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Obama really is the Magical Unity Pony!

By BJ

Because magic is about the only explanation I could come up with for this when I read it. John Cole, today:

Should we set up an ActBlue account to try to offset some of the debt, or will that not go to retiring the debt? Does anyone know? If it does, maybe if we start an ActBlue account, perhaps others will follow. It certainly seems like Clinton has been acting in very good faith, and we should as well. If anyone can definitively state that money donated today will pay down her debt, I will set one up ASAP.

I can’t believe I am contemplating fund-raising for the Clinton campaign.

You can't believe it? I'm still trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for the folks at work for why my chin was dragging on the floor all afternoon!

I mean, this is the guy who, when "bittergate" broke, ran a not inconsiderable number of posts with some variation of "F--K Hillary" in the title!

This is the guy who said things like:

I will say this one more time. All the times over the past few years when the Republicans would repeat their mantra that the “Democrats are worse,” they were not talking about the Democrats, they were talking about the Clinton family.

And they were probably right.

And

As a personal aside, I found that the self-immolation of the most narcissistic campaign ever washes down really fucking well with a Pinot Noir. Fuck off and good riddance.

And

Obama is giving mad praise to Hillary. Good thing he is the nominee and not me, because I would wave a giant foam middle finger and then moon her.

That last all of a week ago, as part of an entire category he created for the purpose: I Can No Longer Rationally Discuss The Clinton Campaign.

Now, Cernig pointed me to a site where they'll exchange old Clinton signs for new Obama ones, which is a nice little gesture, and part of what I see as numerous attempts to reach out to Clinton supporters to help unify the party behind Obama, a decidedly large task. As Will Durst puts it:

Unifying Democrats is like trying to herd a clew of worms over a chicken wire walkway onto an electric waffle iron. Like nailing lime Jell- O with carrot shreds to a tree. Reconstituting the original ingredients of a bouillabaisse. Unburning a bridge.

What Cole is suggesting here goes far beyond that, though. He's not suggesting ways to reach out to Hillary's supporters, he's actually looking to help out Hillary herself, the main source of much of the anger and rage he and others have spewed across the intertubes these last few months, myself included. (Seriously. Looking through the buildasign site above, I saw "wooden stakes" under accessories and my first thought was, "For Clinton?" I've apparently some ways to go before I'm over the primaries.)

Given recent history, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that Cole has come under some fire from his comments section, (My personal favourite so far, "Are you trying to cure your CDS by taking part in some new drug experiment?"), though not nearly as bad as I might have thought. While more than a few have less than sympathetic comments regarding Clinton, the biggest stumbling block seems to be the possibility that Mark Penn might benefit, a sentiment I can't disagree with. For the rest, Cole had this to say:

. . . a lot of you have laughed when I pointed to pro-Hillary bloggers and noted that they have a lot of work to do walking their bloggers back from the cliff. Apparently that is a two-way street. I don’t like a lot of the stunts Camp Clinton pulled in the primary (and I hate Mark Penn), but it is over. She is on the right side now. If helping her pay off her campaign debt quickly gets her out there stumping for Obama every day, I will be the first one to chuck in 50 bucks. Paying down her debt now is not a validation of her campaign tactics- the loss invalidated them.

Something for you to think about when you lash out- you look to Clinton supporters much like the weirdos in the Taylor Marsh comment section look to us.

Nothing less than the truth, and it is going to take a fair bit more time before many of these people remember that they're on the same side again. I think this sort of gesture should help considerably.

Clinton's Golden Handcuffs

By Fester:

Hillary Clinton is operating under a severe set of future political constraints that should create an incentive set that rewards good behavior.  Her campaign debt is large and constrains her future course of action as the New York Times reports today:

Besides the $11.4 million of her own money that Mrs. Clinton lent her campaign, she had about $9.5 million in unpaid bills to vendors at the end of April...

her campaign must liquidate more than $23 million in contributions set aside for the general election. They can do it by either returning it to donors or designating it for her Senate re-election campaign in 2012, provided she obtains permission from her donors to do so.

Mrs. Clinton could simply shutter her presidential campaign committee and transfer her remaining debt to her Senate campaign fund and continue to raise money to pay it down...

Mrs. Clinton could also whittle down her debt by re-negotiating what she owes with her various creditors, but the Federal Election Commission would have to sign off to ensure that a good-faith effort was made to pay off the debt. It also must be satisfied that the renegotiated bills do not amount to an in-kind donation from a corporation to Mrs. Clinton’s campaign.

The article states that the Clinton fundraising over the past week has been sufficient to cover operating and shut-down costs but not a whole lot more.  And this places her in an unenviable position.  She needs massive funds from either her general election donors or new money to pay off her debts and to build up a warchest for her 2012 Senate race.  Her political fortunes will greatly differ if she is still five or more million in debt by the summer of 2011 as she could see both a serious general election challenge and a decent primary challenge versus having her account in the black and growing at that point. 

Her fundraising pitch will have to be different than it has been.  She is no longer the heir presumptive for the White House in a very favorable Democratic environment; instead she is 'just' a powerful Senator from a very powerful state. National actors no longer will be viewing their max limit contributions to Hillary Clinton as a ticket to the Inauguration Ball and a place on the Rolodex of senior advisors of the next  administration.

I think the incentives already had aligned for Hillary Clinton to work hard for the Obama ticket as I do not see 2012 as a viable option for her for numerous reasons if Obama was to lose this election.  The golden handcuffs of needing to fundraise twenty million dollars before being able to effectively bank a single dollar will further this incentive set.   

Hillary delivers

By Libby

I'm still not feeling quite up to blogging speed yet so I've pretty much dithered away the day but I did watch Hillary's concession speech this afternoon. I'm told it's the best speech she ever made but I haven't seen many of them in their entirety so I'll have to take their word on that. I thought this one was very good. Not brilliant in the sense of soaring rhetoric, but she's a wonk, not an orator. Nonetheless, she did a very good job of balancing the acknowledgement of her own, and her supporters', acheivements in the course of the campaign and calling for everyone to join together in support of Obama.

This was the speech I expected her give on Tuesday and I still think the delay robs it of some of its impact, but as not as much I initially thought. Overall she did what she had to do and she did it really well. I'm proud of her today. She delivered my pony and I'm glad to feel good about her again.

Of course there are still too many who aren't as forgiving as me. Judging from the chitchat in the comment sections I cruised today, old resentments die hard and not everybody is ready to ride the unity pony just yet, but I think they'll mostly come around -- eventually. In the end, who doesn't love a pony ride?

Mexican Standoff?

By BJ

Because I simply can't resist mucking around with the topic a bit more.

During the private negotiations between Obama and Clinton, which do you think was the more significant bargaining chip:

1. Clinton being less than helpful with Obama's general election campaign? or

2. Obama being less than helpful with Clinton's $30 million campaign debt?

And I am a bad person for thinking that such a mutual blackmail/self-interest scheme would actually take place?

I was going to call her Virtuous - Updated

By Libby

Out of deference to the Clinton supporters I know and love, I was determined to ignore Hillary's speech but I find I can't move past it without venting some of my thoughts. I had many and I'm glad I was offline most of the day so I could reflect on them for a while without becoming distracted by the buzz. I've read little reaction beyond the speech itself.

I found it bizarre and ungracious, but I'm more disappointed than angry. I expected better of her. I wanted her to confound the toxic media narratives and make a brilliant concession speech. I wanted her to highlight the good her candidacy brought to the women's movement and trot out my unity pony.

She could have pledged to take the battle to the GOP. She could have announced she was going back to the Senate and redouble her efforts to deliver on her platform promises in her quest to serve the people. That would have been stunning and would have restored people's respect to a great degree. Or at least it would have restored mine. As it stands at the moment, I've lost the last shreds I had.

I feel sad and embarrassed for her.

Update: I no sooner posted than the news broke. It's over. I think I'll name that pony Hallelujah.

Problems with prediction markets

By Fester:

I have some significant issues with political prediction markets in that they are good aggregators of conventional wisdom among a small, illiquid, and thinly trading sector of actors.  They are a useful tool, a one-stop aggregator of opinion, but they are not infallible and they are not fully efficient.  They should be a complement to polling, demographic and issue analysis and other political analytical techniques. 

For instance, the AP called Obama clinched the nomination early yesterday afternoon.  Delegate counters had projected that even in worse case scenario situations --- double digit losses for Obama in both Montana and South Dakota, he would pick up a sufficient number of pledged delegates to push him over the top once they were added to the new superdelegate committments he was getting.  And these projections were occurring early yesterday or on Monday.  No one was saying anything new as we knew this was a highly likely scenario since at least March 5 when Ohio, Texas, Vermont and Rhode Island ended up as a net delegate wash for Clinton. 

And yet, as Matt Yglesias notes, the Intrade prediction market still was giving someone other than Obama a more than 5% probability of being the nominee.  Given his age & health, death or disability is a very low probability event so the mechanism would most likely be a political mechanism of several hundred Democratic superdelegates flipping in the next eight weeks.  I think that is amazingly unlikely.  I think 5% is an order of magnitude too high to describe that probability. 

An efficient market would arbitage that problem away, but these markets are too thin and unsophisticated to do that. 

End of the Beginning

By BJ Bjornson

Today, Barack Obama is the presumptive Democratic nominee for President. Hillary is . . . taking a deep breath before any decisions are made.

She wasn't exactly conciliatory, but in my opinion not entirely flame-worthy. (An opinion my co-bloggers apparently don't agree with.) I commented somewhere that tonight's speech was going to leave people grumbling. I certainly wasn't wrong there.

Early Tuesday, Mark Halperin wrote about a number of things both candidates were underestimating. For Obama, the number one thing was this:

The intensely loyal feelings many of Clinton’s supporters have about her – and the intensely negative feelings they have about him.

I don't know if Obama truly underestimates this, but I'm pretty sure many of his supporters do. For the most part, I don't think many of them can even understand it. Over the last few months, I have taken frequent strolls through the comments section of Talkleft, Corrente, and a few other clearly pro-Clinton blogs. There, even more than in the posts themselves, I see an alternate reality that I simply don't recognize from what I've seen and experienced over the last six months.

And from this post, I know I'm not alone, but that there may be more to the story than I can understand.

For the life of me ,I simply cannot see this rampant, bludgeoning sexism that Ferraro and her ilk keep spewing about. Sexist incidents, yes. Sexist columnists and sexist commentators and some idiot with a shirt - yes. But some kind of wholesale, bloodthirsty sexist take down of Clinton? No. One condoned, snickeringly, by Obama and his crew? No, no, no. (And I won't even address Ferraro's laughable charge that white working-class folks can't relate to Obama and his wife because of their education but somehow can relate to Bill and Hillary, who apparently attended community college on 4-H scholarships. As far as I know.) And so, not seeing it, my inclination is to brush the dirt off my shoulders and say to Ferraro and all those other Angry White Women out there: Get a frickin' grip.

What stops me is only this: Too often I have stood in that painful place where all around you people (white people, mostly, in my case) insist that your interpretation of your own experience is incorrect. You're too sensitive, you're overreacting, yeah, that's what I said, but it's not what I meant, you just don't understand. I know as well as anyone that just because a huge and particular swath of humanity does not "see" something doesn't mean it does not exist. As Tim Wise points out, in this point-by-point essay on white denial, even in the early 1960s—a time at which America still operated under homegrown apartheid—most white Americans insisted racism did not exist or was not a major factor in the lives of black folks. Gallup polls show that nearly two-thirds claimed to believe blacks were treated the same as whites in their communities, while 85 percent said black children had just as good a chance as white children to get a good education.

The power of human beings to block out what they do not wish to see is astonishing.

I can't argue with that. So while I don't see or understand much of the narrative expressed by the die-hard Clinton supporters, I don't discount the power such a narrative has. It won't be easy to bring them back into the fold precisely because the narrative they've experienced is often diametrically opposed to the narrative Obama's supporters have.

For all that, I'm agreeing with BooMan:

I'm willing to be reconciled, but I am not willing to stop fighting until I see a white flag and an acknowledgment that Barack Obama won this contest fair and square and according to the rules. When I see Hillary Clinton stand up and admit that she lost and that Obama's victory is 100% legitimate, then I will stop fighting back. I hope to see it soon. And then, I hope, the Clinton supporters in the Blogosphere will stop peddling in hate and unsubstantiated innuendo. We all understand hardball tactics, even if we don't always respect them. But this contest is coming to a close. And anyone that keeps up the fight against Obama after today is working for McCain. And that includes Hillary Clinton.

And fellow Canuck Prole puts it far blunter.

The important thing right now though, is that Obama has won, and while it has been a bruising campaign, how and why he won bodes well for the fall.

Looking back, he won first and foremost because he knows how to look ahead. Neil Sinhababu pointed it out about his Iraq speech in 2002. It wasn't just that he came down on the right side of the Iraq debate when it was politically unpopular to do so, it's that he clearly foresaw the major problems with it. It was this foresight, along with Clinton's refusal to acknowledge her poor judgement on the issue, that gave Obama the opening he needed to topple her in the first place.

From there, it was Obama who had the right plan to win, by knowing and using the party delegate rules to ensure he would come out on top. Again it was foresight, combined with extensive planning, that allowed him to succeed.

And of course, there was his ability to inspire and get his message across, and to damp down controversies when they reared their heads. Great speeches form politicians these days are rare. For Obama, they're almost the norm. From tonight's examples, it looks like that skill will hold him in good stead for the contest against McCain. Head-to-head, Obama does quite well.

Of course, Hillary is already giving the McCain campaign a hand. It should prove interesting to see how she walks this kind of stuff back, if she ever does.

Quote Of The Day

By Ron Beasley

Our own Cernig was disgusted but not as disgusted as Sully:

The speech tonight was a remarkable one for a candidate who has lost the nomination, though not remarkable for a Clinton. It was an assertion that she had won the nomination and a refusal to concede anything to her opponent. Classless, graceless, shameless, relentless. Pure Clinton.

But he wasn't finished with quote of the day:

Her narcissism requires that she deprive her opponent of a night, or a second, of gratification or attention. And she has now won, in her Bush-like version of reality, 18 million votes. Her invitation for her supporters to email their suggestions to her website is pure theater, a way of keeping herself in the spotlight and maneuvering her delegates to demand a second spot on the ticket. The way she is now doing this - by an implicit threat, backed by McCain, to claim that Obama is an illegitimate nominee if she does not get her way - is designed to humiliate the nominee sufficiently to wound him enough to lose the election.

Either way, she is clearly intent on getting Obama defeated this fall if she is not offered the vice-presidency. And if she gets the veep nod, the way she has gotten it will allow her to argue that a November loss was not her loss. It was his. And she will run again in 2012.

It's not and shouldn't work.  She could have gotten a cabinet position or even Senate Majority Leader but after tonight she deserves zip.  Obama will win in November without her so nothing for Hillary and Bill but a failed legacy.  Perhaps there is some land available near Crawford.

Bonus Quote

The bonus quote comes from Bill at On My Mind

All of this is business as usual in Clintonland. She is going out with power plays, dictating terms under which she is willing to play her role in reuniting the party. “I have my loyal voters,” she is saying, in effect, “and if you want them back in November here’s what you have to do for me, because this is still about me.”

Are we there yet...

By Fester:

I'm just about ready for this primary season to be done.  I finally put the increasingly childish calvinball fundraising e-mails from HillaryClinton.com into my spam filter as junk and I am hoping that the massive cache of stockpiled superdelegates that Obama reputedly has in his vest pocket actually exists as they have been rumored to have existed since at least before Texas on March 4. 

BJ and I have been talking about whether or not this primary process has been good for the Democrats as we have both been worried about the probability or possibility of Hillary Clinton taking the Sampson Option of destroying the party to destroy her primary opponent.  Given the flood of rumors that are coming out, combined with the neutral to positive campaign messaging she has employed since any plausible path of winning ended with Indiana being a draw and North Carolina being an Obama blow-out, the Sampson Option looks like it will have been averted, especially if Wesley Clark is offered either the VP or SecState slot as a visible peace gesture between multiple Democratic factions. 

Overall I think this primary season has been a significant net positive as voter registration, GOTV organization, message sharpening and sucking up all of the available media oxygen has been real and positive for Democrats.  The significant negative is that John McCain is entering June with minimal counter-definition work having been done against him.  However given the generic issue and political environment, this is a flaw but not a fatal flaw in my opinion as I believe that as Obama consolidates his support among Democrats in the national polls, he should begin to open up a significant lead in the national vote share and projected electoral vote shares.

Looking forward to the next contested Democratic primary cycle, hopefully in 2016, I agree with Publius at Obsidian Wings that several significant reforms need to be undertaken including rationalization of the calendar, increased superdelegate transparency or the elimination of most/all superdelegates, and reducing the value of jurisdictions that do not have any electoral votes.  This process has been a net positive while being a massive stress test on the Democratic Party.  There are significant but non-fatal flaws that will need to be addressed in the near future.  But finally, it seems like things are over. 

We Wait and We Wonder

By BJ Bjornson

I'm not watching the RBC hearings, both because I have other, more important things to do, and because the ultimate decision they reach really isn't the important point. What's important is whether or not the Hillary campaign accepts the decision. As I put it a few weeks ago:

The results don’t change, but given how voraciously many of Hillary’s supporters have taken up the fate of these two rule-breaking states, it makes sense for the party and the campaigns to come up with a solution to put the issue to rest and to allow the healing to begin. This is why the 31st may be the most important date remaining. If the Clinton camp refuses to accept any and all compromises and takes this issue to the convention, a good number of her supporters will stay with her and we’re back to the Samson Option.

I was probably overly generous in my thinking that Hillary would be willing to fade away quietly and start helping the Democratic party move forward towards defeating McCain in November, but we're now at crunch time, and the next few days will show us Hillary's true colours. Publius at Obsidian Wings has roughly the same take on the matter.

The truly truly critical event tomorrow is the Clinton campaign’s reaction to the rules committee’s decision. It could very well cost Obama the election — or win it for him.

I’m not saying anything that Josh Marshall and Hilzoy haven’t essentially already said, but it’s a point worth emphasizing. In the days ahead, the Clintons have the power either to unite the party going into the fall, or to leave a lasting, poisonous, and potentially-fatal schism. At this point, it’s not clear what path they’ll choose.

. . .

But this latter assumption — inevitable party unity — is up in the air these days. There’s a lot of bad blood. And what’s really "baddening" that blood for Clinton supporters is the idea that she’s being cheated out of the nomination.

And that’s where Clinton herself comes in. Her supporters will follow her lead. If she acknowledges that her defeat was legitimate (regardless of how much she actually campaigns), then I think the party will unite. If, by contrast, she spends the next few days (or god forbid, months) alleging that it was illegitimate, then that reaction will leave lasting damage. Not just among pro-Clinton bloggers, but among her core supporters, particularly older liberal women.

No idea at this point whether or not Hillary's supporters will actually follow her lead, but certainly a whole lot more of them will come around with her making the case that the decision was a legitimate one. It is clear that if she keeps the legitimacy pot on full boil for much longer, her supporters will continue to hate and blame Obama for her loss and guarantee a President McCain in November out of spite.

And if you don't think Hillary will take the brunt of the blame for a Democratic loss under those circumstances, check around on how popular the name Nader is in Democratic circles these days. The narrower the defeat, the more bitterly they will turn on anyone they can blame for robbing them of a few precious votes.

I also think her choice will have a significant impact on her political future. Last week, the Washington Post wrote a story regarding Hillary's options after her Presidential race was over. She's still a very junior Senator, and it's likely that a lot of her colleagues have found their way onto the Clinton's "enemies list". It's not that she couldn't make a very successful career in that position, but she'd have to willing to work her way up the ladder over a considerable number of years rather than have something like the majority leader position handed to her. Somehow that seems unlikely.

One of the other big options was the New York governorship, but her campaign remarks have left her in possible trouble there. Accepting a compromise on Michigan and Florida, and through that acknowledging the legitimacy of Obama's victory, may be the choice of enlightened self-interest.

So, we wait and we wonder. Will we soon see the end of the exhausting primary season and the beginning of the real fight? Or are we in for several more months of kneecapping?

Rewriting History - Clinton style

By Ron Beasley

I wonder if a professor would leave out the contribution of the Soviet Union in WWII.  Clinton supporter and history professor Sean Wilentz  has done the equivalent - he left the impact Ross Perot out of Bill Clinton's 1992 win over George HW Bush. 

With her overwhelming victory in Kentucky on May 20, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton has completed her sweep of the crucial primary states adjoining the Ohio River -- and the fight for the Democratic nomination has entered its final phases. Having picked up a net gain of nearly 140,000 votes between Kentucky and Oregon, Clinton is now well poised to win the Puerto Rico primary on June 1 - and clinch a majority in this year's popular vote, even if the disputed returns from Michigan are discounted. Under those pressures, the Barack Obama campaign and its sympathizers have begun to articulate much more clearly what they mean by their vague slogan of "change" - nothing less than usurping the historic Democratic Party, dating back to the age of Andrew Jackson, by rejecting its historic electoral core: white workers and rural dwellers in the Middle Atlantic and border states.

Without a majority of those voters, the Democrats have, since the party's inception in the 1820s, been incapable of winning the presidency. The Obama advocates declare, though, that we have entered an entirely new political era. It is not only possible but also desirable, they say, for Democrats to win by turning away from those whom "progressive" pundits and bloggers disdain variously as "Nascar man," "uneducated," "low information" whites, "rubes, fools, and hate-mongers" who live in the nation's "shitholes."

Wilentz seems to be implying here that race was not a factor in Hillary's wins in Appalachia.  This itself is foolish since 20% of the Clinton voters admitted they voted for her because she was not black and the percentage was probably much higher.  But it's from here that Professor Wilentz fails as a history teacher.

Northern white working-class defections to the Republicans grew steadily in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Republican's Watergate debacle temporarily halted the trend, but the disasters of the Carter presidency, especially its mishandling of economic woes and foreign policy, accelerated the defections in 1980. In his two successful races, Ronald Reagan won the support, on average, of 61 percent of white working class voters, compared to 35 percent for his opponents, Carter and Walter Mondale. (Both times, Reagan carried Ohio and Pennsylvania handily.) As the caricature of "Reagan Democrats" as racist militarists hardened among "new politics" advocates, they strove to make up the difference by creating an expanded base among African-Americans, college-age, and college educated voters. The result was yet another humiliating defeat for the Democrats in 1988.

Bill Clinton's shift to a centrist liberalism stressing lunch-pail issues--"Putting People First"--won back a large number of Reagan Democrats in 1992, enough so that, by the time Clinton won his second term in 1996, Democrats could claim parity with Republicans by winning a slim plurality among non-college educated working class white voters. But the perceived elitists Al Gore and John Kerry lost what Clinton had gained, as George W. Bush carried the white working-class vote by a margin of 17 percent in 2000 and a whopping 23 percent in 2004.

If you thought there is something missing in this narrative you would be right - Ross Perot is missing.  Bill Clinton didn't get those voters in 1992 Ross Perot did.  They have the numbers over at Comments from Left Field.

In 1988, Bush the First received 53.37% of the vote nationally; Dukakis got 45.65%  But in 1992, while Clinton only got 43% of the national vote, Bush got 37.45% and Perot got 18.91%.  Combine those, and Bush/Perot got 56.36% of the popular vote in 1992 — which looks very similar to the 53.37% Bush got in 1988.

[.....]

So the theory that Professor Wilentz proffers is a myth — Bill Clinton did not win the working class vote.  And while Gore* and Kerry may have lost because they were “perceived elitists,” as Wilentz states, they also did not have a candidate taking 15-20% of the Republican vote in working class counties helping them — Clinton did.  If it weren’t for Perot, Clinton would have never won in 1992 and we probably wouldn’t see his wife running for president now.

This is something to keep in mind the next time Hillary’s supporters claim that she can win the working class vote.  Her husband never did, so what makes them think that Hillary can?

I was a Hillary Clinton supporter until January when her campaign began to look like a Rove/Attwater/Republican campaign.  The Republicans have used the tactic of rewriting history and it would seen that the Clinton supporters have adopted it as well.

Hillary's gaffe

By Libby

Having read through billions of bytes from Hillary supporters endlessly parsing every stray remark of Obama's and proclaiming it 'proves' his unfitness for office, it's tempting to join in the pile on over Clinton's unfortunate reference to Bobby Kennedy's assassination. But I've tried for the most part to avoid this on both sides of the fence and I'm not going to condemn or excuse this one. You could spend the day reading through all the links or you just read Joe Gandelman's roundup. I recommend the latter. He does his usual excellent job of compiling a cross section of views.

For myself, I only find it interesting in terms of the greater pattern of incendiary remarks Clinton has been making in the last week or so. I think it's telling that Obama has moved beyond the partisan sniping of the primary and has turned his focus on the GOP while Clinton continued to pound her talking points on electability. An argument made more difficult despite her strong showing in the last few tiny states by Obama's ability to draw massive crowds to rallies and his overwhelmingly superior fundraising from small donors.

I don't believe she intended to incite violence against Obama and I don't care to speculate whether the Kennedy remark was calculated or simply an inadvertent gaffe born of fatigue. I'm inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. It's been a long campaign. But I've been pondering her strategy on threatening to take the fight to the convention in the face of the growing call for party unity.

The media and most of the bloggers have been largely ignoring her for a couple of weeks but with her latest series of outrageous comparisons relative to the MI-FL votes she was suddenly capturing the news cycle again. As the old saying goes, there's no such thing as bad press as long as they spell your name right. I'm truly hoping all this tough talk about fighting to the bitter end is just a tactic to maximize her returns in the few remaining contests so she can exit the race on a high note and allow the party to regroup for the larger battle.

Hillary loses her moral compass

By Libby

I drafted a much longer post on the Michigan/Florida issue but I didn't want to get into it, hoping it wouldn't become an issue. I'm still hoping that's true but my hopes fade with Hillary's latest speech. I still don't want to go into full outrage mode because I think her ploy will fail but I do want to add to the chorus on one point, that being, all the candidates agreed prior to those primaries that the DNC sanction would stand. Jon Chait links to historic coverage.

It's worth repeating: They supported this "disenfranchisement." Here's a New York Times story from last fall, headlined, "Clinton, Obama and Edwards Join Pledge to Avoid Defiant States."

I also agree with Scott, there's no good reason for Obama to push back against this rhetoric. It would be counterproductive and shutting down this line of attack is a job that rightly belongs to the 'leadership' of the party and in a sane world, her supporters would threaten to bail if she didn't stop it.

It wouldn't bother me so much if there was any evidence that these arguments were being made prior to SuperTuesday, but I don't recall any and in fact, John Cole in rant mode this morning, has a YouTube posted where Hillary unequivocally said, "It's clear, Michigan isn't going to count for anything so it doesn't matter if I keep my name on the ballot."

If anyone can find any indication whatsoever that Clinton was making these arguments prior to SuperTuesday, I'm happy to apologize but failing any evidence to the contrary, I'm simply appalled by the dishonesty of this tack at this time. Meanwhile, as it has been often said, if she's lost TBogg, she's lost the country.

Plotting the endgame

By BJ

Last night went much as expected. Depending on who you talk to, the Democratic race is now over, more over, or nowhere near over. The fat lady may be waiting in the wings warming up, but she hasn’t started singing yet, (and the reference to her and her size is deeply hurtful and insulting to millions of Americans.)

In seriousness, Hillary probably will, and probably should, keep running for the next couple of weeks. If she runs as she has over the last week or so, backing away from the Samson Option and observing a nominal cease-fire on negative campaigning against Obama, then I don’t have a problem with that. In fact, it’s probably a better way to start the cat herding job of getting all the Democrats back together and on the same page for the general election fight.

For all of the signs that the race has passed it’s tipping point and Obama has become the putative Democratic candidate, how the race will end still depends largely upon Hillary and what she will decide o do.

There are three major events left in the next couple of weeks. The May 31 meeting to determine the fate of the Michigan and Florida delegations, followed over the next three days by the final primaries in Puerto Rico, Montana, and South Dakota. The first is probably the most important. The Clintons have been pounding the FL/MI issue for months now, and its too late to walk much of that rhetoric back.

I went over the calculations before last nights results were tallied, and even the most generous pro-Clinton seating of those delegations still leaves her lagging behind, though the high number of uncommitted delegates makes an absolute majority impossible for either candidate. More likely scenarios where the delegations are given half-votes and/or the uncommitted and Edwards delegates are added to Obama’s total means he will still wind up with an absolute majority.

The results don’t change, but given how voraciously many of Hillary’s supporters have taken up the fate of these two rule-breaking states, it makes sense for the party and the campaigns to come up with a solution to put the issue to rest and to allow the healing to begin. This is why the 31st may be the most important date remaining. If the Clinton camp refuses to accept any and all compromises and takes this issue to the convention, a good number of her supporters will stay with her and we’re back to the Sampson Option.

Before Hillary can concede, or maybe it is better worded as; Before Hillary’s supporters would be willing to accept her concession, she has to be able to plausibly say that all of the voters have had their say and are being represented. Giving seats to FL/MI allows her to say that. (It isn’t entirely true. The voters in Florida and Michigan never got the kind of campaign message advertising nor had the big voter registration drives like other states did before they voted, not to mention not having all of the running candidates on the ballot. And more importantly, the campaigns were unable to build the kind of groundwork organizations that can be built upon for the later general election campaign. That cost will be paid by the Democrats regardless of the nominee, and seating the delegates won’t change it.)

Hillary has earned the right to exit on her own terms, and once all of the states have been counted, she will have the opportunity to do so with grace. For now, my gut tells me that is what the plan is.

If she does so, and if she does as she’s promised to do and work her heart out to ensure a Democratic victory in November, she will very likely win back a good portion of the respect and admiration she’s lost from Obama supporters thanks to her nastier campaign tactics.

And as the Democrats start moving together, things are looking mighty good for the fall.

The Tragedy of the Clinton Campaign

By BJ

Joe Gandelman at The Moderate Voice did a round-up on the weekend of the continuing reaction to Clinton’s remarks about her hardworking, white supporters. The word that seemed to come up in several of them was “tragedy”. It is, I think, the most accurate way to describe what has happened.

I once described my reaction to the continuing Clinton campaign as starting out worried about the strong feelings of hatred she inspired in the Republicans, to coming to respect her as a candidate, to understanding why so many of her opponents hated her. Her desire to change the rules mid-stream with regards to Michigan and Florida, her implications that she was going to go after Obama’s pledged delegates, and particularly her repeated assertions of only she and McCain being worthy of the presidency was, and still is, enough to get the anger broiling, and the campaign tactics haven’t exactly improved since.

The anger though, has faded, to be replaced by a sort of pity. Hillary has gone so far over the top in her pandering and “Southern Strategy” that her campaign has turned into a caricature of itself. Given how skilled and talented she actually is, and the respect and support she earned in the early parts of the campaign and throughout her career, to see her piddle that away in an increasingly desperate gamble for votes can only be described as tragic.

She still has the chance to repair the damage, of course, but the longer she stays on the current path, the harder it will be to heal the divisions the campaign has opened up. Here's hoping she finds a way, and soon.

Rendell as Obama's VP does not make sense

By Fester

Now that the primary season finally appears to be winding down and exhausted political junkies like myself can take a breather before the pre-convention definition and registration battles begin, the talk is shifting to what arrangements can be made for Hillary Clinton to drop out gracefully.  The Vice Presidential slot is an attractive and valuable piece of trade bait for the Obama campaign to dangle as it is an enforceable agreement by the losing campaign. So what does he do with it?

He could go and use it to reward a supporter who complements his abilities, but for the sake of this post, let us assume that the VP slot is in active consideration as a trading chip.  I don't think offering the slot to Senator Clinton makes a whole lot of sense as the offer would be awkward as hell, and when I was talking with Jeff the Election Geek recently, he noted it would be a diminution of her power base.  There is more value to be a powerful Senator with an independent fund raising base than to be a VP to a President who is not beholden to her power structure.  This makes a significant amount of sense.

So working with the assumption that the VP chip could go to a Clinton supporter, the next tier of supporters include several Senators, notably Evan Bayh of Indiana and a couple of governors, including Governor Rendell of Pennsylvania.  The logic here would be that a Clintonite VP candidate would be a signal to high information voters and high value Clinton leaning surrogates that they would receive significant attention in an Obama administration.  At the same time, the Clintonite running mate would be useful in shoring up Appalachia for Obama. 

Governor Rendell would definitely qualify as a credible signal to Clinton supporting institutions and high information voters.  He served as a senior member of the Clinton era DNC and is comfortable in traditional machine politics.   However I do not see Governor Rendell being particularly valuable for the second role of appealing to Appalachia.

The first problem is  geographic.  Rendell's power base in Pennsylvania has always been Philadelphia and he comes across as a big city, big machine guy.  In Pennsylvania that can work and work well as Philadelphia and its inner ring suburbs can swamp the rest of the state when assisted by Pittsburgh voting the same way.  However during both of his campaigns for the governorship, he underperformed in the low population parts of the central section of the state compared to his urban performance.  This is not surprising given that the central portion of the state is the GOP base, but it shows his limited general election value proposition.

Secondly, Pennsylvania should be relatively secure for Obama once the ground game gets moving and McCain is defined as unacceptable.  Democrats in the state have a massive and growing voter registration advantage and a vastly improved ground game.  The traditional machine in SW PA was pushed and pushed hard by the combination of the parallel local progressive shadow machine and the Obama campaign.  All three groups benefited from the competition. 

Finally, Gov. Rendell has indicated multiple times that he is not interested in the position and that it really flatlines his career as the VP.  He is still young enough after he leaves the governorship in 2010 to have significant influence and maybe another serious run at another office.  However if was to be VP he would be 73 on Inauguration Day 2017.  Age is a career killer for Democratic presidential primary voters as they have responded best to young, charismatic candidates (Obama & Bill Clinton).  He would not be a viable or  valuable successor and thus any potential second term Obama presidency would have significantly less political leverage for internal party battles. 

A win for policy in politics

By Fester:

One of the most heartening results of the Obama blow-out in North Carolina and the Clinton nail-biting popular vote win but delegate wash in Indiana is the impact of the gasoline tax holiday proposal.  If you listen to the Obama campaign, they are claiming that their opposition to the holiday gave late breaking undecided voters a hook to vote for Obama.  I don't have their numbers to back this assertion up but given that he did better than most of the immediate pre-election polls, this is a plausible interpretation. 

More importantly, the holiday proposal was not the political winner that the Clinton campaign thought it was.  It did not move votes for her.  This proposal was aimed at her bloc of late breakers and low information voters and it did not work.

We had a clear and sharp divide between good sounding but completely ineffective policy proposals and good policy.  We have been conditioned to believe that good sounding policies trump good policies but it is very heartening to see the opposite here.  Good policy was at least able to break even with good sounding policy last night.  As a wonk, that warms the cockles of my heart. 

The "Gas-Tax Holiday" as Science Debate

By BJ

Building on what Fester, (who apparently needs to invest in a DVR), wrote this morning, Hillary’s rather shameless embrace of the anti-intellectual “truthiness” meme on the gas-tax issue has opened herself up to a whole new line of attack based on how closely she’s following the strategy we’ve seen from the Bush administration these last seven years, something folks like Steve Benen and Robert Reich have highlighted.

We all know that Hillary would be far better than Bush, but given that Bush is the worst US President in modern history, that’s not too high a bar to set. In any case, I wanted to highlight this post by science writer Thomas Levenson on the further implications of Hillary’s attack on intellectuals.

. . . The other, broader implication is that we actually just held the long hoped for science debate — and the winner is clear.

I’m going to blog this week on what John McCain’s publicly announced budget plans mean for science (nothing good, and actually worse than that) . . . He lost the science debate long ago

But what of Hilary? Up until recently, she hadn’t been doing too badly.

. . .

But now, what she said at the Indiana interview this morning changes the game. She said, in effect, if the smart boys and girls don’t agree with her, then to hell with them.

That is, of course, precisely the anti-rational madness that has dominated the George Bush years. It is inimical to science or a scientific world view. If we are to pick and choose the facts we like, it is a very short step, quickly taken, to making them up. And that way lies an ever more rapid collapse of the American republic.

. . .

Barack Obama is no perfect paragon — the vaccine stuff is a relatively minor demonstration that he can pander too, soothing a passionate pressure group despite overwhelming expert advice. He is, after all, a politician, a very good, a very compelling one. I’m willing to bet that he’ll find times when the inherent uncertainty in science gives him useful cover for the lesser but more popular choice.

But on the gas tax holiday he has been exemplary. He recognized the flaws in the idea — from the fact that it won’t work, to the realization that even if it did work precisely as designed it’s still the wrong policy to pursue if you take the issues of energy independence and global warming seriously.

. . .

We may not have had our science debate in any formal sense — but on the gas tax issue, our candidates have managed to perform a reasonable simulation of one. And as I said at the beginning, there is one clear winner.

So as not to throw Hillary completely overboard, Steve Benen does offer a way for her to redeem herself at the bottom of his post.

The irony is, Clinton is at her best, her most impressive, and most inspiring when she’s showing off the depth of her knowledge. Policy Wonk Clinton is absolutely amazing — she knows details and policy minutiae better than almost anyone on the national stage. Policy Wonk Clinton loves studies, evidence, and reason. Policy Wonk Clinton is a bit like Al Gore, only with better political instincts and shrewder campaign skills. She’s the type of candidate I can really get excited about.

Policy Wonk Clinton, however, has left the building, and has been replaced with Shameless Pandering Clinton, who sounds like Bush while promoting John McCain’s gas-tax ideas.

The sooner we can get the real Clinton back, the better.

Or, if you prefer, a bit more direct advice from John Cole:

I am now going to offer some unsolicited advice to the smartest woman in America and her joke of a campaign- stop trying to out-Republican the Republicans. They are better at it than you are, as they are actually Republicans.

Unfortunately, I don't think the silly season ever ends.

The Truthiness of Experts

By Fester:

I usually don't/can't stay up to watch the Colbert Report as I start to get grumpy at work if I don't get enough sleep these days.  However I will make an exception tonight as I see the Hillary Clinton truthiness tour continue with her endorsement of the Colbert gut call methodology of policy analysis.

Could she name a single economist who agrees with her support for the gas tax holiday?

Hillary sidestepped the question, and tried to use the complete dearth of expert support for the idea to her advantage, pointing to it as proof that she's on the side of ordinary folks against "elite opinion" -- a phrase she used twice.

"I think we've been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion behind policies that haven't worked well for hard working Americans," she said.

A bit later she added: "It's really odd to me that arguing to give relief to a vast majority of Americans creates this incredible pushback...Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that don't benefit" the vast majority of the American people.

An ordinary voter begged to differ, however. Stephanopoulos turned the mike over to a woman who said she supported Obama and said she makes less than $25,000 a year.

Besides there being a vast social and influence chasm between political/media elites and actual experts, this is a truthiness moment.  The gas tax holiday is a good policy because it feels good (or at least polls that way) while those biased facts and empirical elasticity models don't feel good. 

This is an interesting piece of trying to frame Obama as part of the bad decision making of the past seven years.  I think it will be unsuccessful as Obama just has to call "Iraq War vote" and leave it at that as the counterweight to Clinton's frame as fighter for the 'common-sense' underdog. 

Ohhh--- silly season, when will it be over

Gas tax holidays and government delegitimatization

By Fester:

The proposed gas tax holiday is a dumb and counterproductive policy and political idea.  It will lead to significant windfall transfers to producers while creating minimal new supplies and minimal decreases in counter-factual prices.  It is a cheap gimmick that masks that lack of relevant policy option space.  I expect that from the McCain campaign as Republicans have an ideological opposition to the notion that government can envision, plan, create and run successful policy programs that are not related to who is sleeping with whom.  However the short term pig-piling on by Senator Clinton is damaging to the Democratic brand and belief that government can and should be able to have a positive impact on society and daily life by successful program and policy implementation.

Professor Pollkatz notes that the price of gas is an excellent inverse predictor of Bush's popularity and he offers an intriguing hypothesis to explain this correlation:

The connection between gas prices and presidential approval is not (simply) that Bush is connected to Big Oil.  It's that the price of gasoline is just about the only Federal policy result non-wonks see and can relate to on a day-to-day basis.  Tax cuts?  Most people don't even know how much tax they pay.  War and defense?  Affects foreigners and National Guard families, not the rest of us.  But gasoline price displays, changing daily, hit people directly where they live.  And they blame Bush.

Everything else in government is too damn big or too damn disguised to be reflective of the federal government's ability to be an effective provider of public goods.  We saw this with the disconnect between people with Medicare who strongly like Medicare as it is currently constituted, and an ideological disposition against any expansion of a Medicare like program as 'big government intrusion.  Milton Friedman regrets working on the withholding of income taxes as people just accept the deductions and look at their take home pay. 

The most optimistic quick estimate of the impact of the proposed gas tax holiday is consumers would see a nine cent reduction, all else being held equal, for three months.  This estimate is being made by Menzie Chinn at Econbrowser:

Assume both supply and demand are equally price inelastic, and this means the incidence of the Federal tax is about 50-50. Eliminating the gasoline tax for a short duration gives a windfall to both consumers and producers, of about equal proportion. (By the way, this conclusion is not true of state gasoline taxes; see Chouinard and Perloff (2004)).

Paul Krugman is arguing that consumers will see, all else being equal, minimal to no changes in counter factual prices due to the very short run supply elasticities. 

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving. Any elasticity in the supply comes earlier in the year, when refiners decide how much to put in inventories. The McCain/Clinton gas tax proposal comes too late for that.

The reasonably most optimistic argument is for a nine cent per gallon reduction in prices due to the policy change while a pessimistic take is projecting minimal to no reduction in prices due to the policy change compared to what they otherwise would have been.  At $3.60 a gallon for regular unleaded, this is a decrease in price of between 0% and 2.6%.  I currently get a better per gallon discount on my grocery store loyalty card reward program.   

And gas prices will not be at $3.60 per gallon.  Instead the combination of continual instability in oil producing regions, and typical seasonal increases in demand will continue to drive prices up as there is no slack in the supply chain.  If the tax holiday is introduced, people will see little to no real impact; at most they would see a slightly slower increase in the price of gas than they otherwise would have seen.

This would be a political victory for McCain as he can claim that he 'did something!' At the same time it is an ideological victory as it can be construed as yet another demonstration that the federal government is inherently ineffective and should not be in the business of devising policies.   And that works fine for a Republican.  However the same implicit comparison would be drawn for the Democrat, Hillary Clinton, and it is here I have a problem with the construction of political arbitrage.  Mild, transient and expedient personal political gain is privatized while the costs of reducing the value of the Democratic brand and a core belief are borne by the entire party. 

If only...

by Stacie

Is it just me, or is the entire Clinton campaign at this point predicated on the notion that if only... something were different, she'd already be president? Bill Clinton:

"If we were under the Republican system, which is more like the Electoral College, she'd have a 300-delegate lead here. I mean, Senator McCain is already the nominee because they chose a system to produce that result, and we don't have a nominee here, because the Democrats chose a system that prevents that result," he said.

Bowled over by Obama

By Libby

Kristen Beam, who blogs from my old haunts in the Happy Valley, reports that her dad has queued up for Obama. [photos at link]

My dad called me Saturday night to tell me he was at a Barack Obama rally. He must have been pumped, because when I texted him later to ask him if he was going to vote for Obama, he sent back "Obama rules!"

... He's a white male registered Democrat in Central Pennsylvania and was until recently undecided about his choice for Democratic presidential candidate. ...

My dad emailed me his reactions to Obama's speech: "After 8 years of listening to GWB the bar had been lowered considerably but he was riveting to watch. It was all off the cuff and he never repeated himself for 45 minutes. The crowd was predominantly a white crowd, too. I may have been one of the oldest people there, which will hurt him in the PA primary given that PA has the second largest population of seniors in the country."

I had no idea there were so many old people in PA. That demo could well explain the discrepancy between the public displays of support and the polls that I was pondering in this post. It makes sense that they wouldn't necessarily turn out for rallies but they will most likely show up to vote for Hillary. It's her most reliable block and the only one that Obama can't easily crack. I guess we'll find out tomorrow whether those big rallies translate into enough votes to roll over it and finally end this ridiculous primary.

Why I'm not worried about November

By Fester:

I am not worried about either Democrat losing in November to John McCain despite recent polling showing McCain roughly even to slightly ahead of either nominee.  The MyDD electoral vote projection currently shows McCain winning the neccessary 270 electoral votes over both candidates.  But I'm not worried as this is an artificial equality due to circumstances. 

McCain has been able to run as an undefined candidate and picking off an unnaturally high number of disaffected Democrats who are proud partisans of one candidate still engaged in the Democratic primary and currently proclaiming as a leverage point that they'll defect in November.  That won't happen in historically unusual numbers. 

Further more, McCain is not being targetted.  Instead, his critiques of the Democrats are being amplified by Democrats making those same critiques.  The Philadelphia debate is an excellent example of this pattern.  Once a nominee is settled and acknowledged as the nominee, this will stop.  McCain will then have to rely on free media, and as First Read notes, there will be plenty of incoming Democratic pressure if the free media gets out of hand. 

Finally, the most recent Gallup daily tracking poll shows something interesting and that is McCain's level of support.  Against either candidate, he is polling at 44 %.  That is without being defined, without having to contend against being spent into the ground, and with reinforcing Democratic talking point quasi-coordination. 

All the advantages right now are in McCain's corner if we are measuring the campaigns on traditional metrics.  However he is statistically even to slightly behind both candidates he could face in November. 

I'll get worried if either Clinton or Obama don't open up a significant national polling lead by late July once a nominee has been acknowledged and party reconciliation begins.  At that point the mass increase in Democratic voter registration, excitement, organization and fundraising should be burying the McCain campaign.  Until then, no worries. 

Scaife's Paper Endorses Clinton

By Cernig

No...really?

Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton was endorsed Sunday by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, whose owner and publisher, billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, personally funded many of the investigations that led to President Clinton's impeachment in 1998.

It was one of a handful of endorsements the New York senator has received from Pennsylvania newspapers before the state's primary Tuesday. Most of the state's major papers have endorsed Barack Obama.

In its endorsement, Tribune-Review editors said Obama is too inexperienced to be president and that his recent comments about bitter voters living in small towns showed a lack of respect for middle-class values.

"In sharp contrast, Clinton is far more experienced in government _ as an engaged first lady to a governor and a president, as a second-term senator in her own right," the paper said. "She has a real voting record on key issues. Agree with her or not, you at least know where she stands instead of being forced to wonder."

So now you know the result of Clinton's meeting with Scaife back in March. The man who funds the fever swamps of neoconservativism is backing her.

The organizations and publications Scaife has funded include the American Enterprise Institute, the American Spectator, the Center for Immigration Studies, the Center for Security Policy, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Committee for the Free World, the Committee on the Present Danger, the Ethics and Public Policy Center, the Federalist Society, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Freedom House, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, the Institute on Religion and Democracy, the Institute on Religion and Public Life, the Jamestown Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, the National Endowment for Democracy, the National Institute for Public Policy, The National Interest, and the Philanthropy Roundtable.

It's a match made in Hell and surely a final indication that Clinton will, indeed, do anything or anyone to win.

A poll conundrum

By Libby

I've never given much weight to polling in trying to predict long term trends. Polls by their nature take a snapshot of a moment in time and by the time they're published some new factor has likely as not already swayed public opinion in another direction. But still, the polling in PA has puzzled me because it seems so far removed from the reality on the ground. I mean consider this recent rally for Obama in Philly. By all accounts at least 35,000 people showed up and their enthusiasm didn't end with the rally.

5,000 people (at least) had nowhere to go but up Market Street. Obama's charge of the night: "Declare independence!" was with them. They started with the familiar "O-Bam-A." By 7th and Market, they had graduated to "Yes we can!" By 10th and Market, with hundreds streaming in between cars on the road, they were just cheering. At first, a few Philly cops, killjoys, tried to rough the crowd to the sidewalks. It didn't work. The cops retreated to the sidewalks. By the time I ducked into my hotel, a full mile away from Independence Park, the Obama crowd was still marching. [...]

I counted at least a hundred Philadelphia police officers. There were state troops. TSA personnel magging the crowd. A helicopter hovered over the square. The fire department set up a command post with extra medical supplies. It was some way to start Obama's final Pennsylvania push.

That sounds more like the aftermath of the World Series win in Boston than a simple political event. Meanwhile, Clinton is drawing mere hundreds to her rallies, yet the pollsters show her leading in PA.

Hillary Clinton leads among bowlers, gun owners and hunters in Pennsylvania, a blue-collar trifecta that is helping her hold an edge over rival Barack Obama heading into Tuesday's pivotal primary there.

Overall, Clinton leads Obama by a margin of 48-43 percent, with 8 percent still undecided. The telelphone survey of 625 likely Pennsylvania voters was taken April 17-18 and had an error margin of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Do Obama supporters never answer the phone? Are bowlers, gun owners and hunters too busy to go to Clinton's rallies? Clearly, judging by the fundraising figures, they don't contribute money to the campaign either. So what explains the discrepancy between the close predictions and the obvious disparity between the public show of support?

Update: On another note, via Balloon Juice commenter Martin, an uncommited superdelegate is asking people to vote on who he should support. The tally when I checked was 98% in favor of Obama. Granted, it doesn't mean much in terms of the PA vote since anyone can vote in it, but still it indicates a level of support that I see consistently in news reports about these rallies that never seems to be reflected in the polls.

What should happen on Wednesday

by Stacie

Not saying it will, but here's what should happen on Wednesday:

Hillary Clinton's campaign calls an afternoon press conference after she beats Obama by a few points in Pennsylvania, but the delegate count is another tie. Clinton makes a speech in which she thanks her amazing supporters who have given so much time, energy, and idealism to her campaign, and explains that the job now is to buckle down and work tirelessly to defeat John McCain and the policies of the GOP in November, from the top of the ticket down to county dog catcher, and every race in between. She tells the assembled press and invited members of the audience that her run has been extraordinary, and she is extraordinarily blessed to have had the opportunity to meet so many Americans in so many places and to have been touched so deeply by their stories and by their passion for their country. And that it is in that spirit that her campaign ends, and that her energies will now be directed to building the national leadership that will enact policies to assist all Americans instead of the wealthy few who benefit so overwhelmingly from Republican rule. She will say that it is time for us to come together as Democrats, Independents, and Republicans who want a new direction, and to support the next president of the United States, Barack Obama.

This is what I want to see from Hillary Clinton: a decent act that closes the rancor of the primary battle and moves the Democratic Party into the general election against John McCain and the authoritarians who've taken over the GOP. I don't say this as someone who wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton in November -- I would. I simply can't see how the math works to allow her to take the nomination, only a path of bitter ruination for the party that is still unlikely to yield her the prize.

And so, free of passion, I say that she needs to go. It isn't an attack on her to note that she's behind and unlikely to catch up. It isn't an attack on her to note that if she were to clinch it in the end, it would be through a form of politics that strikes me as simply wrong -- rule changing, strong arming, and ultimately having the superdelegates narrowly overrule the votes of ordinary people. I don't want the process to play out that way, not because I wouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton in November (again: I would), but because when I think of those kinds of brutal, exclusionary, win-at-all-costs tactics, I think "GOP." I don't want to see it on my side.

I want to see an act made for the greater good, by a candidate whose campaign has been revolutionary but has just fallen short. It's politics. It happens. And it's time that Democrats take the fight to John McCain. I want to see Hillary Clinton get on board with that. Wednesday is the right day to do it.

Calling the grown ups in the Democratic establishment...

by Stacie

Because, you know, John Cole is absolutely right:

Not that any of it matters anyway, because even if Clinton loses PA, let alone win by close to double-digits, the race will go on, even if the delegate math does not get any better for her.

I think Clinton could lose PA by 20 points and she'd continue on (not that I think she will lose PA at all, but that's not the point). She'd continue bashing the leader over the head with anything and everything her campaign can make hay out of, and very possibly finish the thing with the leader's negatives so high -- because of these swirling non-stories that prompt stupid "questions" about some inane and irrelevant quality about the candidate, which Clinton will remind us over and over again that Republicans will raise -- that he's crippled in the general.

I see that Howard Dean has started to raise the temperature on the superdelegates. He needs to raise it more and then, most likely, sit down with the Clinton campaign to break the news to them all that it's over.

The Interminable Primary

by Stacie

Pausing from my house duties for a late breakfast, I want to say how horrible the current primary situation is for me. On the one hand, I'm a true Obama supporter -- I believe he represents a generational shift away from a tired politics, and that he brings a truly fresh perspective to the process. Adding: blah blah. See, that's the thing. There's no new information. I voted for Obama on February 5 and continue to support him for the same reasons I did months ago.

My feelings about Hillary Clinton have rollercoastered throughout this process. I began this election cycle strongly opposed to her, later developed a certain respect for her, and now consider her a pariah on the body politic. I have never been more opposed to Hillary Clinton than I am right now, and I don't think it's simply because I'm an Obama supporter.

It really is her tactics at this point: attempting to paint Obama as an elitist while she attempts to coerce the elites of the Democratic party to overrule the votes of ordinary Americans, who have given Obama a sizeable, if arguably surmountable, lead. Pouncing on harmless statements that I happen to believe are true -- I've always understood that hate groups like the Klan have their best membership spikes during economic hard times. I don't have a link to back that up (I didn't go looking for one), but it's something I've heard many times over the years and accept as true. Occupied, busy people who are building dreams are far less likely to get wrapped up in such sillyness.

As I said, it's a tired old politics, and I'm just sick of it. I hate to pull a Sullivan here, but it's long past time for Hillary to give up the ghost. It's time for the general election campaign to begin, and just like the Highlander, there can be only one. Obama has waged an extraordinary campaign, fighting for every vote, and it's worked. At this point, Hillary will obviously hang in for Tuesday, but she's gotta go. Democrats have an election to win, and she needs to get on board with that. Now.

Pennsylvania GOTV Observations

By Fester:

My wife and I live in Pennsylvania and on Tuesday our household will contribute a net margin of zero votes for Obama or Clinton.  My wife re-registered from unaffiliated to the Democratic Party in order to vote in this primary.  She fits a couple of favorable demographic and consumer profile groupings for each campaign.  I'm either a Democratic supervoter now or I am two elections (this primary and general) short of having eight consecutive elections where I picked up a ballot. 

GOTV is focusedn on ensuring your supervoters make it to the polls with techniques such as a door hanger and a call to make sure that grandma, who has voted in forty seven straight elections, has a ride to the polls, or in getting the least attached and most marginal votes out to the polls.  This is the much harder and more intensive work as three to eight pre-election contacts are needed to reliably move a freshly registered voter from a low probability of voting to a high probability of voting.  People who usually vote with the I aoccassional lapse are not pushed as hard as momentum will deliver a campaign's fair share to the polls. 

As a supervoter and a newly registered potential swing voter lives in this household, I would have (naively) predicted that we would have been bombarded with mobilization and motivation messages over the past six weeks.  Instead we have received almost nothing besides the Allegheny County Democratic Party endorsed candidate door hanger and my first GOTV identification call from a union affiliated with the Clinton campaign.  They were trying to assess where I stood and if I was a persuadable for Clinton.   At this point I am a 1 (sure thing) for Obama, so we had a pleasant conversation for a minute or two, and he went on down his list.  Tough work, but the guy was doing a good job with a weak script. 

I am just surprised that we have not seen more GOTV activity in my neighborhood as it should be a swing area (Creative Class gentrifiers and young families, older blue collar ethnic whites, and a growing African American population within 500 yards of my front door) in a delegate rich area that CQ magazines predicts as a 4:3 Obama delegate win.  If Clinton can scratch out a 50%+1 win or Obama pushing towards 64.5% of the vote for a 5:2 split that has major implications for the statewide delegate split. 

Right now all of the GOTV activity that is visible or rumbling loudly on the grapevine is the more traditional flush the best precincts out and don't worry about the rest.  This is traditional Democratic GOTV techniques and technology but it is step back from some of the microtargetting of Democratic voters in highly Republican precincts that we engaged in 2006.  Those techniques took a significant time and money investment before the pay-off was worthwhile, but they worked as they helped push Jason Altmire into Congress and a couple of Dem. state reps back to Harrisburg.  So I am hoping that the national coordinated campaign for the summer re-engages in those and improved versions of those techniques while the current flush the best and ignore the rest tactics are temporary field expedients. 

Clinton, Rendell and PA-18 coattails

By Fester:

The only really interesting local race in the greater Pittsburgh area is the race for the 18th Congressional District.  I did some work for a Democratic candidate (Tom Kovach) in the 2006 primary, and this is a tough but winnable district.  The incumbent, Tim Murphy (R-Upper St. Clair) has a mildly Republican leaning district, with a Democratic registration edge.  He holds on as he has not had a serious challenger in three cycles and also does a fairly good job of tap-dancing his affiliation with the Republican Party.  He has some personality issues and is tied tightly to Bush on foreign policy and Iraq.  He is vulnerable, but starts from a strong position.

The primary election is next week, and it is a three way Democratic race between Bethany Hafer, Stephan O'Donnell and James Wall.  Stephan O'Donnel is self-funding his campaign and has Allegheny County support from both the party and the Post-Gazette.  During the 2006 primary, Chad Kluko had this coalition wrapped up and it was how he eked out a narrow primary win despite getting wiped out in the outlying counties by Tom Kovach.  James Wall does not have a lot of money or support.  Bethany Hafer is trying to thread an interesting needle, and I think there is a decent chance that she can do it.

She is trying to keep O'Donnell's margins down in Allegheny County by tying into the liberal activist base and the upper income Democrats in Mount Lebanon, Upper St. Clair and Bethel Park while leveraging the Rendell machine to turn out her vote in Washington and Westmoreland Counties.  I think the contested Presidential primary will significantly aid her campaign.  PA-18 is a district that I project Hillary Clinton will win, and win fairly convincingly.  Hillary Clinton does best with older women, and there is a good chance that these voters will also vote for another woman for C