by hilzoy
I haven’t written anything either about Obama’s massive victories in Virginia, Maryland, and DC or about the new spate of stories about Clinton’s campaign, since I haven’t wanted to seem as though I was piling on. But the latter, especially, seem to me to raise pretty serious questions about Clinton’s candidacy.
Its initial rationale, as best I could tell, was that Clinton was inevitable. That idea has presumably gone glimmering. Next, we got the claim that Clinton was the candidate with “35 years of experience making change”; the one who was “ready to lead on day one“.
Those 35 years of experience have always been a bit murky to me. Hillary Clinton’s seven years in the Senate have been pretty undistinguished. Fifteen earlier years were spent working full-time as a corporate lawyer, and while Clinton served on various worthy boards and panels during that period, and by all accounts did quite well on them, it’s hard to see how much time she could have spent on them while also having a full-time job. Eight were spent being first lady, during which time her major undertaking was the catastrophic attempt to get health care reform passed. And while I do give her full credit for the two years she spent working for the Children’s Defense Fund, and the Watergate Committee, I’ve always been a little puzzled by the idea that I should vote for Clinton because of her experience.
The one thing that argued for real managerial skill was the fact that Clinton seemed to be running a pretty good campaign. That idea seems to me to have been destroyed over the past few days. Even if every single word in every single story about the campaign is due to disgruntled staffers being unfair and petulant, you’d still have to ask questions like: how did a campaign that raised over $115 million in 2007 burn through all that money with only a third place showing in Iowa to show for it? Why did the campaign not plan for the possibility that they would not wrap up the nomination on Super Tuesday? Why did they have no resources, and practically no field campaign, in place in any of the February caucus states? (Marc Ambinder’s answer: “a lack of money”. Again: how could that have happened given how much money they raised?) These are major unforced errors.
The stories coming out of the Clinton campaign provide an explanation for this, and it’s not pretty.
Michelle Cottle in TNR on Patty Solis Doyle, Clinton’s now ex-campaign manager:
“Among the most devout members of Hillaryland, Solis Doyle is cheered by supporters as an “unconventional” choice for campaign manager. Detractors are less kind, noting that even some of Hillary’s most trusted advisers have long questioned Solis Doyle’s readiness for the job. Clinton money man Terry McAuliffe is said to have expressed reservations early on, including in a conversation with the Clintons during the couple’s January 2006 trip to the Dominican Republic, according to someone there with the group. (McAuliffe denies this.) Similarly, several weeks before the campaign’s official launch, a handful of the most senior Hillarylanders met with the senator to express eleventh-hour doubts about Solis Doyle, says someone Hillary spoke with after the meeting.
No one denies that Solis Doyle’s authority stems less from her expertise or political savvy (though defenders insist she has an abundance of both) than from her bond with Hillary. The result, say critics, is a toxic blend of insecurity (about her abilities) and arrogance (about her proximity to the boss). As they tell it, an overwhelmed Solis Doyle has become increasingly temperamental–playing favorites and abusing her relationship with Hillary to control information flow and enhance her own power. “It’s become ‘The Patti Show,'” snipes a former member of the Clinton White House who remains close to both Clintons. Solis Doyle is said to allow unaddressed issues to pile up, failing to do things like return calls to surrogates in need of direction or contributors in need of stroking. “People are constantly complaining to the senator and other members of the campaign family that their calls aren’t being returned,” notes one observer who often hears from such people. At the same time, over the course of her management career, Solis Doyle has developed a reputation for mucking around in the weeds, insisting upon signing off on even low-level decisions, such as where to hold a minor event and whether bagels or donuts should be served. (That’s not a hypothetical.) She is brutal to staffers who try to circumvent her with a request, and she is not shy about reminding others of her position: When dispatched to Iowa headquarters in the final month, Solis Doyle demanded that in preparation for her arrival walls be erected around the section of the giant bullpen where she would be working.”
Or, in short, the boss from hell. How did she end up running a campaign? Josh Greene, in the Atlantic, says that the answer is: because she was loyal, and Clinton valued loyalty more than competence. When this excerpt starts, Greene is talking about her work for Clinton’s 2006 reelection campaign:
“Here, too, Solis Doyle was disastrous; her lack of skill in areas other than playing the loyal heavy began to show. The first public sign of this came just after Clinton’s reelection to the Senate. Even though Clinton had faced no serious opponent, it turned out that Solis Doyle, as campaign manager, had burned through more than $30 million. As this New York Times story makes clear, the donor base was incensed. Toward the end of the Senate campaign, Solis Doyle did her best to bolster the impression of the inevitability of Hillary’s nomination as the Democratic presidential candidate, spreading word that Clinton’s Senate reelection fund-raising had gone so exceptionally well that $40 million to $50 million would be left after Election Day to transfer to the incipient presidential campaign. But this turned out to be a wild exaggeration—and Solis Doyle must have known it was. Disclosure filings revealed a paltry $10 million in cash on hand; far from conveying Hillary’s inevitability, this had precisely the opposite effect, encouraging, rather than frightening off, potential challengers.
Rather than punish Solis Doyle or raise questions about her fitness to lead, Clinton chose her to manage the presidential campaign for reasons that should now be obvious: above all, Clinton prizes loyalty and discipline, and Solis Doyle demonstrated both traits, if little else. This suggests to me that for all the emphasis Clinton has placed on executive leadership in this campaign, her own approach is a lot closer to the current president’s than her supporters might like to admit.
The extended denouement that began after the Iowa caucuses and finally culminated with Sunday’s departure reinforces this supposition. By all accounts, Solis Doyle’s firing became imminent after the first loss, as the extent of the damage sank in. (My colleague Marc Ambinder has provided plentiful detail on this here and here.) She’d been dispatched to Iowa to oversee operations in the final weeks before the caucuses, and Clinton still finished third. She’d been placed in charge of the campaign’s relationship with John Kerry and hoped to get an endorsement, but he’d chosen to back Obama. And of course, the campaign had hemorrhaged money, which Solis Doyle had managed to conceal. The ax was expected to fall the day after New Hampshire (Solis Doyle opted not to depart on her own after Iowa), but it didn’t happen until weeks afterward because Clinton put off making the crucial decision—just as her alter ego was often charged with doing. (The best blow-by-blow account is this prescient New Republic piece by Michelle Cottle that was read avidly inside the campaign because it’s so accurate.) Even then, Solis Doyle’s departure took a near-mutiny to bring about. Williams and Lieberman left their jobs last week; this finally seemed to have influenced Clinton to oust Solis Doyle.”
Valuing loyalty over competence is a terrible trait in a manager. But so are other things that come through in this piece: putting off decisions that obviously need to be made, for instance, and letting personnel problems fester rather than resolving them, and having subordinates who “protect” you from bad news that you really need to know. But the one that particularly struck me — which is why I quoted Greene at such length — was this: In 2006, Solis Doyle first burned through an extraordinary amount of money in 2006 — the NYT story Greene quotes says that the campaign spent “$27,000 for valet parking, paid as much as $800 in a single month in credit card interest and — above all — paid tens of thousands of dollars a month to an assortment of consultants and aides.” She then demonstrably lied about the campaign’s financial situation in ways that angered Clinton’s base of donors. Various Clinton insiders, including (according to Greene) Terry McAuliffe and Maggie Williams — tried to get her fired. And yet Clinton hired her to manage her Presidential campaign.
Rewarding incompetent people because they are loyal is bad. But rewarding incompetent people who lie to the public and to your donors is worse. Lying to the public is both wrong and stupid: it brings your name into disrepute, and that’s not good for anyone, least of all a politician. Lying to your donors is also wrong and stupid: wrong, since you presumably ought to feel some loyalty towards the people who have donated to your campaign, and stupid because they are the last people on earth whose trust you should abuse. Solis Doyle’s performance in 2006 should have meant that she was not hired for any position of responsibility ever again. Instead, Hillary Clinton made her campaign manager.
That, to me, is astonishing. And not in a good way.
Back in 2003, Brad DeLong wrote:
“My two cents’ worth–and I think it is the two cents’ worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 1993-1994–is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasn’t smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly.”
He later decided that he had been unfair: according to “her people”, “she has done an awful lot more over the past fifteen years, and done almost all of it very successfully.” I have never really known what that “awful lot more” was, so I’ve never felt competent to judge what Hillary Clinton’s people say. But based on her campaign, I think I’m sticking with DeLong’s original judgment.
God, this is depressing. It means that if she manages to get elected she’ll screw the psrty over by being incompetent.
And I am not at all sure that our fellow Dems won’t do the selffdestructive thing and nominate her. I am not at all sure Obama can win.
Depressing.
When it comes to experience, Barack Obama has an item in his biography that trumps anything in Clinton’s. It’s not being a legislator. It’s not being a community organizer. It’s being on the faculty at the University of Chicago as a lecturer on Constitutional Law. To me, this indicates that he has probably thought seriously about the US Constitution.
At this point, that’s a very good thing.
As with any other person at the top, the most important decision the President makes is who to appoint as the people beneath them. Anyone want to argue that incompetence at this has not been one of GWBush’s major flaws? I have to admit that when I read (in one of these articles, or another recent one on Solis Doyle) that she had begun as Clinton’s scheduler, a voice in my head echoed “And Bernie Kerik started as Guiliani’s driver”.
A revealing post. Thanks. I can’t say that I’m surprised by the spoils system/rewarding loyalty in place in the Clinton campaign. But the documentation of it and its results is still utterly depressing.
the NYT story Greene quotes says that the campaign spent “$27,000 for valet parking,
Heh, isn’t there some old cliche about history and repetition or something?
But the campaign’s latest reports still show unusual expenditures, such as nearly $500,000 last year for parking costs.
wash po
For some reason, that strikes me as so absurd that it must be some under-the-table pay off. I just don’t see how that’s possible, that she could be so terrible at money management that she made that same mistake again on…parking?!?
Michael: I know. I was amazed when I read that — partly because I am myself given to spacing parking meters and ending up with tickets, throwing up my hands after looking for a parking space and heading for expensive lots, etc., so I have some idea how much parking can cost when it is your personal Achilles’ heel (I don’t do this with everything; it’s parking in particular), and: that’s a ton of money.
We’ve known about Hillaryland for a long time. Perhaps we didn’t know they were incompetent, but descriptions like “tight-knit”, “secretive”, and “known for their loyalty” have floated around for a while.
Shouldn’t we know better by now? Aren’t presidencies run by ‘tight-knit’, ‘loyal’, ‘secretive’ groups disasters? Isn’t it obvious that from the outside it is an invisible line between a leader inspiring loyalty (good) and a leader who rewards loyalty above all else? (bad) The best presidents don’t need to be tended by flunkies. Lincoln appointed his biggest rivals, and FDR didn’t think a policy had been thought through unless his aides were in open combat with each other. Bill Clinton’s administration was pretty open and pretty successful. How about that. Hillary’s health care initiative was closed and… a failure.
We don’t know a lot about Obama. His campaign does not leak much (possibly a bad sign) but he has surrounded himself with a lot of big names unlikely to kowtow to him. Perhaps most promising he is only a few years out of the Illinois legislature.
Suffice to say that we know HRC has a problem, while BHO is a toss of the dice.
good post – I’d like to add a couple of points, which I might turn into a follow-up post myself.
1 – It bothers me that her campaign’s raison d’etre is essentially procedural. In other words, the campaign’s Great Argument isn’t necessarily about reaching a given end, but simply about the MANNER in which nameless end will be efficiently reached.
The dark underside of that is “we will efficiently cut you out of the DC loop if you don’t get behind us.” Because we’re a machine, we’re efficient, we’re unstoppable, etc.
Even that’s accurate, it’s still about procedure — and it’s notably lacking on vision.
#2 – If you build your entire campaign on a Wizard of Oz-style appearance of competence, it’s pretty easy for the entire foundation to crumble beneath you rather quickly. A campaign director’s departure can do that, for instance. Or burning through money at ungodly rates.
What i’m getting at is that it’s worse for her to stumble in these particular ways, b/c the ENTIRE PREMISE of her candidacy is that we wouldn’t have to worry about these things. Well, for reasons Hilzoy explains, we do. And if she can’t do the procedure, and if she’s always been shaky on vision, i’m not sure what we’re left with.
And getting back to the dark underside, the superdelegates they’ve bullied are smelling this weakness too. They don’t like the Clintons, and if they’re not the scary Wizard, then I think they’ll start defecting in droves
“It bothers me that her campaign’s raison d’etre is essentially procedural.”
Everyone who remembers the Dukakis campaign, raise your hand.
In fairness, a major part of the reason for this is that Clinton and Obama’s policy differences are relatively few, so so can only do so much with that, and Obama has her beat in the inspirational category, although she’s also making what mediocre efforts she can in that direction (Bill is much better at this, although Obama is yet much much better).
So what else is she left with but “I’m more experienced (at somethingorother), I’m allegedly ready, I’m tested, you know me, I know what to do,” etc., plus trying to make Obama seem scary?
And, of course, I’mawoman.
What other selling point could she put forward?
I’ve been off reading TPM, and this strikes me as an incredibly (and needlessly) dumb thing to say:
Honestly: Virginia and Colorado aren’t “significant states”? Why not just announce that the nomination should depend on NY and CA alone and have done with it?
Plus, it’s hard to square that with this other talking point:
In terms of winning the general election, I would think the “significant states” would be Iowa, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada. Swing three of these to the (D) column and at worst you get an Electoral tie. Clinton did not outperform Obama in any of these by a large margin.
And the latest poll out of Colorado has Obama running 11 points ahead of Clinton vs. McCain (according to TPM’s reporting of the 2/13 Rasmussen poll).
Whoa! Hilzoy, did you notice this?
Only yesterday it was:
This evening, it’s suddenly “…will likely be within 25 delegates of Obama”?
I don’t think the 13 pledged delegates of Rhode Island and the 15 of Vermont will be overwhelming the votes of Texas and Ohio, myself.
Those goalposts must be mounted on pickup trucks.
“Honestly: Virginia and Colorado aren’t ‘significant states’?”
If Missouri, South Carolina, Georgia, Washington, Louisiana, Utah, Maryland, and Connecticut aren’t, why not? (I’ll give him Delaware, D.C., the Virgin Islands, and American Samoa, which also went for Obama.)
Honestly: Virginia and Colorado aren’t “significant states”? Why not just announce that the nomination should depend on NY and CA alone and have done with it?
Even though I’m a full-throated supporter of the 50-state strategy, even accepting the dubious assumptions that go into Mark Penn’s electoral math, it’s worth noting that VA + CO > OH or PA in electoral votes.
Indeed, if Obama won all of Kerry’s states + VA + CO, he wins the election.
Which of Kerry’s states couldn’t he carry? Someone should put this directly to Penn.
We have
CA
OR
WA
MN
WI
IL
MI
PA
NY
VT
ME
NH
MA
CT
RI
NJ
DE
MD
DC
I see no reason to think he couldn’t win every single one of those states, probably quite easily. Maybe McCain could contest PA.
Meanwhile, he’d be the favorite in IA and maybe even Kansas (definitely at least make McCain pour resources into it), while I’d put CO and VA and MO into lean-Obama categories and definitely be competitive in OH. So, that means he has the potential, IMO (conservatively speaking) to add 46 electoral votes in addition to OH, and maybe he could be in jeopardy of losing the 21 electoral votes in PA (hard to say unless we have a contested primary there on 4/22, but this regional breakdown of support suggests Obama could have a big blindspot v Clinton that might not necessarily go to him should he be the nominee in the region)
I think those are conservative guesses at what Obama could do with his whole “we’re gonna knock on every door in the country” approach to campaigning.
I’d just add that it seems incredibly politically tone-deaf to dismiss 23 states as insignificant? I mean, if you want a clear contrast between the two campaigns and the real root of Clinton’s campaign problems, it’s precisely that they’re actually willing to write off 23 states as insignificant, presumably because they’re either “sure wins” or “sure losses” (except, of course, for Iowa, Missouri, Virginia, Colorado, IMO Kansas, and maybe even Alaska since I understand McCain is unpopular up there w/ conservatives, but hey, who’s counting, right?)
I mean, this is why they’re losing. Because they wrote off every state except NY, AK, NJ, and CA on Feb 5th…and then wrote off every state after Feb 5th…and wrote everywhere that isn’t a major population center…and then got their asses handed to them in contest after contest, whether it’s Obama beating them in rural counties in Nevada and, as such, getting more delegates even though they won Clark County and the pop vote…or Obama roping in more delegates on Super-Tuesday in spit of losing the biggest delegate “pies” by keeping those margins close while racking up huge margins in all the smaller states…or investing in infrastructure beyond Feb 5th in advance…
I mean, is there any doubt that Obama and his team just understand how to get votes and win elections better? I think, at this point, the evidence is pretty strong that their approach + their candidate is simply a superior product to head up the Dem ticket, and what’s more, that quote suggests Hillary, Penn & Co. still don’t get why this is so
It’s because every vote and every state counts.
It seems quite clear at this point that Hillary is a very skilled politician and often an inspiring leader. She is not a very good manager, and either she’s not aware of it, or she is but can’t assess management skill in others.
Many leaders are only mediocre managers, but can build enough momentum that they sweep some managers into their wake who compensate for their weaknesses — George W. Bush seems a good example of this. He’s a horrible manager (and doesn’t seem to know it sometimes), but he’s surrounded with people who are very good managers and make up for that weakness.
Clinton’s momentum is the obvious explanation for how her campaign could run at such a high burn rate without a course correction. Silicon Valley is littered with people who were gods of their professions but failed either because they couldn’t manage, didn’t think they needed to, or didn’t know how to find someone who could.
For example, it seems widely accepted that while Brin and Page are brilliant guys, Google wouldn’t have succeeded without Eric Schmidt there to complement them. What Brin and Page deserve kudos for is (a) recognizing what they lacked, and (b) their recognition that Schmidt had the talent to fill the gap.
My take on Hillary is that she has the common blind spot of poor self-assessment. She’s a talented politician and a leader — and she knows it and capitalizes on it — but keeping Patty Solis Doyle on for that long indicates that Hillary seriously overestimated her own ability to judge talent. It’s difficult to tell at this juncture whether Hillary overestimated her own management skills or Doyle’s, but one of the two must be true.
The gamble people seem to perceive in Obama is that he, too, might not have sufficiently backed-up his momentum. But at this point, that doesn’t appear to be the case, and a brief look at his history and even his own statements (the acknowledgment that he leans on people to help him stay organized, for example, speaks volumes) seems to make that quite plain.
Though it’s possible that he has some handler or handlers who have steered him right so far, at this point it’s simply not credible to argue that he’s not cognizant of management as a logistical issue and able to handle it, personally or by proxy. And in any event, it’s even more clear that he’s better at it than Hillary.
tomtom: Shouldn’t we know better by now? Aren’t presidencies run by ‘tight-knit’, ‘loyal’, ‘secretive’ groups disasters? Isn’t it obvious that from the outside it is an invisible line between a leader inspiring loyalty (good) and a leader who rewards loyalty above all else? (bad) The best presidents don’t need to be tended by flunkies.
That’s not a very solid proposition at all. In fact, many if not most successful presidencies and executives tend to be surrounded by trusted decisionmakers, and often those circles are quite closed. The fact that you cite FDR as an counterexample indicates an ignorance of history. (The name “Frankfurter” might ring a bell — and no, it’s not something that you eat.)
The difference between a good leader and a bad leader is not how they get their advice, but whether they know how to get it in. Some require a tight circle, some an open forum, but the important thing is knowing what works for them and why.
This is also one of the few times when I’ll disagree with publius, when he says It bothers me that her campaign’s raison d’etre is essentially procedural. In other words, the campaign’s Great Argument isn’t necessarily about reaching a given end, but simply about the MANNER in which nameless end will be efficiently reached.
I don’t think that her campaign’s strategy was prima facie wrong any more than I think that advisor circles should always be open or closed. Hillary’s “inevitability” approach is a sound strategy, in theory, but they just couldn’t execute on it. Josh Green’s Atlantic piece seems to put that pretty clearly in perspective. In large-scale organization, it’s often very hard to assess bad management skills except in hindsight. It continues to happen and always will, but that’s selection bias for you.
And hilzoy, I think that in this case the conventional wisdom is correct: Mark Penn really and truly just is a colossal incompetent. By pointing out inconsistencies in what he says, you’re assuming that he himself has even the vaguest idea what he’s talking about and furthermore has some coherent conceptualization that he’s capable of being consistent about, which frankly doesn’t seem to me to be the case. There’s no ‘there’ there. Until I see some evidence to the contrary, I am absolutely convinced by this point that he’s just a complete twit, and that’s really just all there is to it.
“while I’d put CO and VA and MO into lean-Obama categories”
Colorado is an absolute lock for Obama. By a large margin.
It might even go for Clinton.
The Big League
…Brad DeLong
Mark Penn reminds me of how William Gibson wrote his hacker heroes in Neuromancer and his other early stories. Gibson didn’t know anything about computers. He did have an excellent ear for dialect, and he captured the rhythm of hacker speech. It worked so well that hackers who felt flattered by their collective portrayal set about making the fantasy real.
Penn doesn’t strike me as knowing much about anything. What he has, apparently, is the rhythm of expertise, and he sells that to clients who care more about being so cool as to hire the best-sounding hep cat in town than about getting demonstrable results.
Actually, Gary, I agree with you re: Obama and Colorado, though I have my doubts on it for Clinton. But I was trying to be conservative with my estimations there. My personal opinion is that he could win the state big time.
Anyone else noticing how defensive the Clinton strategists have been? Dismissing small states. Dismissing people’s will not have have the thing decided by superdelegates. Arrogantly insisting on seating Michigan even though competitor’s names weren’t on the ballot. Do they think no one is listening? Do they think none of us care? Have they lost their grip on when you go from being a hard-nosed politician to a pariah bleeding your party?
I think it’s rather obvious that Colorado and Virginia are vastly more important than California and New York. We *know* those states are going for the Dems. Does Penn seriously believe that the Republicans are a threat to snatch California? Really?
Penn is just full of hot air. At times, it sounds like he’s prescribing what he thinks people ought to be voting for (the small issues that concern a certain class of swing voter) when people are plainly doing something quite different. His frustration has led him to go from descriptive to prescriptive on this. A prescriptive pollster! Imagine!
Bear in mind, a big campaign is like a 500 person corporation. The executive branch is *vastly* larger than that. If you can’t the campaign…
I’ve had this conversation so many times in so many different comments sections, I hope I haven’t gone over this stuff here already; I can’t remember if I have. Forgive both the length and the absurdly over-the-top permutations and %s and such, this is what I think about when I’m bored.
But I wanted to note that, IMO, at the risk of being presumptuous, the race for the Dem nomination is effectively over, and I’m not sure even Hillary’s people realize this. Maybe I’m late to this party and everyone here already knows it, but I’ve seen plenty of commenters who don’t seem to grasp this yet and breathlessly insist that this thing isn’t over by a longshot.
It’s one thing to say that it’s not formally over. But at this point, that’s like warning that the following football game isn’t over:
45 seconds remain, Team A trails Team B by 11 points, has the ball on their own 40 yard line.
Sure, technically, that game isn’t over. Sure, technically, Team A could launch a hail mary successfully, score a 2-point conversion, successfully convert an onsides kick, move the ball down field with a couple quick long throws, and then boot a field goal as time expires in order to get to OT, and then win the toss in OT, drive the length of the field, and kick a short FG to win. Sure, that’s theoretically possible, but it requires such absurdly low-probability conditions happening in succession as to defy credulity.
That’s the situation, roughly, Hillary now finds herself in. To wit: she currently trails Rock Obama ~136 pledged delegates. In all likelihood, Obama will widen that gap on Feb 19th, so, we can accept that as probable and move on, or posit improbable Hillary outcome [1]: she gains ground on him on Feb 19th.
Let’s ignore that though for now (we’ll come back to it), and assume he goes into March 4th with a 146 delegate lead. Clinton’s improbably necessary condition [2] is to win 60% of the available delegates on March 4th, 222 to Obama’s 148, for a net gain of 74. That would cut his lead roughly in half, to 72 pledged delegates. Reasons this is improbable: (a) Texas is designed such that, as long as it is even moderately contested, winning any sort of large advantage is nearly impossible, thanks to its numerous 4-delegate districts (amongst other things), and (b)the relative demographic strengths of Clinton and Obama suggest that Obama is more likely to benefit from delegate apportionment than Hillary, since delegate allocation is based on prior turn-out, and A-A turnout in 2004 and 2006 was high, while Hispanic turn-out in same elections was low. As such, Obama’s goals are relatively modest: hit 40% w/ Hispanics to ensure mostly 2-2 splits in their districts, continue to clean up with A-A votes, split or competitively lose the white vote, and he could tie or win the delegate battle. There’s also, of course, (c) the added 18,000 caucuses that take place after the primary, for a significant minority of the delegates to be awarded, which will be a great place for Obama to make-up ground on Hillary in Texas.
Aside from Texas, there’s also the fact that Clinton has not shown a particularly devastating ability to rack up 60% of delegates in prior contests, which she’ll need to do consistently from here on out. She got 59% in NY and 60% in MA, and 63% in Oklahoma and much better in Arkansas. Disregarding her home state margins, and noting the demographic differences (and the fact that Obama will actually contest Texas heavily) that make an OK-like finish very improbable, Clinton would basically have to match her singularly best performance in a contested primary in Texas (and Ohio, for that matter!) in order to make this scenario possible.
And as noted, neither state sets up demographically to make that a particularly likely outcome, and Texas’ delegate allocation system makes that further unlikely.
Even then, though, assume only a modest 72 delegate lead for Obama on March 5th. Now, let’s look at the rest of the calendar. Our super-delegates that morning would wake up to see a calendar with 12 contests worth a total of 561 delegates. Obama would be favored to win, by my eyes, 5 of those contests, for a total of 198 delegates (Wyoming, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, South Dakota). That leaves a relatively shallow pool of delegates from which Clinton can draw post-March 4th in order to make up ground on Obama: 363 delegates from 7 contests. In order to end up in a delegate tie with Obama, then, she’d have to execute unlikely event [3]: win 59.9% of the delegates in those states…once again matching her very best performances in contested, non-home states (i.e. Mass). In order to keep it within a couple dozen, she’d need “only” 56.8% of those delegates (we’ll call that more-likely-but-still-unlikely event [4]). And that is, of course, assuming Obama does not get a single delegate advantage from the 5 contests he is favored in. Conservatively, we could guess that Rock gets something like 54% of the delegates there to expand his lead by ~17 pledged delegates, meaning the 59.9% delegate share scenario outlined above would only keep her close, not get her a tie.
Unless, of course, unlikely event [1], making gains in Wisconsin and Hawaii, comes to pass, in which case she could tie him by executing, as well, [2] & [3].
And none of these scenarios leads to a Clinton win, which takes me to my next point. Her current strategy is no longer to even win the pledged delegate battle; it’s simply to delay the super-delegates from coalescing around Obama as long as possible, in the hopes of getting all the way to the convention while kicking up as much dust as possible to cloud the legitimacy of his lead, either by trying to run up and pass him on the popular vote totals, keeping at the MI/FL debate, complaining about caucuses, etc etc. Their entire strategy is based around the assumption that they won’t catch him in pledged delegates. Much like they conceded vast swaths of the country to him already, they are now too effectively conceding the lead in pledged delegates.
Which takes me to unlikely event [5]: her plan rests on the idea that throughout all these incredibly unlikely events, super-delegates would hold off from crowning Obama the victor in order to indulge Hillary’s brokered-convention gambit.
That’s just not gonna happen. Super-delegates are not numbers-crunchers, so while they might have some vague idea now that Hillary “needs to win big” March 4th or something, it won’t be until the clarity of March 5th that they really see the contours this race has already inescapably taken. Looking at those last 12 contests, even on the heels of a big Hillary win, it wouldn’t take long to realize that she still simply does not have the pool of favorable states waiting for her beyond that. With Obama still holding a clear lead, it wouldn’t take long (prob after Missisippi, when he could push it back up towards 100) to crown him and end the race. The realistic choices are coalesce around Obama while he leads handily, ending the race in early March; or ride it out all the way to the convention while Clinton tries to pull off hail mary after hail mary. I mean, if we said she needed 60+% of the delegates in just one contest, that’d be a huge task knowing Obama is gonna be campaigning hard to keep that from happening. In 9 contests? Maybe I’m just naive, but I can’t imagine the party leaders indulging that.
Hillary has to vastly out-perform what can be reasonably expected in order to even stay close to Obama at this point, all in order to get to a brokered convention where enough obfuscation and spin and backroom arm-twisting will get her the super-delegate edge she needs. But all that relies on super-delegates being completely oblivious to this plan as it unfolds, which seems absurd, or them aware of the plan and tacitly approving of it. Much more likely, IMO, is that once the actual situation, and Hillary’s plan, become clear, the super-delegates will see that for what it is, stop indulging Hillary, and get behind Obama. And that will be that.
And even more likelier than that is Obama simply grows his margins on the 19th, keeps it relatively close on March 4th, and the same math applies March 5th, only Hillary’s threshold #s are that much higher, e.g. if Obama has a 130 delegate edge on March 5th, Hillary would need to win 68% of the votes in her favored states from there on out to tie Obama in pledged delegates. And a 130 delegate edge is not out of the question. His campaign currently pegs him at holding a 136 delegate lead. Add 17 for Feb 19th, and you’re looking at 153. Hillary only getting ~23 delegates on March 4th is quite likely…there’s a good chance she and Obama simply split Texas, or the margins are very small, thanks to the reasons outlined above. And the gains Hillary is likely to make in RI will likely be mostly mitigated by VT. So 23 delegates would mean winning Ohio by 58%. More likely is her grabbing 55% or so, but maybe getting a slight edge in Texas to make up the rest. That would be a good night…VT and RI wash each other out, Hillary wins both Texas and Ohio by ~55-45, doesn’t get a lot out of Texas but does get some out of Ohio, and ends up…needing to win damn near 70% of the delegates in the remaining favorable contests in order to stay competitive.
This is the math the super-delegates will be waking up to on March 5th, whether they realize it or not now. And while I might’ve made it very boring and inaccessible in this post, it will be impossible to ignore when it’s reality in a few short weeks. And you won’t have to go through all the permutations to see it; it will be plain as day, looking at the calendar. And that’s when the nomination battle effectively ends.
Which is why I’m gonna work my ass off here in Houston to make sure that we dont have a blow-out here. Cause I want to get back to Florida and start work on the General Election campaign 😀
i’ve never lived in NY, but my impression based on other cities i’ve lived in is that parking is really expensive. is 10k for say each person in a 50 person office for a year in new york totally crazy? not just “a waste of money”, but obscene?
Yoyo: her national campaign HQ is in Virginia
…and just to add, in my (limited) experience, campaigns tend to rent spaces w/ parking, or people just walk or take public transportation or park on the street on their own dime.
However, a national HQ I would assume be an office space w/ parking.
“Colorado is an absolute lock for Obama. By a large margin.
It might even go for Clinton. ”
yeah, assuming its not a blowout (eg, mccain starts raving more than usual and falls down while doing so), the dark red states that could flip are probably mountain states. I’m liking montana, personally.
And michael is totally right. He even skips the part of how hillary has to hold of voters coalescing on obama (perhaps coincident with her money running out). A few more weeks of mccain starting up his general election campaign, and democrats are going to want to rally around someone. Momentum has been a phantom this year, but it might yet get its day. And this is a separate phenomenon from “in every state thus far obama has campaigned in he’s moved up in the polls, what makes the remaining states immune from obamarama?”
Also, this reminds me of when i used to watch sports. Even when my team kept getting farther behind, i’d have an idea in my head how they could totally still win it. They lost, (because if the strategy you spent a week thinking up isn’t working, the new 4th quarter one isn’t going to be better), and it drove me nuts. It also kind of reminds me of when i’d put off writing an essay until the night before and still have this plan in my head of how i oculd research and write in in 6 hours.
oh.
These last couple weeks have really made me disgusted with Clinton. Svereal quick points.
1> the refvelation of the preference for loyalty over competence (See GWB).
2. The inability to plan for anything going wrong (finance campaign manager admitted there was no plan for Obama being serious contender past Super Tuesday) (See GWB).
3. The basic confession that they are willing to throw away states as unwinnable. (Interesting that Texas will be a state which, if they win, will count as important under that logic.)
4. The arrogance in the Shuster case. To send an open letter to NBC basically demanding his head on a platter over an admitted mistake, though hardly worthy of all this, displays an extremely high level of arrogance and hubris (See GWB).
%. DeLong’s report of his time in the 90’s with Clinton turn out to be more valid than even he thought. His disclaimer was prior to a lot of the above revelations and I am not sure he would feel the same way today.
I’m guessing that everyone’s heard about the Che Flag Incident, by now?
I’m seeing lots of folks interpret that as Obama is a Che-worshipper, which I think is absolutely silly. More likely (meaning: as far as I’m concerned, it’s a given) one of his supporters put it there, and he had no idea. I’m guessing it’s probably gone, now.
Che Flag Incident
I didn’t see even those on the right taking that too seriously. At least in terms of it being something Obama knew about and/or endorsed. What I mostly saw pointed out was:
1. The reporter did not notice and/or question it.
2. These are the type of people attracted to his campaign.
I’m in agreement with (1). As to (2) – two words: Ron Paul.
These are the type of people attracted to his campaign.
These are a type of people attracted to his campaign.
Che Flag Incident
I would bet there is a substantial overlap in the groups of people who (i) are bleating about the Che flag “incident” (there was at least one Bizarro World post about it); and (ii) think the stars and bars is just hunky-dory.
Excellent analysis, Michael. That’s how I see it as well. I do think, though, that in the event of Clinton victories in Ohio and Texas, it’s going to start looking kind of murky. I hope you’re right that at that point the superdelegates are going to realize that Clinton has no realistic path to the nomination, and will start coalescing, and Clinton either drops out, or stumbles on to defeat in Pennsylvania.
I’m afraid, though, that math is too complicated, and that they will not realize this. I hope it doesn’t come to that…
Che, Che, Che
Che, Che, Che.
Che, Che, Che…
Che fools
I’d add to Michael’s analogy, “Sure, technically, Team A could launch a hail mary successfully, score a 2-point conversion, successfully convert an onsides kick, move the ball down field with a couple quick long throws, and then boot a field goal as time expires in order to get to OT, and then win the toss in OT, drive the length of the field, and kick a short FG to win.”
Team A, by the way, has just had 8 consecutive 3-and-outs.
David Brent for President! (Oh sorry, he’s not eligible is he – OK, Michael Scott for you Americans).
Drudge is bleating that a new poll puts Obama up over Clinton nationally 49 to 37.
John–same John from the comments at Matt Yglesias’ place?
In the event you described, it would indeed by murky March 5th…but not a week later, after Wyoming and Mississippi restore the race essentially to where it is right now, or close to it. I think at that point, seeing how Hillary’s “big wins” netted her, in the long run, no real gains on Obama, they’d start to coalesce before the 6 week slugfest over Pennsylvania. After all, be it’d almost exactly like the situation we’re currently in, only with substantially fewer contests to hold and delegates to hand out.
Plus, something else I didn’t mention (aside from yoyo’s and footballer’s insightful comments) is that I think Obama is sitting on a lot of superdelegates who have already seen the light…and he’ll start trotting them out one at a time after Wisconsin/Hawaii in order to dominate the news cycles. His campaign’s numbers are markedly higher than the publicly declared super-delegates who’ve endorsed him, and while his post-Feb 5th leaked spreadsheet only had him at 159 supers, I saw a report just the other day saying his campaign is now touting 190, but I certainly don’t think we’ve seen 31 endorsements for him in the past 9 days.
…
And I also think that we’re past the point where establishing Hillary’s cred as a “fighter” does her any good. I understand that she needs her voters to be motivated to volunteer, donate, get out to the polls, etc, and keep herself from getting asphyxiated by an all-out McCain/Obama contest before she’s even conceded, but still, all that granted, I think stories like this one, to the extent they effect anything at all, only hurt her, not help her. And whether or not it changes primary state results, it probably changes national numbers a tick or two, and that wont help with super-delegates.
I don’t think this stuff helps her fend off voters coalescing around Obama, as yoyo noted she must do.
Like I said, this is their only path to “victory”…and what a Pyrrhic victory it would be. That, of course, is the last part of that scenario I forgot to include, which is that should she somehow pull all that off, her strategy would, IMO, absolutely decimate turn-out for young voters, African-American voters, and especially drive away white/male Independents. And what worse candidate to face than John McCain if you’ve alienated white male indies before the general election has even started? It’s not like Clinton started out from a position of strength with that demographic, and they think highly of McCain, and Obama is their favorite candidate and they would, I think, largely view his nomination as stolen.
I think the standard GOP base consolidating around stopping Hillary (here in Houston, I’m staying with my aunt and uncle, and my uncle and 2 cousins like McCain, are open to Obama, and refuse to even consider voting for Clinton) + those Indies is enough of a coalition for McCain. It would be interesting though, as Clinton would have a huge advantage with women, but McCain would, I think, neutralize a lot of her support with Hispanics.
She’d have some issues with coalition building facing McCain in the abstract; but in her only path to “victory” I can imagine, she would cripple her GE campaign to the point where I’m not sure a winning coalition is possible.
Great post Hilzoy. I have long felt that Hillary would be a Democratic version of W. in the “loyalty above all” area. And the “35 years experience” claim has always been a complete joke. HLC would be a disaster as President.
check out this story: McCain adviser says he’d quit if it’s McCain v Obama.
Drudge is bleating that a new poll puts Obama up over Clinton nationally 49 to 37.
It’s Rasmussen. If it’s confirmed by the Gallup tracking poll and/or other national polls, all my mathematical permutations would probably be academic/mental masturbation, not that I would complain. If the voters coalesce around him, the supers will follow, and that will be that.
Anecdotally, FWIW, the guy who’s couch I slept on in San Fran doesn’t vote, says all politicians are corrupt, wasn’t that impressed by Obama and seemed to go out of his way to try to be skeptical of him (though he was supportive of my efforts; he’s still a good guy). He was down on Obama’s chances when I left Feb 6th, and I assured him that he’d be much higher on him in 10 days or so.
he called me up last night to say, “your boy is on quite the run, eh?” When I agreed and did a little gloating about calling the way things unfolded, he surprised the hell out of me, with a hint of excitement in his voice quoted Obama word-for-word (he’d never seen an Obama speech when I was in San Fran, so this must’ve been the first time he saw Barack in action), trying to adopt an Obama-voice, “we are bringing together Democrats and Independents and Republicans; blacks and whites; Latinos and Asians; small states and big states; Red States and Blue States into a United States of America.”
Then he paused and just said, “pretty fucking sweet man.”
That’s going to leave a mark. (h/t HA)
Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign manager backs Obama
Another reason for me to like O over C (h/t Insty):
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog, issued a report on Wednesday that showed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York had obtained $342 million in earmarks last year, nearly four times as much as the total for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Of course McCain hasn’t requested a single one…
(he’d never seen an Obama speech when I was in San Fran, so this must’ve been the first time he saw Barack in action
Is it too simplistic to think that this anecdotal event is being repeated everywhere? It was the case for me. As I teetered between Edwards and Obama, the first speech I saw Obama give (this campaign anyway) sealed the deal.
“Of course McCain hasn’t requested a single one…”
I have to say that, no disrespect intended, and present company excepted, I think the conservative blogosphere’s fetish with earmarks is inane: it’s purely a campaign of distraction, to keep you guys all busy and excited over something that’s essentially trivial.
Are some earmarks egregious bad ideas and waste of money? Sure.
But, in fact, only a small percentage of earmarks are that sort of thing. The overwhelming majority are for perfectly sound projects, sought after by local communities.
And earmarks are less than 1% of the federal budget, after all: they’re an absolutely trivial piece government spending.
Lastly, they never talk about presidential earmarks.
Basically, I think the folks subscribing to the whole fetishization of earmarks as some sort of major waste in government, and spending a lot of time and energy on campaigning against them, are essentially charging a red cape, while the Republican leadership bull waves it around, and serious issues of waste, like farm subsidies, or tax breaks for hugely profitable international corporations, go unaddressed. It’s a con job, and the conservative grass roots have fallen for it.
Here’s another bunch of anecdotes of Clinton campaign infighting.
I’m less concerned about infighting (the number of such reports go up any time a campaign is seen as tanking) and more about the big, major strokes of strategy failure. Even f you grant that Clinton ran a good conventional campaign, the response to a change in conditions has to be worrisome; it certainly gives reasons for people to hop off the bus.
More problems for Clinton, and smart Obama planning.
If I could only get a piece of the action, I’d probably shut up about them.
It’s a con job, and the conservative grass roots have fallen for it.
there are probably hundreds of topics which could be described by blog posts ending in that sentence.
Here’s Chuck Todd on delegate math (YouTube). It’s quite interesting, and Todd is very good.
Oh: and Chafee endorses Obama. Good news for the RI primary.
Gee, she values loyalty over competence?
There’s been talk about how if Clinton wins she’ll be setting up a second dynasty to match the Bushes.
Sounds more like there’s just the one.
i have this sneaking feeling a lot of people are going to be saying “well, he never had much of a lead, when you really look at the numbers.”
but, i’m sure that’s just my pessimism reflex twitching in the unexpected presence of hope.
Adam: Many leaders are only mediocre managers, but can build enough momentum that they sweep some managers into their wake who compensate for their weaknesses — George W. Bush seems a good example of this. He’s a horrible manager (and doesn’t seem to know it sometimes), but he’s surrounded with people who are very good managers and make up for that weakness.
Don’t you mean “people who are very good campaign managers” here?
Redhand, it’s HRC.
Michael‘s math looks about right: Clinton needs to win out in a way that’s staggeringly unlikely. I can’t see any way this will happen, especially with momentum and especially the way media momentum is.
Gary, I wouldn’t be so sure that WI is guaranteed to be in the Democratic column. Kerry won by a razor-thin margin — close enough that I thought the Republicans had a colorable court case, though not close or contested enough that I thought they would win. The state is swinging blue but the north is still extremely conservative and I don’t know what they’re going to do come election time. I’m hoping that, between depressed turnout in the smaller cities and the energizing of the big cities (Green Bay, Milwaukee and Madison) that the contest won’t be close, but there’s no guarantee.
To the main point of the thread, this boils down to something I’ve thought for a while, and which Mark Penn inadvertently confirmed. A major bone of contention in 2005 (when Howard Dean took control of the DNC) was the 50-state strategy. It was widely derided, particularly on the DLC side of the fence, as being impractical and foolhardy because it contravened the conventional wisdom that you only contested the “battleground states”. The verdict from the 2004 election was that conventional wisdom was wrong, though, and the verdict from the 2006 election is that the 50-state strategy is right. In two short years the Democrats went from being considered — not necessarily correctly, mind, but close enough — a purely regional party, to one that’s national and which further has pushed the Republicans into being a regional party themselves. And this is, in short, why Hillary’s getting smoked: Mark Penn (and maybe Hillary) is too invested, or too hidebound, to realize he’s using last year’s failure of a strategy. I hate to say it, but for that reason alone Hillary deserves to lose.
[I also think Obama deserves to win for many reasons, btw, but that is to me a very different thing.]
I remember another president who valued loyalty and message discipline over competence…
Gary: But, in fact, only a small percentage of earmarks are that sort of thing. The overwhelming majority are for perfectly sound projects, sought after by local communities.
IMO perfectly sound projects sought after by local communities need to be funded by local communities, or the county, or the state. If it’s not part of federal infrastructure it should not be getting federal dollars. Why should you pay taxes in Colorado for a bike trail in Maine for example? YMMV, but it is an issue for me.
$20 billion per year doesn’t go as far as it used to I admit, but think of where else that money could be used. And it’s not even the money as much as the related problems:
-Lack of transparency, slipped in after committee with no oversight.
-Keeps incumbents in office because they bring home the pork.
-Encourages corruption. Company X exists for little reason other than to suck up earmarks but contributes a lot of money to Congressperson Y’s coffers.
I’m not claiming it is a D problem. It’s a primary reason I didn’t vote R in 2006 – because I was so disgusted at Republican’s abuse of the system and Democrats promised to fix it.
cleek – you missed the most important thing though about that poll:
Key point: These polls were taken from Feb. 6th-12th — before Obama’s resounding wins in the Potomac Primary. So whatever momentum he gained then is not reflected in these numbers.
“My opponent makes speeches, my campaign offers solutions.”
-Hillary
Now why would a party that pretends to represent middle class American workers fight for low tariffs and a new plan to give competing illegal immigrant workers 5-year visas?
With the resources that she has at her disposal, the fact that she surrounds herself with weak people speaks to her personal insecurities.
cleek – you missed the most important thing though about that poll
i saw that. but her leads are pretty large, even with BOSHMO’s presumed Potomac momentum. he’s gonna need some fat mojo to overcome those numbers. but, if he’s able to do it, i’d hope HRC’d take the hint and get out of the way.
Anarch
Thanks for the kind words re: my math. Also, I agree about the 50-state strategy and your conclusion. This is what I wrote on that subject over at The CarpetBagger Report [I’m editing it a bit as I re-read it]
Michael, this has been really interesting reading. Good data, and good illumination of its possible significance. Much thanks.
Anarch: Don’t you mean “people who are very good campaign managers” here?
No, George W. Bush has a lot of different types of psychotically loyal managers around him. You appear to be thinking of Karl Rove. Just off the top of my head, Andy Card (within the inner circle) and James Baker (looking down from Daddy’s inner circle like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction) are good examples of guys who certainly strike me as very good managers who are not campaign guys — at least not to the degree that Rove is.
How did she end up running [activity]? … because she was loyal, and [a certain someone] valued loyalty more than competence.
Doesn’t THAT sound familiar?
her own approach is a lot closer to the current president’s than her supporters might like to admit.
That’s why it sounded familiar!
=======================
Why not just announce that the nomination should depend on NY and CA alone and have done with it?
That would work only if they were winner-take-all states. But Obama got 40% of the votes in NY and 43% of the vote (44% of the delegates) in Cali. So it’s not like those were huge wins for Clinton, either.
=========================
I’m guessing that everyone’s heard about the Che Flag Incident, by now?
Does the Che poster even refer to Che anymore? It seems to me that most people who wear a Che T-shirt or hang a Che flag probably don’t know who he is (possibly a fictional character in a musical?). It’s beciome like Einstein sticking out his tongue — a picture which has moved from the individual to the mythic.
From the NYT article, exactly what I was harping on last week:
It’s the Anti-Rove strategy. Rather than firing up the base, expand and mobilize the center; get new people to the polls; get help in smaller increments (financially and logistically) so you’re not as reliant on partisans. This sort of thing has always been considered “good idea, sounds purty, but won’t ever really happen” territory. I wouldn’t have thought it possible if Obama wasn’t so damned good at it.
In almost any other year, Clinton would win the primaries in a walk — she’s turning out the base at an historic rate. The fact that Obama is beating her so resoundingly suggests that a lot of the conventional wisdom about “centrist” politics might have been wrong — and largely because of some foolish assumptions about how to “campaign to the center.” I have a feeling that the difference between Kerry’s pandering to those in the middle and Obama’s attempt to engage them will be looked back on with befuddlement in years to come.
Anarch has it almost exactly right in focusing this whole issue on the 50-state strategy, I think. The criticisms of that strategy do make sense if the only way you know of to go for the center is “I feel your pain” — which has been the best that Democrats have been able to muster for some time now — or “compassionate conservative,” which suggests that the Republicans, while a bit better at treating non-partisans as human beings, don’t really take it seriously either. To the extent they’ve been better at it since Reagan, it hasn’t been by much, and the general scumminess of the party hasn’t helped them much.
What Obama represents for Dean is a vindication of the 50-state strategy; the hope that there really is a silent, frustrated, disenfranchised majority out there waiting to be tapped. And a lot of politicians have assumed that because they couldn’t figure out how to tap it, it wasn’t there. The center was just too apathetic, young voters don’t care, the country is too divided… But what if they’re wrong? Is it really that implausible to consider that the incompetents and malcontents that have passed through D.C. throughout the modern political era just might not have had much of a clue? Campaigns have been slow to change despite some pretty radical cultural shifts — viral marketing, direct mail, segmentation, brand management, trust relationships, long tails, purple cows, decentralized information, blah blah blah. The Democrats didn’t even have a decent centralized voter database before Dean. The Republicans were better because of direct mail, but not by much (although they did write some interesting software designed to optimally gerrymander redistricting in Texas — I’ve seen it).
Of course, all the resurgent-center talk might end up being too optimistic, or just a transient ’08 phenomenon, or it might be that Obama himself is just that good. But I have a feeling that many of those who fawned over Rove’s get-out-the-base strategy are going to end up like the people who were scrambling to build bigger forts and bigger battleships up until the tanks and aircraft carriers came rumbling in. “Huh. Now why did that not seem obvious before?”
(Also, in this metaphor, Dean is Rommel, which is kind of morbidly apropos. I was going to say that Hillary would be like the Bismarck before I considered that might be offensive, so instead she can be the Yamato — Kerry is more of a Bismarck type anyway.)
Crap, the Yamato‘s still a battleship, so it’s actually not less offensive. It’s just so much cooler than the Bismarck that I forgot why I was amending my metaphor in the first place.
although they did write some interesting software designed to optimally gerrymander redistricting in Texas — I’ve seen it
What do I have to do to get a look?
Well, duh. Star Blazers!
What do I have to do to get a look?
I guess that sounded more insider-y than it was. OK, explanation:
During the Texas redistricting fiasco, I was a staff editor at the Daily Texan (UT’s newspaper) and was doing background research, and ran across a public website of a company that made software designed specifically for gerrymandering political districts. (They didn’t use that particular word, but it wasn’t really necessary, as I’ll explain in a sec.) For the life of me I can’t remember their name, but I might be able to find it again if I looked.
It was really surreal to see it just laid out there — like, they had screenshots and a slick interface and everything, and all these cool demonstrations about how they’d compiled all this demographic info that would let you consolidate hostile voters in such-and-such way and split them in other ways and on and on and on. They had all these super-detailed maps of Texas showing where to draw all the lines (even more impressive to me now, considering what I’ve learned since about the arcane nature of Texas politics — which we’ve been discussing recently).
The site wasn’t particularly partisan, but considering the time (redistricting doesn’t normally happen mid-decade, and only one side was pushing for it, obviously), and considering that most of their examples were things like splitting up Latino and Black voting blocs to dilute them into larger White blocs, etc… (yes, it was that blatant) — at any rate, it was pretty clear who their target market was. And they had a hell of a price tag.
I’d surprised if they were around long after that, since their software would in theory only be useful once a decade when the districts are supposed to be drawn (though I suppose it could be repurposed for lots of other purposes), but who knows — it’s almost that time again. I’d love to find that site again. I might go look for it a bit later. It was gold.
It almost sounds like a dream now, but it was definitely there. It was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen.
NPR added fuel to the management fire yesterday , reporting the rental of lists by the Clinton team to a Clinton supporter. There’s more smoke than actual fire, but it is an interesting issue that unfortunately does call into question the internal judgment of the campaign generally, and of Solis Doyle in particular.
NPR added fuel to the management fire yesterday , reporting the rental of lists by the Clinton team to a Clinton supporter. There’s more smoke than actual fire, but it is an interesting issue that unfortunately does call into question the internal judgment of the campaign generally, and of Solis Doyle in particular.
Another line of attack on Obama, this one a revision of a Republican classic: he’s so negative.
This won’t fly, either.
Except perhaps with folks like Von, because it exposes the evil way Democrats favor defending themselves from class warfare.
Dahlia is unusually funny, too.
Harris’s double post is unfortunate, but I’ve been surprised the story s/he cites hasn’t been getting more blog attention. It concerns privacy, usually a hot issue on the internet and several things about it are weird:
1) They rented the lists to a company that does commercial solicitation; it isn’t like the lists were to solicit liberal activism.
2) The money involved was fairly paltry, so it isn’t clear why they’d bother – unless it was some sort of a favor to the guy renting the list.
3) Conversely to (2) (I said weird), the guy they rented the list to has given Bill Clinton some undisclosed but huge amount in personal income and also some undisclosed but still huger amount in donations to the Clinton Library, and this rental let him give money to the Hillary campaign, from corporate funds and above the individual limit (on which we assume he’s maxed out).
4) Since when are campaigns are allowed to run as businesses, building and selling their assets to fund themselves? What’s to stop a candidate from funding their campaign by selling their artwork, or their autograph, at $5,000 or $50,000 a pop to their big donors? Or taking the campaign fund and putting it on the Roulette wheel?
5) Renting the list for commercial solicitation pretty clearly violates their stated privacy policy – for donors to the Presidential campaign. On the other hand, what I’ve seen suggests it may have been a list of her Senate voters, and I haven’t read that campaign’s privacy policy. This rental might just be hypocrisy but not direct betrayal.
A quick search doesn’t find any commenters saying this, not even Gary, so I feel compelled:
Josh Green, no ‘e’ on the end.
IMO perfectly sound projects sought after by local communities need to be funded by local communities, or the county, or the state. If it’s not part of federal infrastructure it should not be getting federal dollars.
This is kind of an aside from the overall topic of this thread, but — IMVHO the correct answer here is “it depends”.
Without trying too hard, I can think of a number of things that are particular to specific regions, states, counties, or communities, which might merit federal participation because they, in one way or another, either create value for the nation as a whole, or contribute to broad national goals.
Improvements to ports.
Money to improve schools in poorer states.
Money for basic research, development, or other investment in regionally based agriculture or industries.
Disaster readiness in uniquely disaster-prone areas.
Even your bike trail in Maine might merit federal money as part of an overall initiative to reduce dependence on oil. I bike at least part way to work when it’s not too cold, I’d love to see federal money (or money from any source) invested in any and all kinds of non-automotive transportation.
Maybe I’m reading you wrong, but IMO there are lots and lots of reasons that federal money can legitimately be spent on initiatives that are relatively local in their immediate scope.
All of which is kind of a different kettle of fish from what is normally meant by earmarks.
Thanks –
Jim Hightower will endorse Obama. So, apparently, will SEIU.
Cleek upthread referred to the McCAin staffer who says he will quit if Obama gets the nomination because he doesn’t want to campaign against him.
The man didn’t say this but my assumption is that he would like Obama to win.
One of the participants at my dad’s causuc was a republican who was there to support Obama. HHe came righht ouut and said that he wanted the Republicans to lose this year if thhey could lose to Obama.
I know that anecdotes aren’t data but thhere are indications of this sort of thinking everywhere. There is a subset of the Republican pary that want’s to lose this year if they can lose to Obama.
They don’t want to lose to Clinton, however.
And oh, dear God:
Voters who change their mind because suddenly a candidate is the hip thing? Or because of a video his campaign didn’t even make? Gag. A vote isn’t a fashion statement, or a sort of lifestyle accessory. It’s that sort of thinking that got us George W. Bush, the guy you’d want to have a beer with.
Sigh.
Jim Hightower will endorse Obama.
I am so sold!
I’m also disappointed at Edwards’ antics (and Gore’s supposed intention to sit this one out, but I guess I can forgive that). It seems painfully clear that Edwards is jockeying for position rather than standing on principle or trying to get a policy concession from either Clinton or Obama, and it strikes me as really dissonant from the tune he was singing on the campaign trail. Not happy at all.
I’ve been worrying about a backlash against the obama momentum. Dems seem to have a death wish. We’ve got an obvious winner on our hadnns and look at the sneerinng ahis winning attributes! He’s charismatic! He talks abouut hope! He can fill areanas with screaming fans!
On what planet are those qualities bad in a candidate for President?
I tell you what. If we we nomimate Hillary, then, after she loses, I want everyone who voted for her to be banned from further participation in the primaries.
@Michael: A hearty second of Bruce B.’s appreciation of your post from a veteran of the sleep-on-sofas brigade. And thanks for working so hard in Texas; hope you can go home happy.
Party-building pays off at all levels of the ticket, and for years to come. It would really help counterbalance all the disappointments sure to come in an Obama presidency if the campaign did succeed in redrawing the map and exposing the Republican party as a regional entity, representing a serious minority.
The Clinton-McAuliffe approach weakened the grassroots almost fatally. All the more serious since it followed twelve years of Republican dominance.
It’s hard to avoid boiling down the two approaches as the difference between operating from fear and operating from hope/confidence.
Your delegate math and the Virginia county-by-county results (reinforced by the map linked in a comment way upthread) have convinced me that an urgent task for local Dems is to begin helping build support for Obama in the rest of the western counties. The coolness to Obama there may be the result of less campaign contact. If not, McCain will be able to exploit our candidate’s Appalachian problem.
Jim Hightower will endorse Obama. So, apparently, will SEIU.
John Lewis too.
FWIW wonkie, I think Obama’s quite on top of this, and has been at least since the first time he made the hope-monger joke. You’re right that “he’s too charismatic!” is a pretty self-defeating argument — and that for some reason Dems seem to buy these sorts of arguments — but they can’t be ignored, and part of the reason Obama’s been successful is that he’s good at volleying this sort of attacks. If he wasn’t, he wouldn’t be as good/charismatic a candidate as he is — QED.
At some point I think you just have to trust that he’ll be able to contend with stuff like this, or not. He has to break down the Dems’ traditional “fear of success” in order to win, and the job he’s done so far is, I think, about the best we can ask for at this point.
OK, enough Kumbaya. Later all!
Ugh: I just saw that. That’s huge, I think. (Well, it’s huge to me. I really respect John Lewis.)
wonkie, Adam: It’s a long-term project, this party-building thing.
I’m not known as a fan of the Clintons, Sen. or President. But my disagreements with their policies and their politics doesn’t make me view the many, many people who support them as enemies.
It’s going to be a rough couple of months coming up. Please try not to make them any rougher than they need to be.
Yargh, coming into my building just now, one of the people who works here, a 30-something African-American woman whom I’ve never spoken to before, said she’d seen me campaigning for Obama at the Metro and was surprised because she hadn’t thought I was the type of person who’d get out and do that. I said that yes, I’d felt inspired to do that, and I was happy that we’d had a big win. I was shocked when she responded “Unfortunately” and went on to say that she didn’t like any of the candidates because they were all going to sell out America. The only one she’d liked was Tom Tancredo, and it was too bad he was no longer in the race. Everyone else was too friendly to illegal immigrants. I was speechless at that point.
i’ve been a Democratic party activist since elemenatary school. Literally. I stuffed enevelopes for LBJ. And if my fellow Dems have are irresponisble enough to pick a cowardsly Vichy Democrat like Clinont who can’t even campaign effectively over a gift like Obama, then i deserve the right to be madder than hell and to say so to any Hillary supporter I can find on McCain’s inaugeration day.
In the meantime, when discussing politidcs with Hillary supporters I am very nice.
Interesting anecdote KC.
Another one. I was speaking to my sister-in-law tonight. She lives in the great northwoods of Wisconsin. I asked who she was going to vote for in the primary. Keep in mind that she and her husband are basically Republicans, although they voted for Kerry in 2004, partially because he is a Vietnam vet and felt the Republicans really dissed the vets and because they really hated Bush.
She mentioned that if they were voting in the Republican primary they would vote for Huckabee, but they really want the Republicans to learn a lesson. Then she mentioned that she is torn but will probably vote for Hillary. Well, 10 minutes later, just by discussing some of the things the Clinton camp has done in the past couple weeks, she will now vote for Obama. Knowing her husband, that is who he will vote for too.
Nell, keep in mind that wonkie is talking about aftre the general election when Clinton loses and we end up with a continuation of the present. Assuming she does. I think she might squeak a victory out, although based on her performance so far, I’m not so sure.
And her latest ads in WI, complaining that Obama won’t debate her are just sounding like a person who suddenly realizes she is in trouble and is whining about it.
Well i probably won’t ever sound off in real life to a real person.
But i am furious with thhe Clinont supporters now. I wishh one, just one, would give a reality-based sensible reason for supporting her. It is frustrating when a choice is so seriouus that people concoct such patently stupid rationalizations. The ladies at my caucus didn’t want to say so byyt basically they like Clinton for being female. Sheesh. Or they preferred her health plaN. pRESIDENTS DON’T WRITE HEALTH PLANNS. If they want her to write a health plan, they should leavbe her in the Senate. Or they said shhe will fight the righht. If she was going to fighht the right, why hasn’t she done so yet? Or they think that Obama is going to be lovey-dovey with thhe republicanns. Well better than trying to appease them or cave into them as Hillary did over and over.
Actually I think the love thing between Obama and Republicans is an inndecation that some of them would like to negociate a surrender, but not to Clinton. They don’t want to surrender to her because to do so would be to accept responsiblity and admit error. So they want to give up the partisanship to someone other than her.
But whatever. The important thing is thhat they surrender thier partisannship because that’s what’s good for the country. If they surrender then we won and that’s what matters. There is no virtue in continuing to fight when you have the option of winning.
Ok wonkie- I support Clinton. I’d rather see Barack in the white house maybe, but I don’t think he can win. The Republicans will get millions of extra racist voters. Larry Wilmore had it right on the daily show last night.
Does that make sense?
I mean, I’m pretty keenly aware of the residual racism present in society, but is there that many active racists that would go out of their way to prevent a black man from getting into office? Isn’t it more likely that all these millions of extra racist voters would sit out?
Voters who change their mind because suddenly a candidate is the hip thing? Or because of a video his campaign didn’t even make?
This is, though, the only sense in which the “Obama cult” objection makes sense. Obviously Obama’s supporters aren’t a cult in the literal sense in which Scientology is a cult. Some of them are a cult in more or less the figurative sense in which Macintosh users or heavy Wikipedia editors are a cult: really a fandom. And there are people out there who hate this sort of thing with a burning passion. When anything gets like this, they have to run away or become hostile—they don’t want to be one of the sheeple!
It’s not just pride; one part of it is a sometimes-useful reflex. In Obama’s case, there’s a discussion going on over on Making Light about whether it makes sense to be repelled by charismatic speakers. Patrick’s initial post proposed it was the same kind of “false economy” you mentioned, in which somebody who’s good at being charismatic has to be bad at other things. But many posters responded that, no, charisma inherently made them suspicious, because they didn’t like the feeling of getting emotionally carried away in some sort of tidal wave; after all, that sort of thing so often leads to no good. We all remember late 2001/early 2002, what feelings most Americans had and what that led to. It wasn’t thanks to a charismatic speaker that that happened, but it was another kind of emotional flood.
I think the revulsion toward enthusiastic movements is mostly this kind of feeling, the worry that you might get snookered by your own emotions if you give in. And it’s a valuable feeling. If more people felt that way in 2001/02 we’d be better off today. It doesn’t mean, though, that it makes sense to follow it mechanically any more than it makes sense to follow every big fad that comes along. Some of Obama’s fans might like him because he’s actually a good candidate, just as some Macintosh fans like them because the machines have actual virtues.
In information technology, The Register’s modus operandi consists largely of finding figurative cults of this type and poking them with a stick, because it’s funny and because it makes readers feel skeptical and smart. This kind of reaction does, however, ignore the ways in which the cult-object might actually be worthy of admiration.
Matt: I can see that in some cases. Generally, my romantic taste is idiosyncratic, but one time I managed to fall for someone everyone else fell for too. (And yes, you know who you are. — He reads this blog.) I used to joke that when he walked into a room, all the women’s hair would point in his direction, like iron shavings to a magnet. It was sort of unnerving.
On the other hand, while falling for someone isn’t supposed to reflect an objective judgment of any kind (I mean, other than ‘this person is not a monster’), voting for President presumably is. So I can see being suspicious and deciding to think things through more carefully, but not just deciding not to vote for someone because it’s the in thing and he’s charismatic.
It isn’t just charisma, in the sense of “delivers his lines well”. Bill Clinton is pretty darn charismatic, as well as a decent present, but his rhetoric has always left me pretty cold.
It’s:
1. His writing. His best stuff–I want to write like that. So I can hardly hold it against him. (I did try not to just vote based on that, naturally).
2. He actually seems to have a better regard for the intelligence & decency of the citizens of this country than any presidential candidate I can remember.
“Bill Clinton is pretty darn charismatic, as well as a decent present”
I’ve heard it said that he is gifted, but never that he’s sometimes regifted.
Adam: Just off the top of my head, Andy Card (within the inner circle) and James Baker (looking down from Daddy’s inner circle like the Wolf in Pulp Fiction) are good examples of guys who certainly strike me as very good managers who are not campaign guys — at least not to the degree that Rove is.
See, I don’t really. Baker is more of what I’d call a handler — in fact, Wolf (or The Cleaner, an earlier {and inferior} Keitel role) is a very apt comparison — which means that he’s great as a temporary fixer, but doesn’t really have the kind of long-term presence I’d associate with a manager. And I have no opinion of Andy Card at all; near as I can tell, he was essentially a non-entity, an empty suit emasculated by Bush’s peculiar brand of insanity. Any managerial skill he might have is, to me, a hypothetical. Though of course I could have simply missed it.
gwangung: Well, duh. Star Blazers!
It’s Battleship Yamato, you heathen!
Are these the racist centrists, or the racist Democrats? Because the racist Republicans are likely already voting R.
Um…er…strike centrists, replace with something else that I can’t quite come up with right now.
Probably time to turn in for the night.
And her latest ads in WI, complaining that Obama won’t debate her are just sounding like a person who suddenly realizes she is in trouble and is whining about it.
OTOH, I heard that both Chelsea and Bill were pretty darn good speakers the past few days. I just don’t think they’re good enough.
To continue on the 50-state-strategy discussion, this bit from The Field over at rural votes is worth pondering:
You don’t build lasting majorities by simply trying to associate yourself with some catchy buzzword or slogan, nor do you build them by winning elections through patronage machines, nasty and misleading mailers, etc. You do it by actually grasping what bothers people, getting people to become invested in your cause, and giving them a chance to cast a vote that they think affirms their values.
Clinton probably thinks “change” has just been a better catch-phrase than “experience” or “strength” or “ready” (but maybe “solutions” is the solution!). Again, her team just doesn’t get it, though EJ Dionne (!!) does seem to grasp the dynamic here:
We’re not quite there yet, but Howard Dean and Barack Obama have done a lot to lead the Dems out of the woods, and we all owe them a debt of gratitude, IMO, just for getting us this far. Also, little known fact (I think it’s little known): Dean’s Democracy for America volunteers played a role in pushing Obama over the top in his primary challenge in 04, and Dean steered his fledgling movement towards Obama as a grassroots candidate on the rise in his Dean’s Dozen rec list. (check out comment #9 on that link, hehe. good eye for talent)
And I have no opinion of Andy Card at all; near as I can tell, he was essentially a non-entity, an empty suit emasculated by Bush’s peculiar brand of insanity.
Card is Chief of Staff at the White House — he is Leo McGarrity in the flesh the few times I’m heard him speak, though of course bound to a slightly less… awe-inspiring Chief Exec…
And I said Battleship Yamato, I don’t know what all this star blazers nonsense is.
Whenever anyone mentions Andy Card, I think of Bilmon’s post on him, partially reproduced here
“Card is Chief of Staff at the White House”
“Is” in the sense that he quit two years ago.
“– he is Leo McGarrity in the flesh”
Any relation to Leo McGarry, whose flesh really wouldn’t be smelling very good right now?
Margaret Carlson has an interesting observation:
Slarti- Most of the people eligable to vote don’t. In the last presidential election there were roughly 50 million voters on each side. There were better than 100 million people who could have voted but didn’t. If half of that 100 million are sympathic to Republicans then there are 50 million possible ‘additional’ Republican voters. If half of them are to some degree racist that 25 million potential voters who are racist. If half of them show up at the polls because they simply cannot stomach the idea of a black POTUS then thats 12.5 million voters, and a massive Republican mandate.
I don’t expect the numbers to work out exactly like that but even 2 million extra voters would likely hand the election to the Republicans.
Of course I also think there is a good chance Obama will simply get shot.
Maybe I am too pesimistic, but usually I find I’m not being cynical enough.
I’m a person whois fundmentally immune to charisma becausei don’t like to caried away by any rhetoric other than my own.
BUT those turned off by Obama’s charisma really ought to discipline themselves to think past their own emotional reaction. We are trying to win an election herre, not jjust please ourselves. Just because I don’t repond to charisma is o reason to reject a charimatic candidate. Too much of the dissing of Obama is this sort of ego-centerd argument: he isn’t what IIIII want. He doens’t suit me me me.
We ought ot be thinking about us us us.
Oh, that’s your point: that Obama will likely reactivate the 30% or so (I’ve seen figures that it’s roughly a third of eligible voters that consistently identify as Republicans; it might very well be half and half as you state, but I expect that it’s less) of Republicans that are racist?
Well, let’s not argue ratios; let’s say it could be as much as a couple of million. Do you honestly think there are more racist Republicans than there are anti-Clinton Republicans?
For me, being honest here, I’d lean toward voting against Clinton, but voting for Obama if he’s the candidate. I’m not every voter, but neither is anyone else.
Just something to think about, not saying that one effect is definitely stronger than the other. I just don’t know all that many people upset about Obama’s skin color, not that my anecdata have anything whatever to do with reality. I do still know some people who think Obama is a closet radical Muslim, but mostly those people are too busy talking to listen.
Which, come to think of it: I’ll shut up now.
Anf another thing! I don’t buy the argument that a black man can’t win. Why? Because it is coming from people who apparently think that gender is no issue in a run for the Presidency.
wonkie- Well you were “furious” with me and wanted a rational reason to vote for Clinton so I gave mine. If I could make people believe me I wouldn’t start with you, so I don’t mind if you think he can win.
I will lose a lot of respect for some people around here if he gets creamed.
Slarti- Sure all the Republicans hate the Clintons but I don’t think that has anything at all to do with them. I remember an army buddy wanted Bill impeached in 1992 before Bill had taken office yet. The susceptable will hate who they are told to hate once the noise machine gears up.
The overt racists are a bonus for the Republicans because usually they have to make their racist messages covert.
Frank: At one time it was true. I’d point out a couple of recent truths.
1. The Bradley effect is from the early 80s. In MA 2006 a black man ran against a white woman and the polling was dead on.
2. More important, SC. A ploy that might have worked when the Clintons knew the ropes, maybe 1990–give up the black vote while ghettoizing your opponent as the black candidate, and white voters will make up that loss. And then you get the black voters back when they decide their candidate can’t win after all. That ploy spectacularly failed. They lost a lot of white voters, myself included, in that contest. And whites keep voting for Obama. I think it’s the boring world of people voting for a good candidate (Sebelius, Napolitano) who also happens to be (X–a woman in that case) but not for a candidate based on identity first–if you don’t run as THE woman or THE black or THE latino, you draw a lot more voters than those who do.
Looking at voting trends in this country, I just don’t see a spectacular avalanche of closet racists suddenly registering. Partly that no other issue (War in Iraq, Illegal aliens, whatever) got that kind of new voter participation. In fact, the only thing that did is….Obama. But mostly that I just don’t think we’re that overtly racist anymore.
I’m reminded of the protest that “people here aren’t ready to vote for a woman.” When you point out that the governor is, in fact, a woman, they just mutter darkly.
And it’s a pretty dark mutter, to say hordes of motivated voters should go with the dynasty candidate, since there are secret racists hiding out there, ready to mobilize. I’ll vote for someone with a brighter view of the country.
“Card is Chief of Staff at the White House”
“Is” in the sense that he quit two years ago.
–That I did know. I am sure of this because the one time I’ve watched him at length was on the Daily Show, after he quit. Jon Stewart commented — astutely as usual — that Card was an especially impressive (“scary” may have been the word) spinmeister, and I agree.
“– he is Leo McGarrity in the flesh”
Any relation to Leo McGarry, whose flesh really wouldn’t be smelling very good right now?
–Now that I just got wrong. I can’t really explain why — not as if I never watched the West Wing before — but I’d just fixed it in my head wrong. My version still sounds right to me.
Anyway, thank you for the correction, Garrity.
Any relation to Leo McGarry, whose flesh really wouldn’t be smelling very good right now?
And actually, that was the whole basis for my comparison, the whole undead angle
Looking at voting trends in this country, I just don’t see a spectacular avalanche of closet racists suddenly registering. Partly that no other issue (War in Iraq, Illegal aliens, whatever) got that kind of new voter participation. In fact, the only thing that did is….Obama.
Ron Paul.
But mostly that I just don’t think we’re that overtly racist anymore.
That’s distinct from being less racist. It’s even distinct from being intentionally racist. That’s the point.
Ron Paul got a lot more money than votes.
My impression is that the population of potentially politically active racists is actually pretty fully engaged. There are more racists than that in America, but they regard politics as hopelessly compromised or, in some cases, fundamentally a tool of the enemy. Their view of the usefulness of political participation is about what, oh, mine would be if I were asked how worthwhile it’d be to get into denominational politics to get a fundamentalist denomination away from creationism and homophobia.
Ron Paul got a lot more money than votes.
Yeah, I was just making a dumb joke.
He’s still creepy, though.
Deborah- You are right about the optimism thing. One reason I’m not mad a Obama is that he can’t look a these things a cynicly as I do. He wouldn’t be a good candidate if he did.
But you seem to be confusing the primary with the general election like a lot of other people. The fact that there are basicly no racists among Democratic primary voters is no kind of evidence about how racist general election voters are.
Well, Frank, you’re making a non-falsifiable statement, so I’m not sure the point, to be honest. There’s no way to prove to you that an Obama nomination won’t activate a bunch of closet, angry, politically-unengaged racists from registering and mobilizing to beat the black candidate, and do it in such large numbers as to overwhelm the incredible amount of counter-balancing enthusiasm Obama himself is generating.
There won’t be any way to empirically put it to the test until election day itself.
On the other hand, we do have evidence that Obama is generating some level of racial backlash, but not generating enough to drive people to register to vote against him. For example, poblano at dkos has found that Obama’s performance with whites is largely explained by the population size of Southern Baptists. Exit polls in NJ showed that 1 out of 10 Clinton supporters said that race was an important factor in their decisions (saw something similar in Tenn).
But here’s the flipside to that: Obama still did well with first-time voters in those states, from reports I saw, so there’s no reason to think his race was animating a huge voter-reg drive against him; on the other hand, we do see evidence that he’s animating dormant non-racist voters pretty much wherever he goes. And Clinton also had trouble with Obama supporters in some of her strong states self-reporting that “gender” played a strong role in their decision; how can we be sure we won’t animate closet sexist feelings and get all sorts of angry men registering just to stick it to her?
We can’t be sure. But we can look at what evidence we do have; and that evidence suggests Obama will do just fine, quite well in fact. He’s enormously popular with Dems, hitting over 85% favorablitiy. I’ve seen multiple polls put him as having the best favorable/unfavorable ratings of any national politician in the country, period. And he has the highest favorable/unfavorable rating among the GOP of any Dem I’ve seen polled, hitting over 50% favorable there in at least 2 polls I’ve seen.
Considering how broad his appeal is across registered voters, it seems doubly dubious to assume that non-registered voters both differ in some relevant way that they’ll significantly change those numbers, while at the same time be engaged enough to care to register, and that there won’t continue to be an opposite effect going the other direction of non-registered voters getting engaged precisely so they can vote for Obama.
Electing Barack Obama certainly will not push this country past it’s race issues, but we cannot get past them if we continually tie ourselves to them by insisting on, say, voting against a black candidate to protect him from assassination/Bradley effect, or tacitly approving the “ghettoizing” of a black candidate by not punishing the candidates who attempt to do it.
Micheal- Again you seem confused. Its not non-falsifiable. We are going to find out in November. What part of the racists are not in the Democratic party don’t you understand?
Actually, you should be answering that question.
Tossing out warnings about boogiemen doesn’t cut it.
That doesn’t make any sense gwangung. Unless you are acusing me of being racist. If you are then go ahead and come right out with it.
Micheal- Again you seem confused. Its not non-falsifiable.
Of course it is. How could anyone, right now, falsify it? I mean, really, this is obvious. Like I said, the only way to empirically test it would be to actually go the election, which you advising against because you claim to already know the outcome of said test. But your claim to that knowledge is based on nothing.
We are going to find out in November.
Right, and until then, it’s non-falsifiable. What’s so hard about that to understand? It’s fairly obvious. If you don’t vote for Obama, a monster under your bed is going to eat you alive on election day in Nov! He wont’ be there until Nov, though. Now prove me wrong. Prove it won’t happen.
What part of the racists are not in the Democratic party don’t you understand?
Well, some things to note:
1-You’re simply incorrect that there are no racist Democrats
2-These racist voters that aren’t Democrats have had many opportunities in open primaries to vote against the black man if they wanted to
3-A large portion of the 100 million voters you were talking about aren’t registered voters, and as such could easily register right now for either party and participate in the election to knock the black man out, but we haven’t even seen the slightest hint of that, even in racially-polarized states like TN and LA.
Non-falsifiable has a specific meaning which you are ignoring. Its not non-falsifiable if you can conduct the experiment. In this case not only can you conduct the experiment, we know it will be conducted.
Now you need to go back through my comments and read them. I never told you not to vote for Obama. Somone complained that Clinton voters never had a rational reason for supporting Clinton. Well I do and I explained it.
There aren’t any signifigant numbers of racist Democrats, and claims that there are is just tedious nitpicking. The Democratic party has been unwelcoming to racists for decades now, while the Republicans have actively recruted the racist vote.
Which brings me to you last point. I don’t understand how you think it is plausible that apathetic low-information people who are sypathetic with the Republican brand for racist reasons would show up to vote in the Democratic party?
Pull the other one, its got bells on.
penultimate para party should be primary.
“There aren’t any signifigant numbers of racist Democrats, and claims that there are is just tedious nitpicking.”
Please define how you’re using “significant,” and “racist,” and explain how you’ve determined this fact that “there aren’t any signifigant numbers of racist Democrats,” and how we can objectively verify you’re correct.
If you can’t, you’re just engaging in bluster to cover that you can’t, and that you’re simply trying to assert your personal opinion as fact, rather than as mere opinion.
If you can provide a cite with objective verification of your claim, however, I invite you to please do so. That’ll settle the point, after all. Thanks kindly!
Non-falsifiable has a specific meaning which you are ignoring. Its not non-falsifiable if you can conduct the experiment. In this case not only can you conduct the experiment, we know it will be conducted.
But you are arguing against conducting the experiment because you claim to have access to knowledge of the outcome of the experiment in advance. As such, your claim is only falsifiable if we reject it. As such, yeah, you’re right, it’s not strictly non-falsifiable so much as somewhat incoherent, certainly unpersuasive. It’s certainly non-falsifiable until the actual election, though, so the claim right now is non-falsifiable. It’s not really any different than saying, “look, we can’t nominate Obama because there’s a secret dirty scandal he has hidden, but the GOP has it, and they’ll wait just before election day before burying him with it. I know it!” Sure, I could say the same about Clinton, and where would that get us? You can’t prove me wrong, and my reason for why Clinton is an unacceptable nominee, according to you, is totally rational.
That’s not a statement we could ever contest and prove wrong when discussing who to nominate in the first place; we actually have to move past these discussions and this place & time in order to do it. So, in the context of here and now, yes, it is non-falsifiable.
Now you need to go back through my comments and read them. I never told you not to vote for Obama. Somone complained that Clinton voters never had a rational reason for supporting Clinton. Well I do and I explained it.
I fail to see how it’s rational. You somewhat arbitrarily decided that 2.5 million voters will be motivated by Obama’s race to come out who otherwise wouldn’t, and that such margins would be too big for Obama to overcome. You didn’t really present a particularly persuasive case for that, in that you didn’t really cite anything but your own opinions. I guess it depends on what you mean by “rational”. If it’s that your conclusions flow naturally from your assumptions, then sure, I guess, your point i kinda rational, but if your assumptions are specious and poorly-argued for (or not argued for at all), then I find it kinda lacking in rationality. I mean, shouldn’t the empirical play a role at all here? Is it rational to say that I can’t risk getting out of bed b/c the monster underneath will grab my feet, drag my under, and eat me?
Well, if you accept the assumption that the monster is there, then it’s definitely rational to not get out of bed. The question is whether it’s rational to accept that assumption.
There aren’t any signifigant numbers of racist Democrats, and claims that there are is just tedious nitpicking.
As I said, regression analysis suggests you’re wrong, that white Southern Baptist Democrats have an abnormally hard time voting for Obama, and make up large portions of the Dem vote in states like Tenn, OK, etc. And he does poorly with white voters there, but as of yet, I’ve seen no indication that there were large numbers of like-minded voters coming out for the first time to vote against him.
I don’t understand how you think it is plausible that apathetic low-information people who are sypathetic with the Republican brand for racist reasons would show up to vote in the Democratic party?
Well, I don’t think it’s plausible, because I don’t think there are a lot of low-information, racist voters who are going to be activated by Obama’s presence. However, if we accept your assumption that such voters exist, it’s simple. You’re positing that there is some raft of hicks who are normally politically disengaged but would otherwise engage to vote against a black man in a 2-man competition for the Presidency. Not to vote for the GOP nominee, mind you, but against Obama. Is it really such a leap that some not-insignificant portion of them would activate now, rather than wait until the general? If their only goal is to keep him from the White House, that seems pretty non-controversial.
We’re not talking about regular voters, after all, who would otherwise vote and vote Republican and will only feel more strongly about it. We’re talking about people who specifically reject or otherwise abstain from voting, but want to vote against Obama, passing up the chance to do it. We’ve heard anecdotal stories of Republicans changing parties to vote against Hillary in primaries for awhile now, and even some Obama supporters encouraged it (which I didn’t like, but that’s neither here nor there). And yet, 35 states in, we haven’t heard a peep about a similar phenomena for Obama’s race.
Basically, your whole argument is, “trust me, the monster is just around the corner”, and that it will always be around the next corner, so you can’t really prove it’s there. And we’ve already walked around a bunch of corners, of course, but, as you say, “the monster isn’t on this side of the house, dummy! It’ll be around the next corner! Duh”
You have to give me something more. As it is, you can’t show anything to support your claims, and all evidence points the opposite direction.
And btw, I find your claims about racism in the Democratic party somewhat Pollyanna-ish. I mean, there are lots of registered Dems in areas where racism is still prevalent. Lots of first-generation Americans from Latin America and Asia are registered Dems and also still caught up in the cultural biases of their home countries. It’s nice to think of the Dems as the party of the pure, tolerant, working class, and the GOP as the hickish, racist, sexists, Christian idiots and war-mongerers and big corporations. And don’t get me wrong, a lot of times the policies shake out that way. But, I dunno, I go to West Virginia, I talk to registered Dems in San Fran, I’m in Houston now, and I find plenty of racial animus among Dems. Nothing that worries me about electability, mind you, but still there.
Please define how you’re using “significant,” and “racist,” and explain how you’ve determined this fact that “there aren’t any signifigant numbers of racist Democrats,” and how we can objectively verify you’re correct.
If you can’t, you’re just engaging in bluster to cover that you can’t, and that you’re simply trying to assert your personal opinion as fact, rather than as mere opinion.
We could also ask this of the claim of millions of non-activated, race-motivated voters who will appear out of the woodwork in Nov, just enough to swamp what lead Obama would otherwise have on the GOP candidate.
I should have figured a mention of nitpicking would instantly summon Farber.
🙂
Gary- Michael claims to have the cites with regard to white voter participation. I’m not going to waste time proving that the sun rises either. I’m not obligated to convince you of anything and I’m not going to try.
I don’t think Michael’s numbers really prove anything since knowing that there is a racial disparity in voting doesn’t prove that disparity is motivated by racial animus.
You guys are going to claim that the opinions and experience of me and my black friends are just anecdotal which is true, but when you characterise my experience as irrational, or as a childish fear of bogymen or monsters under the bed, or as having “nothing” backing them up, you are simply being needlessly insulting. Your arguments indicate a basic lack of good faith.
“I’m not obligated to convince you of anything and I’m not going to try.”
No, I didn’t think you would.
“You guys are going to claim […] but when you characterise my experience as irrational, or as a childish fear of bogymen or monsters under the bed, or as having ‘nothing’ backing them up, you are simply being needlessly insulting. Your arguments indicate a basic lack of good faith.”
Please quote me the words in which I did all these things.
Or kindly withdraw the falsehood that I wrote any of them, and thus was “needlessly insulting.”
Thanks.
“Your arguments indicate a basic lack of good faith.”
My “arguments”? What “arguments” would that be? Quote them, please.
Gary- Was there some part of “you guys” that wasn’t clear to you? “but when you” is a clause that might clarify things for you as well. Not everything in my 03:13 am post was directed at you.
“If you can’t, you’re just engaging in bluster to cover that you can’t, and that you’re simply trying to assert your personal opinion as fact, rather than as mere opinion. ”
Maybe you could point to where I claimed something was a fact. As far as I’m aware I’m not yet legaly required to preface all my opinions with the statement that “this is my opinion.” I’m sure you’ll let me know otherwise.
“Gary- Was there some part of ‘you guys’ that wasn’t clear to you?”
Quite clear. Are you unclear that the plural includes more than one person? If you weren’t addressing me, you shouldn’t have written “you guys,” but instead addressed the sole person you were addressing.
Instead, you addressed the two of us. Thus my request that you support your claim, which you are, of course, unable to.
“Not everything in my 03:13 am post was directed at you.”
I’ve quoted your words. If you meant something other than what you wrote, okay. Please then withdraw your assertions that “you are simply being needlessly insulting. Your arguments indicate a basic lack of good faith.”
Thanks.
I wrote: “My ‘arguments’? What ‘arguments’ would that be? Quote them, please.”
You are, of course, unable to.
Otherwise, thanks for clarifying that your assertions are based on no facts whatever, and are unverifiable opinion, and that’s all. I had no “argument” other than to clarify whether that was the case or not. Naturally, you’re entitled to believe whatever you wish.
I know you can read so I gotta admit I’m puzzled. Apparently you didn’t notice that my post above had a direct quote from you. You say I’m unable to right after I did.
I guess I don’t understand why Obama supporters so often on this site have to react with barely suppressed rage and insults when they see someone who supports Clinton. And God forbid that they give a reason and claim it rational.
that last they should be an I.
My personal experience is not nothing. “But when” is a conditional phrase and if you didn’t do any of the thing refered to in it then I didn’t claim you were needlessly insulting. Though of course bluster could be an insulting characterization.
Since Michael and I were discussing racism in the context of elections, primary vs general then the charitable take on what I said would have been that there is no comparing the number of racist voters in the Democratic party compared to the Republican party. I don’t know why you always seek to bog the discussion down in side issues. But I don’t know why you pretend not to know about the southern strategy here.
Setting aside the undoubtedly more knowledgeable responses to this (and similar) statements, above: no. No, no, no. Sure, you can conduct an experiment, but that experiment has to be designed so that its outcome can, actually, falsify your hypothesis. I don’t think you’re going to get anywhere near sufficient data to accomplish that, though, unless millions of angry Republicans show up at the poll, dressed in white hoods and all.
Probably you’re not going to get anything quite that declarative, though. I’m not saying you don’t know jack about the scientific method, I’m saying that on the off-chance you do know anything at all, you’ve elected to completely disregard it in making this claim.
Think of the devil and his horns appear. I realized that was a weakness of my arguement the other day. Republican voters probably not only will not wear their white sheets to the polls, they will likely lie to exit pollsters as well.
Still I don’t demand a full-scale repeatable experiment. If the demoralized Republican party of 2008 gets at least 2 million more votes than the fully mobilized and enthusiastic Republican party of 2004 then I’ll be satisfied no matter what anyone else claims.
I don’t mean happy. I mean I’ll be satisfied I understand the facts.
Ah, ok. I had no idea that the design of the experiment was to reinforce Frank’s preconceived notions. As long as we both understand that what you meant by “falsifiable” doesn’t map at all onto what it actually means, well and good.
I’m one of those Independent’s that would cross over for Obama. I haven’t voted in the last two elections because I found the candidates too mired in “politics as usual” and considered a vote to be a moot point.
I believe that HC is the epitomy of the political problem that has made Washington ineffective and has fueled the disinterest in our elections.
I just want to go on record that if HC manages to steal the Democratic nomincation that I will do everything in my power to to help with her defeat in the General election.
I’ve read the same sentiment expressed by other on more other blogs, and I just hope that somebody from the Clinton campaign is reading the blogs (although based on how inept other areas of her campaign has been run, I doubt it).
Just my $.02…
Well Slarti if you want to see it like that. Of course nothing in politics is falsifiable. And Michael was just saying a nullity in the first place.
I notice you didn’t even pretend to have grounds for arguing with my conclusion.
It’s because your conclusions are…what, exactly? Foregone?
Now that I think of it I realize I gave your argument too much credit. If I make a prediction that can be proven wrong, claiming that its non-falsifiable is obviously wrong. Your argument is idiotic.
Again, I certainly hope I’m wrong about this. Not only will I gladly eat crow about this, I will pronounce it delicious.
Tautology. I’m not sure where you’re going with this. Are you?
To be a bit more clear: I’m not even saying that your hypothesis is not falsifiable, although that may be the case. What I am saying, specifically, is that your experiment, as you call it, doesn’t appear to have any possibility at all of falsifying your hypothesis.
Other than, as I said, reinforcing your suspicions. That’s something altogether apart from science or logic, though.
So you are claiming there is zero chance that the Republicans will get <52 million votes? I dont think most people are currently betting that way.
Looking upthread, I see none of my comments that could be interpreted that way.
Even if I had said anything like that, though, it’s practically perpendicular to your claim.
You need to re-read my posts Slarti. What do you imagine I’ve been claiming?
“The Republicans will get millions of extra racist voters”.
-Frank
So even though you earlier quoted: “If the demoralized Republican party of 2008 gets at least 2 million more votes than the fully mobilized and enthusiastic Republican party of 2004 then I’ll be satisfied no matter what anyone else claims.”
You still couldn’t add 2 million to the ~50 million got in 2004 and notice that the sum was 52 million?
You wouldn’t know anything at all about the motivations, etc of the extra 2 million. Unless there’s something that you’re not telling me, and I expect there’d have to be.
But, to answer the question: yes, I can add 2 million to 50 million.
Just in case that was still a mystery.
So when you said:”What I am saying, specifically, is that your experiment, as you call it, doesn’t appear to have any possibility at all of falsifying your hypothesis.”
Since my hypothesis predicts that the Republicans will get 52 million votes in November. Either you think there is no chance the Republicans will get less than 52 million votes or you need to go back and re-read what I’ve said.
That might be one of your hypotheses, but I think you’re missing the racist component in what you’ve stated, above. And you’ve yet to explain how you’re going to falsify the hypothesis of a racially-motivated surge in voting, without being able to correlate turnout to racism. If you can’t correlate turnout to racism, you can’t conclude anything one way or the other about racism from turnout.
“Since my hypothesis predicts that the Republicans will get 52 million votes in November. Either you think there is no chance the Republicans will get less than 52 million votes or you need to go back and re-read what I’ve said.”
Alternatively, you need to explain how we can know the motivations of the 2 million additional voters, which would be a necessary condition to demonstrating what said motivations are. You seem to have left that part out, other than that you seem to be assuming that racism is the only possible explanation, because…?
I thought I’d made that point, Gary, but I might not have made it well.
“I thought I’d made that point, Gary, but I might not have made it well.”
Setting aside that your previous comment hadn’t yet appeared when I wrote my prior comment, I’m unclear: are you objecting to, or bothered by, my expressing a similar and supportive view?
If not, what point are you now trying to make?
The existence of racist voters isn’t a hypothesis. It is at least a law. Again you need to go back to basics and educate yourself about the southern strategy.
I don’t need to prove the nature of their motivations, any more than I need to psycoanalize a quark to know its color. The burden of proof for that is not on me since I’m not the one making an extrodinary claim.
You need to come up with a theory which better explains the observable facts.
To put it a bit differently if the Republicans lose this election against Barak and don’t get more votes than last time it will be clear that there are no longer enough racists in America to swing elections in their favor. The Republicans will have to become even more covert about how they appeal to the racist vote.
No one disputes the existence of racist voters or the southern strategy. What is in dispute is the idea that there are significant numbers of racist non-voters (that is, they haven’t been voting in previous elections) who will nevertheless turn out in force in this election to vote against Obama. BTW, I don’t get your reference to the southern strategy; the whole basis for the southern strategy is that the racists already do vote. I mean, it’d be a pretty stupid strategy if they didn’t.
What you are suggesting is that there are millions of people who are sufficiently apathetic about politics not to vote regularly, who will only bother voting in order to deny a black man the presidency. These hypothetical voters don’t feel strongly enough about any other issue to vote regularly, but are so strongly racist that they’ll turn out for this election solely to vote against Obama. This seems, um, questionable at best.
Frank, the problem with your post of 6:28 pm is that it seems to ignore the reality of population growth, and the realities of vigorously contested elections. Why, exactly, should we feel compelled to accept your claim if (for instance) Obama wins the nomination, 1.5-2 million more people vote Republican, the Republicans still lose, and there’s no general evidence that the additional voters are motivated more strongly by racism than the rest?
What you’ve got there is a setup that violates one of the basic tenets of experimental design – you have multiple independent factors at work, instead of just one. Whenever an experimental hypothesis needs several “and”s in its presentation, it’s generally not well enough designed yet.
Notice that one way your claim would actually fail thanks to your sloppy presentation would be if some regular Republican group (evangelicals, say) avoided the election in larger than usual numbers, the racist contingent you think is there shows up, the Republicans lose, and there’s a net reduction in Republican votes despite your group being real and voting in large numbers. In this case, a group you’re not interested would screw up your claim because you haven’t focused enough.
That’s just one of its problems.
I’ve hesitated to speak with any assumed authority in this matter, because as science goes, I am only an egg. Nevertheless, I do use the scientific method with some frequency, and what you, Frank, are describing bears only superficial resemblance to the scientific method that I’m familiar with. I am, though, very familiar with the desire to claim that a given experiment proves one’s thesis. It’s a seductive, self-feeding thing; one that sort of needs a built-in self-bulshitting detector.
Which I don’t have, but sometimes I still manage to cry bs on myself nonetheless.
Again, I’m not disputing that there is racism. I’m not even disputing that Republicans are racist with more frequency than are Democrats. What I’m disputing is that this experiment, as you call it, is in any way a test of your hypothesis.
But if it were, what great fortune you have had, to have an experiment just show up to the party; one that is premade to test your hypothesis without any interaction from you at all.
Which is not to say that such a test of your hypothesis couldn’t be designed, just that it, so far, hasn’t. For all the reasons that I’ve given above, and what others have said.
If any of this comes off as being snotty, I sincerely don’t mean it to.
Ok In order;
Larv- The fact that the southern strategy works doesn’t depend on racists being more likely to vote than non-racists. All the racists have to do is vote as a block to some degree.
Also any good hypothesis will generate predictions. This is key since the accuracy of those predictions is how you know to reject, modify or confirm a hypothesis.
Bruce- I apreciate that you at least took the time to understand what I was saying. I did consider allowing for population growth but I felt that I deserved to get to make some allowance for the fact that the Republicans are going into election season demoralized with a nominee they (the base) dislike. Hopefully something like your scenario will occur and the election will be a blowout for us.
However I’m more pessimistic than that. The last few presidential elections have been closely balanced enought that not only could they have gone either way easily, but any of several different factors could accurately be said to be the sole determining factor in the election. The butterfly ballot, the purge of voter rolls, the hatred of the press for Gore etc.
In that kind of environment a major demographic shift shows up like a tsunami. (I hope you will pardon the Charlesism. Of course exit polling tracks the number of evangelicals along with many other Republican subgroups which would tend to reveal the racists by process of elimination.
Slarti- That is what a lot of black people think of the Obama candidacy. They didn’t have to do anything and along came a test of the theory that a black man could never become president. For some its a big selling point for Obama. But it has its converse side.
What I’m saying is that the theory predates this situation. And it bothers me that still no one else is willing to hazard a predition. You reject my theory, fine I’m not trying to convince you. But at least put down what you think will happen and why.
I should clarify when I say “reveal the racists by process of elimination.” I don’t mean that I think racist is a mutually exclusive category with evangelical. I mean that if there were a big change in the evangelical vote and a smaller change across categories that would naturaly show up in exit polls.
Making theories about politics is difficult but we are better off than astrophysicists.
Well, there’s a hypothesis that can be negated, and negated by the very experiment you had in mind. Note that it’s significantly different from yours, though.
It may be a truism that the more complicated a hypothesis, the more difficult it is to test. I’ve noticed that is true in my admittedly limited experience, but I don’t know that there’s any conventional wisdom to that effect.
I don’t reject your theory, Frank; I reject the way in which you think your theory will be validated. Your theory is not for me to reject, it’s for data (I was going to say “the world”, which is actually what I mean, but I’d expect some negative feedback from those who live in other countries to the effect that they didn’t get a say) to reject.
I don’t offer predictions or alternate hypotheses, though. Sorry to disappoint. The extent of my involvement, here, is simply to point out a rather significant flaw in your thinking. I’m not calling you stupid; I’m suggesting that you’ve made a mistake.
Ok, I lied. I predict that if Obama secures the nomination, that a wave of abject apathy will wash over the Republican Party, countered by enthusiastic support from the Ds and many Independents for Obama, and Obama wins by a comfortable margin in electoral votes and a rather narrower popular vote margin.
I pulled that prediction straight out of my butt, though, so it’s pretty worthless. But you did ask.
Lol. Well its worth what I paid for it anyway. I figure posts here are generaly at least 50% more accurate and reliable than the average balloon juice.
Basicly your objection here amounts to saying that the problem with my thinking is that it is too specific.
I am aware that people who make predictions are supposed to be as vague as possible, and preferably use poetic language for extra unaccountability.
Personally I believe that thinking is most productive when it is clear and specific. By productive I mean likely to be of benefit to myself and others. I also try not to be afraid to state the obvious.
Thats really all I meant to do here. The whole basis of Obama’s campaign, “The Audacity of Hope” idea is an optimistic refusal to believe the conventional wisdom that a black man can never be president. Sadly sometimes the conventional wisdom is right.
(I haven’t been following closely but isn’t this what got Michelle Obama in trouble, just now starting to believe the promise of America is real.)
It does challenge my belief capacity, Frank. I’ve got a lot of regard for Michelle; she’s clearly very smart, and she’s just as clearly good at public speaking. But Michelle Obama was, two decades ago, in a place where very few people can ever hope to get. That she’s just now starting to think that, hey, much IS possible in America…I don’t get it. Can you imagine, being a low-income minority, hearing this woman tell you that only now, after Harvard and Princeton degrees, living in a $1 million-plus house, is she now thinking good thoughts about the American dream? It’d be annoying, and discouraging. It’s almost as if it’s not about the opportunity, it’s about arriving.
Probably she didn’t mean it that way; probably that’s just how I heard it. I hope that’s the case.
Put yourself in her shoes for a second Slarti. She’s a middle aged black woman. She probably never thought a black man could be president. These last few months have changed her mind about that. I think that would have to redefine what REALLY proud of your country means to you. I’m sure she had moments before when she thought she was really proud, but I don’t see how anyone could expect they would measure up to now.
Regarding predictions, racism, and related things we’ve been haggling over upthread, though: sure, it’s nice to have specific predictions, along with specific reasons for making those predictions. It’s just as nice, though, to have specific results, and have an accurate and defensible interpretation for what those results mean. This is where your whole experiment falls apart, Frank: not in the prediction, but in the results-interpretation part.
I hate to flog the scientific method equine much more, but if you don’t have a really rigorous approach to interpreting your experimental results, you don’t have much of an experiment. If one explanation is just as defensible as another, completely different one, than the experiment isn’t going to tell you anything useful, other than how not to design an experiment.
Well, sure. All maxima are local. I get that. This is certainly a high point for her and her family; I get that too.
“That she’s just now starting to think that, hey, much IS possible in America…I don’t get it.”
I thought: she probably meant possible in America through politics, because she’s not all starry eyed like her husband & they should say so, promptly. And indeed, yesterday they both did.
If millions of racists who seldom or never have voted before show up at the polls it is really going to be quite obvious what is going on. You keep acting like it is my fault that the available means for gathering data on elections are more limited than the techniques available to say quality control engineers in a factory. In any field of science people are limited to using the best available techniques.
I’d be perfectly willing to defer further discussion until after the election. I prefer my crow well done.
Reasonable, Katherine. I’d buy that.
I don’t tend to watch every speech of every candidate and/or spouse, so it’s hard to keep this kind of thing sorted out.
That interpretation didn’t occur to me because all in all, I would regard a potential role for me in national politics and a trajectory toward high public office as more of a nightmare than a dream.
How could you tell which ones are racist, or if there are any racists at all? How could you tell which voters have never voted before?
I don’t think anything is your fault, Frank, except your thought process in this regard. If I’m acting in some way that makes you think that, you need to interpret my actions in a different way, because it’s not even close to the point that I’m making in print.
I don’t know what techniques are available to quality control engineers, either, so that can’t possibly be my point.
Maybe an analogy will help; even a bad one. Let’s say you have a theory about the nature of gravitational attraction; one that, if true, would be a key building block in some sort of GUT theory. As experimental verification, you choose to repeat Galileo’s experiment with falling objects.
Wrong experiment, bad experimental conditions, and inadequate recording of observables for your purpose. Determination of the motivations of people by asking them is chancy enough; trying to gauge it to something as multivariate as voter turnout is folly.
Frank is partly right. MCCain will be helped by Republicans fearing Guess Who’s Coming to the Executive Branch. But my guess is it will be offset by the xenophobic wing of the GOP who dislike the fact McCain doesn’t support their right to summarily shoot Mexicans who cross the border.
Once again, I’m not disputing Frank’s point so much as whether he’s going to be able to substantiate it, given the information that will be at hand.
That’s roughly consistent with what I’m saying, here: you’re certainly not going to have a zero effect from racism, and it’s also a possibility that a a strong racist turnout can get completely washed out by the effect you describe.
In either case, you’re not going to know why you got the result that you did.
I understood your point the first time you made it. I just dont find it very convincing. As I recall we spent some years disagreeing about the Iraq war. You didn’t think the evidence was in there either. I think you are predisposed to minimize the evidence that many Republicans are racist.
Also I note that in the example of Michelle Obama you ignore the fact that she is reacting as an American and as a black person and not just as a member of Baraks familly letting you continue the narrative
“I think you are predisposed to minimize the evidence that many Republicans are racist.”
Does that explain why I agree with Slarti? Or is it my habit of automatic agreement with him?
You’re missing the point — made quite repeatedly — that it’s a question of logic, rather than being about the content of the syllogisms you’re using.
Try putting it in the form of formal premises, and see how it looks. (I’ll leave it to you to formulate your own argument, of course.)
I am not really interested in your efforts to shift the ground from social science to formal logic. Real science doesn’t always have perfect conditions, as with any other intellectual activity, science requires weighing the evidence and making judgement calls. Now I could question your judgement personally, but I’m making an effort to rise above that. My judgement, however, is my own. Even if I respected your judgement I would still prefer mine.
Sorry, that came out harsher than I wanted.
I am aware that my theory isn’t going to make the journals. Nevertheless I am satisfied with it.
Hmmm…logically, then, social science isn’t real science.
I have some limited agreement with that, depending on the application.
Your going to have to expand that thought if you want it to make any sense to me.