Matt Zeitlin

I’m of the opinion that conventions are entirely theater and should be enjoyed as such. Watch it on TV!

I don’t understand why so many reporters have to be there. The only “news” coming out of the convention is the infighting among Clinton and Obama staffmembers. But what if the only media people in Denver were TV producers, would this be a story? Does anyone really care about not-for-attribution quips besides political journalists?

Dana Goldstein would probably say that for those who are interested in intra-Democratic Party debates about policy and messaging, there actually is news. She wrote an article about the pre-convention education panel which featured non-stop teachers union bashing. That the main pre-convention education panel was full of criticism of unions seems signifigant, but it isn’t exactly news* that Cory Booker, Adrian Fenty and Michelle Rhee aren’t in lock-step with teachers unions.

We mostly get a bunch of little interviews with convention-goers, live-blogs of speeches and panels and very little actually reported. There’s no new information, and nothing important actually happens. Occasionally, there’s a speech that launches a politician onto the national scene. But those speeches are on TV anyway.

So what to do?

Obviously, reporters and bloggers are going to be at the convention. My idea is that they should abandon all pretense of substance and simply report on all the gossipy goings on. Which Democratic party bigwigs are going to this strip club, for instance? Can members of the drafting committee hold their liquor? Who’s taking the free condoms that Trojan is handing out? Which delegation has the best parties?

Substance free and gossipy? Sure. But it’s probably the most interesting stuff coming out of Denver.

*It probably sounds like I’m disparaging Goldstein’s work. I’m not – everyone should read the piece. It’s  informative on the positions that all these education reformers have, which reforms have worked out and how teachers unions fit into the overall structure of the party. But notice how all the good stuff doesn’t have anything to do with the Convention per se. Dana hardly needs to go to Denver to produce good education-policy writing.

I know that since Obama has wrapped up the nomination, there’s really no reason to pursue recriminations, but the GOP-like cultural attacks that many Clinton supporters made just can’t be forgotten. That’s because anytime someone criticizes “latte sippers” “the creative class” ” the wine-track” or uses any other slur for the professional, educated, urban base of the Democratic party, they are playing the Ace of Spades in Richard Nixon’s pack of resentment. These attacks can never be productive, because Republicans will just about always win the cultural resentment game. And it just makes it easier for them if they can claim to be merely echoing disaffected Democrats like Lanny Davis, Evan Bayh and her allies in the blogosphere did it for them.

My friend John Cain has an excellent wrap-up of pro-Clinton bloggers use of this inane and counterproductive rhetoric.

Late in the campaign, when it became painfully obvious that she was headed to defeat, Clinton began to embrace feminism as more than just voting for her. She talked about sexism in the international arena and how women’s rights and autonomy are probably the linchpin for achieving any sort of laudable global goal like reducing disease or eliminating poverty. But it was too little too late. For most the campaign, when Clinton and many of her close supporters and surrogates talked about feminism, it was very inward focused, as Haley Swenson put it (on a super secret blog) “her talk of campaign sexism and “we’ve come a long way, baby” were really the extent of any talk of feminism or revolution she offered. Her feminism was a self-centered feminism.” And I don’t want to minimize the importance of talking about sexism in the media or sexist portrayal’s of women in leadership or political roles, but she never offered a compelling larger narrative for what her candidacy meant outside of simply breaking the last class ceiling.

Obama, on the other hand, was able to put his own historical candidacy in a larger context than simply breaking a barrier for African Americans, but also talking about how he could be a unifying figure for more than just different racial groups, but also ideologically and globally. His race was certainly the basis for his change and history message, but it wasn’t the entirety of it. It also didn’t help that Clinton’s surrogates were so quick to belittle the historic nature of Obama’s candidacy, as opposed to offereing up some sort of counter-narrative. When Bill compared Obama to Jesse Jackson and when Geraldine Ferraro found her inner George Wallace, the historic or transcendent aspect of the candidacy was even further diminished. Add on her Washington experience, her history of triangulation, voting for the War, being more hawkish and an allergy to appearing to being seen as too far to the left, and it was just very hard to make an argument for the larger meaning of her campaign outside of her fufilling the aspirations of mostly older women.

And that’s horribly sad, because even though sexism is not the uniquely American sin that racism towards African Americans is, it’s still a huge, systemic and horrible problem. And if Clinton could have tied her being the first female president to a larger discussion not only about the systemic gender inequalities that afflict American women, but also talk about the horrible inequalities faced by all women and, if she was really daring, talk about a less masculine model of the presidency. But she rarely took her historic message outward, and as Meghan O’Rourke devastatingly notes, she even played up her own masculine traits and even tried to imply that Obama was too weak, wimpy and conciliatory to be president.

This failure to historicize, radicalize or open up her campaign was probably a safe political one – if America demands that their first black presidential candidate to be a “post-racial” rorschach, then they clearly don’t want their first woman to be a reconciliatory, dovish type – but it also means that her campaign won’t be remembered for starting to chip away at the last glass ceiling, but instead as a banal, failed project.

I remember thinking a while back that Obama could entice Clinton to either drop-out or at least tone down her rhetoric by letting her be the pointwoman on health care reform. It seems like a perfect idea: many liberals aren’t too happy with Obama on health care and the issue doesn’t seem to animate him in the same way government transparency or foreign policy does. Clinton, on the other hand, is positively electrified by the subject and clearly is incredibly passionate about it. And, according to the Telegraph, at least, the Obama campaign has floated this idea as a way to get Clinton to bow out gracefully. And it sounds like a great idea! Clinton doesn’t take the campaign to Denver, gets a plum position with lots of power and influence and everyone’s happy. There are, however, a few rather signifigant problems.

1. If Clinton is assigned to run point on health care, GOP talking point number for the entirety of the process would be Hillary Care 2.0. The damage these optics do is that despite the content of the plan, the public will think that her proposal will mean the government taking control of the insurance industry, rationing their treatment and radically changing the nature of their health care. Considering the amount of work universal health care will require to get passed, it doesn’t seem worth it to start so far in the hole.

2. For all of Clinton’s purported political skills, it’s not at all clear if she’s the best person to champion a major piece of legislation. From her record, we see scant achievements. Of course, it’s been hard to pass progressive policy for as long as Clinton has been a senator, but still, she simply hasn’t shown that she can pass anything as big, complicated and controversial as universal health care. Had she been instrumental in something like NCLB, I’d have more confidence. And then, of course, she never played a major role in passing any legislation during her time as first lady. Her health care reform plan was a political nightmere which many attribute to her flaws in trying to shepherd it through Congress, and after that, she played little to no role in passing anything noteworthy. It’s also worth remembering that Democratic senators are supporting Obama pretty solidly. And if Carl Hulse is right, many of Clinton’s senatorial colleagues don’t view her as particularly important – she is, after all, 36th out of 49 democrats. If Obama were to make Clinton his key ally on health care, he could alienate both more senior Democrats who have been pushing health care for a long time (Ron Wyden, perhaps) and those more conservative Democrats (Baucus) whose support will be absolutely crucial.

3. It’s not all clear if Obama and Clinton could work well together, or if they would particularly want to. I don’t want to accuse Clinton of being obsessed with bringing Obama down, but it’s certainly a possibility that she wouldn’t be a total team player in pushing forward health care legislation. Senators are notorious for carving out little fiefdoms and jealously guarding their own influence, even at the expense of presidential or party goals. It would make more sense, it seems, for Obama to go with someone he can well trust like Dick Durbin and then try to bring in another more conservative Democrat like Evan Bayh or Max Baucus.

I don’t think that there was any “fair” result from Michigan. Not only was Obama not on the ballot, but turn out was incredibly low because people were told that the votes wouldn’t actually elect any delegates.

Considering these rather odd circumstances, ther was no good way to apportion the delegates. It can’t really be said that Clinton’s 55% reflected her “true” level of support (lots of people probably just voted for her because she was the only major nominee on the ballot) and Obama’s “true” support was significantly underestimated with his zero percent. So the RBC should have decided Michigan by doing whatever the Clinton campaign wanted. This wouldn’t have actually affected the results – Obama still would have his delegate lead – and we wouldn’t have to be worried about Harold Ickes pronouncing that “We reserve the right to challenge this decision before the Credentials Committee.” At this point, all that matters is getting Clinton and her supporters to see the delegate allocation and Obama’s inevitable victory as legitimate. Although the ultimate Michigan ruling of halving the delegate vote and giving the uncommitted to Obama may be “fair,” when Harold Ickes says that four delegates have been “hijacked” from Clinton, all I can see is Clinton continuing her campaign and continuing to press on Michigan despite the superdelegates moving to Obama after the Puerto Rico primary.

PS – for three great dispatches from the protests outside the RBC meeting, read Eve Fairbanks’, Dana Goldstein’s and Chris Hayes‘ accounts. They’re all excellent.

Let’s say that Clinton gets the Michigan and Florida delegations seated. All this changes is that Obama’s lead in pledged delegates is lessened, but he would still have the lead. He would also have the lead in total delegates, because he’s taken the superdelegate lead. The only thing Clinton would get is the “popular vote.” But the popular isn’t an official metric of anything – the total delegate count is.  But if Clinton is pushing Florida and Michigan to be seated so that she can tell superdelegates that she’s the popular vote leader, then it doesn’t actually matter if the delegates are seated at all. The popular vote is still a unofficial metric, and so it really makes no difference if the states that give her a popular vote lead are actually seated. Clinton can no longer make a case based on delegates, no matter who gets seated, so if she wants to make the popular vote argument, she should just make it without trying to say that Obama’s election is illegitimate.

In yet another tiresome, “but she’s a woman!” column, Marie Coco laments that Americans are only selectively dynastic:

And we don’t like political wives who strike out on their own. Yet around the world, political spouses, widows and daughters are elected with stunning regularity. Indira Gandhi of India; Corazon Aquino of the Philippines; Violeta Chamorro of Nicaragua; Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan; Cristina Fern¿ndez, the current Argentine president — who succeeded her husband — all rose to power through family connections.

She goes on to say that any committment to anti-dynasticism is highly selective – just look at our current president. And she’s right, but that doesn’t justify us trying to imitate the countries she lists. Doesn’t it seem obvious that any argument which begins with “our political system should be more like Pakistan’s!” is probably a bad one? I’ll be the first to admit how distressing it is that America seems almost uniquely uncomfortable with women, and wouldn’t mind if we had some sort of informal (or formal) quota for the number of women in the House, but presidential elections are too damn consequential, and Clinton has too many negatives to let her gender tip the balance.

The basic nut of Obama’s “bitter” remark was that because there’s been economic stagnation for a lot of people and a general lack of responsiveness to their plight from the political system, they’ve turned to symbolic cultural issues to express their political identity. Another implication of this type of reasoning is that much of the racially motivated voting we see in Kentucky and West Virginia – poor, white states – can be explained by a combination of outright racism as well as a feeling of zero-sum competition among poor whites and blacks.

Jim Webb, who’s the closest we have as a national spokesman for working class whites, says that Obama is doing poorly because affirmative action has whipped up resentment:

“We shouldn’t be surprised at the way they are voting right now. This is the result of how affirmative action, which was basically a justifiable concept when it applied to African-Americans, expanded to every single ethnic group in America that was not white. And these were the people who had not received benefits and were not getting anything out of it. …. The fact that they would line up and vote this way is not so much a comment on Barack. … I think Barack Obama is saying a lot of good things that will appeal to this cultural group in time.”

We get some anecdotal backing of this type of reasoning in this great Al Jazeera piece about Eastern Kentucky, the most depressed and whitest region of the state:

At 2:10, a man just out-right says that he fears an Obama presidency would mean that blacks would someone enact retribution on whites. Sounds pretty bitter to me.

Via LGM

It’s nice to see a Pacific Coast state like Oregon push Obama over the top for his lead in pledged delegates. And although I would would like to see the remaining 70 superdelegates deliver him the nomination over the top sooner rather than later, at this point, it doesn’t matter very much. Clinton isn’t running a particulalry negative campaign and her surrogates like Lanny Davis just look pathetic and sad by going on Fox News and calling it the best news station ever. Because of George Bush playing the appeasement card, we are essentially in general election mode.

And so there will be three more primaries, two of which Obama will probably win (Montana and South Dakota) and by around June 3rd, he’ll have a majority of the delegates. The Democratic establishment has been pretty clear that they A) don’t want this to go down to the convention and B) don’t want to steal the election away from the first viable black candidate, so Obama doesn’t have much to worry about.

On a related note, publius has a good post explaining why Clinton’s margin was so large in Kentucky. As many noted, not only did Clinton win huge margins in her regular demographics (women, under $50,000, non college educated), she also won the Obama demographics. And as Noam Scheiber wrote, a regression model for predicting the state only had Clinton winning by 19 points, not 35. So what’s up with Kentucky? Well, it turns out that despite electing lots of Republicans to the Senate, voting for GOP presidential candidates and being a fairly conservative state, Kentucky is actually 57-36 Democratic by party ID (the state voted 60-40 for Bush). Like many southern states that used to be solid Democratic strongholds, people retain their party identity despite the fact that they’re essentially Republicans, because hey, their father was a Democrat, grandfather, great-grandfather and so on and so forth. This would also explain why a chunk of Clinton voters tonight don’t even plan on voting for Clinton in the general, they plan on voting McCain.

Awnaw! Hell Naw! Big Tent Democrat is doing some wacky math. Here are the Kentucky exit poll numbers according to Talk Left:

White voters (89% of the vote) went for Clinton 72-22. African Americans (9% of the vote) went for Obama 88-7.

My back of the envelope math tells me it will be closer to 40 than 30.

Clinton wins ALL women (57% of the vote) 67-27. Clinton wins ALL men (43% of the vote) 62-32.

Hmm, 40 points is a lot, so let’s actually go through the math and clear everything up. If Clinton is winning 72 percent of 89 percent of the vote, that’s (.89x.72) 64 percent, tack on her portion of the black vote (.07x.09) and you get a grand total of 64.71% of the 98 percent of the Kentucky vote that is either black or white. This gives her a 65-35 win. And that’s a 30 point margin. But maybe Big Tent Democrat is using the male-female numbers to get his 40 point gap.

Let’s look at those. Her total is (.57x.67)+(.43x.62), which gives her…wait for it…65 percent of the vote and a 30 point margin.

I don’t know what envelope Big Tent Democrat is using…

BIG OLDE CORRECTION – Ok, I suck at math. So while my numbers for Clinton’s total are correct, she will be getting 65 percent of the vote, my numbers for Obama are wrong. I stupidly assumed that Obama and Clinton’s totals would add up to 100% of the vote. That’s not how the election works, however. When I actually calculated Obama’s totals, instead of just subtracting Clinton’s from 100% of the vote, I came up with him getting 29%, which would give Clinton a 36 point win. So, Big Tent Democrat was right, her margin will be “closer to 40.” Anyways, it’s probably better to just give real numbers, not totals rounded to the nearest ten, so as to avoid having Obama-partisan high schoolers impetuously go after their numbers because they seem suspiciously high. But really I’m at fault here, I shouldn’t have instinctively doubted BTD’s calculation and should have done my own more carefully. Mea culpa.

For what it’s worth, according to Politico, with 32 percent of precincts reporting, Clinton is up 54 to 43. I don’t think the exit polls are wrong, we just haven’t heard from all the rural counties which are likely to go huge for Clinton. On the other hand, the two big Obama counties have reported most of their results. Jefferson County, which is coextensive with Louisville, Kentucky’s biggest city and also has a 18% black population, has already reported 89% of its precincts and is going 50% for Obama. Fayette county, the home of the University of Kentucky (which went huge for Obama), has reported 54% of its delegates and has Obama at 51%. So expect Clinton’s lead to increase, because Obama is essentially done getting any big vote surges.

Dana Goldstein wonders why NARAL decided to nominate Obama at a point when his nomination is a) technically contested by Clinton but b) functionally secured. They’ve managed to anger their supporters and because of the Edwards endorsement, their endorsement wasn’t even that big of a news story, or a particularly influential one. I think one important reason why they endorsed Obama, one that they openly stated, was that because the nomination is locked up, and the two candidates are essentially identical as far as being pro-choice goes, we desperately need to move the discussion forward. Because last time I checked, the GOP nominee not only says that he wants Roe v Wade overturned, but also wants to appoint justices in the anti-choice mold of Alito and Roberts. NARAL’s desire to move the discussion is particularly important because the one way that Obama can gain support back from female Clinton supporters is by emphasizing how he’s light years better on choice and reproductive rights.

Also, and fewer people in the pro-choice community probably agree with me on this one, but I think that the Clinton campaign had to be sanctioned by some pro-choice organization for her dishonest attacks on Obama’s voting record in the Illinois State Senate. Repeatably, the campaign went after him for voting “present” on abortion-related legislation. What they didn’t mention, however, was that it was a strategy he thought up with Planned Parenthood t counter the political effect that voting “yes” on these bills could have(it didn’t actually effect any legislation being passed). In short, Clinton was attacking Obama on pro-choice grounds for implementing a strategy that the leading choice organization in America thought up. And NARAL consistently defended Obama from these accusations. I don’t know if that had anything to do with their decision to endorse, but it’s certainly something worth considering.

Alex Massie makes the case for Webb as VP, and it’s one that’s been made many times before and remains quite convincing. Webb, after all, is the white working class incarnate. He’s a former Republican, he has credibility on the war that matches or surpasses McCain, his proposed veteran legislation would funnel a lot of money to those areas where Obama is doing poorly, he can’t be portrayed as weak, etc etc etc. But his tremendous upside also entails some downside: nominating Webb could easily be viewed as a slap in the face to female and minority voters.

Real quick: Webb has a ton of sympathy for the Confederacy. Sure, he doesn’t support slaveholding and isn’t a modern-day segregationist like Trent Lott, but one aspect of his academic/cultural project of defending the legacy and history of the Scotch-Irish (or, in American, rednecks and white trash) is coming to grips with the fact that these people made up the bulk of the Confederate military. Here’s what Webb said at an address at the Confederate Memorial:

I am not here to apologize for why they fought, although modern historians might contemplate that there truly were different perceptions in the North and South about those reasons, and that most Southern soldiers viewed the driving issue to be sovereignty rather than slavery. In 1860 fewer than five percent of the people in the South owned slaves, and fewer than twenty percent were involved with slavery in any capacity. Love of the Union was palpably stronger in the South than in the North before the war — just as overt patriotism is today — but it was tempered by a strong belief that state sovereignty existed prior to the Constitution, and that it had never been surrendered. Nor had Abraham Lincoln ended slavery in Kentucky and Missouri when those border states did not secede. Perhaps all of us might reread the writings of Alexander Stephens, a brilliant attorney who opposed secession but then became Vice President of the Confederacy, making a convincing legal argument that the constitutional compact was terminable. And who wryly commented at the outset of the war that “the North today presents the spectacle of a free people having gone to war to make freemen of slaves, while all they have as yet attained is to make slaves of themselves.”

Make of that what you will, but considering that leading lights in the liberal blogsophere delight in going after those that who celebrate “Treason in Defense of Slavery Month Heritage Month,” it’s unclear how Webb’s sympathy for the Confederate cause, or at least those who fought for it, would go over with black voters. But that isn’t all that big a worry considering that Barack Obama is at the top of the ticket. A bigger concern is how female voters and activists would respond to a Webb nomination. Webb, in 1979, published an article entitled “Women Can’t Fight” in defense of his position that women should not be allowed in combat positions in the Navy. If activists like Emily’s List’s Ellen Malcom are still smarting over an Obama victory, then putting Webb on the ticket could be seen as throwing women under the bus. For them, the Party would have gone from being very close to nominating the first female presidential candidate, to having a gender reactionary nominated as Vice President.

Another argument against Webb is that instead of acting as “insurance” that Obama would be able to compete for working class white votes and not have McCain get away with questioning his patriotism,
he would instead accentuate that Obama is perceived to be everything that Webb is not. If the purpose of putting Webb on the ticket is, as Massie and others say, to project strength on foreign policy, military issues, patriotism, being a badass, getting white working class support, then that very action implies that Obama is weak on all those fronts. And when a candidate essentailly cops to weakness in certain areas, the media and the other party will just eat it up. Neil Sinhababu made this point very well a few months ago:

when a presidential candidate chooses a VP to cover a weakness, it’s considered an acknowledgement by the campaign that their presidential candidate has a weakness. Thereafter, the media is officially licensed to harp on that weakness.  So now you reinforce the storyline: “Ordinary white folks don’t and shouldn’t like Obama!” or “John Kerry is a New England aristocrat with no ties to the common man!”  Given the fact that the presidential candidate is more significant, a balancing strategy might actually end up moving perceptions of the ticket in the opposite direction.

I’m not saying that Webb would be a bad choice – I think ultimately that the veepstakes doesn’t really matter that much – it’s just that he isn’t necessarily the best choice.

Alex Massie links to this map showing where Clinton has gotten 65 or more percent of the vote. There’s a essentially a purple belt across West Virginia, central Pennsylvania, Tennessee, parts of Missouri and most of Appalachia/hillbilly/core white working class country.  Also, last night, I heard Dick Morris say last night on Fox that a Democrat needs to win West Virgina to the win the election. The implication is that Obama can’t win the rust belt states, which makes him either a weak general candidate, or necessitates that he sign up Jim Webb. Too bad this is just wrong.

The idea that a Democrat “needs” these old rust belt states is based on where the population was 10, 15 even 20 years ago. The trend is that the Rust Belt and Lower Midwest is depopulating for the Sun Belt and the Mountain States. So, shouldn’t we be focusing on how Democrats are doing in a blue-trending state like Colorado, instead of more-red-than-not state like West Virginia? Obama, like in most Mountain West states, absolutely crushed Clinton by a 2-1 margin. Or take Iowa, another swing state that is chalk full of white people, Obama won there too. And if everyone is freaking out about Obama’s “weakness” in states that Democrats need to win, why aren’t we talking about Clinton getting annihilated in Minnesota or Washington?

It’s just true that Obama doesn’t need the states that the media keeps on telling the Democrats they need to focus on. If Obama can win the Kerry states and flip Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, he has the election.

Read Matt Yglesias and Dylan Matthews on Obama’s shameful jettisoning of Robert Malley. The story is that Malley, who was an informal Obama foreign policy adviser, works with the International Crisis Group. As part of his ICG work – the ICG perhaps being the most respected conflict resolution NGO – met with leaders of Hamas so as to better know what was going in Gaza and help, yes, resolve the conflict. Sure, Hamas is a horribly sundry group, all of whom would be happy to see me dead, but that doesn’t change the fact that they’re the democratically elected representatives and government of the Gaza Strip. And so, if you want some sort of resolution to the conflict there, one is going to have to talk to the leadership of a major portion of the Palestinian population.

Unfortunately, Obama has totally sworn off speaking with Hamas, but that’s something I can understand. But this sacrificial offering to the most reactionary forces in the Israel-Palestine debate for something that isn’t a big deal is really worrying. Although I’m excited with the prospect of Obama beating back the Jewish Establishment, I’m also worried that because of the widespread perception that Obama has a Jewish/Israel problem, he will now be tempted to make gestures to prove that he’s acceptable to pro-Israel types. First it was a priori refusing to talk to Hamas, now it’s jettisoning Malley. I hope he doesn’t go much farther and start talking about Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel and crap like that. I think that he’s OK if he makes the basic, sensible committment – that he views Israel as a legitimate, Jewish state that is the best American ally in the Middle East. And because he cares so much about Israel’s security, he will leverage US influence to try to force both sides to come to a workable solution that ends in two secure, legitimate, internally recognized states. If he can say this, over and over, I don’t see why he’d have to throw much more red meat at the AIPAC crowd.

For far too long, the major Jewish organizations have been controlled by people who don’t have the politics, interests, history or temperament of the American Jews they claim to represent. Although everyone always knew that the ADL, AJC and AIPAC were almost Jurassic in their approach to American Jewish politics and Israel and only represented a narrow sliver of American Jewry, it all came to the surface when Abe Foxman angrily yelled at a student criticizing the ADL’s stand against the Armenian Genocide resolution that he doesn’t “represent you nor the Jewish community! I represent the donors.” Sure, we all knew this, but at least it was good to know that Foxman’s suppression of free debate about Israel (see Tony Judt and the Polish Consulate) and smearing of respected academics (Mearsheimer and Walt) wasn’t being done in our name.

And today, we are on the verge of having the presumptive Democratic nominee – who’s likely to win the election – who has little to no support from the Jewish Establishment. It’s not surprising that Obama hasn’t been able to win the support of prominent Jewish fund raisers and players in Democratic circles. After all, the Clintons have been the number one Democrats since 1992, and have had the strong support of the Jewish community all that time. It also didn’t hurt that the Clintons enthusiastically supported a series of absurd AIPAC-promoted initiatives that did nothing to improve Israel’s security and only inflamed the situation more – like Clinton’s support for an “undivided Jerusalem” as Israel’s capital. Obama, on the other hand, hasn’t been kissing the ring of Haim Saban since the early 1990s, and also because of his middle name, association with Jeremiah Wright and some things said by advisers, is now perceived to have a “Jewish problem.” Of course, Obama hasn’t actually gone very far off the reservation about Israel. He still went to AIPAC and assured them that Israel is our most important ally and so on and so forth.

But today, as it now appears impossible for Clinton to get the nomination, I can’t help but smile that the candidate who the AJC criticized for insisting that Israel take risky steps for peace, the candidate that Haim Saban said was only 1/10th as qualified as Clinton, the one who makes AIPAC “uncomfortable” and the one that the Jewish Establishment has rallied against is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Of course, I expect plenty of these types to come out for McCain and insist that four more years of reckless hawkishness is exactly what American Jews and Israel needs. But considering that younger American Jews don’t vote in the narrowly sectarian manner that AIPAC and the AJC would want us to, and that the overwhelming majority of Jews are Democrats, hopefully this election could signal the end of an leadership class who have served their constituents so poorly.

Phil Weiss sums it up the best:

Will Obama be as “good for the Jews” as Hillary? No. But I bet younger Jews aren’t asking that selfish question. They don’t feel themselves to be outsiders, and I imagine that many of them see our tragic Israel/Iraq policy, that deathly double-play combination of Pollack-to-Kristol-to-Perle, as the Jewish establishment at work. I often think of what Michael Walzer said at the Center for Jewish History last year. For 3000 years, “we governed only ourselves, as best we could… Sometimes [we were] semi-autonomous… responsible only for ourselves.” Not so good, he added ruefully, at governing others. I’m looking forward to more power-sharing, in a rainbow establishment…

In a different world, Jon Chait would be a Digby or Rick Perlstein type. It’s weird that in some netroots corners, he’s though of as a squishy centrist, when he’s really a forthrightly liberal dude.  For a good example of forthright liberalism, his TRB column calling Clinton a “conservative populist” is about as good as it gets.

Mori Dinauer doesn’t think so:

although North Carolina went for Jimmy Carter in ’76, I think we can safely consider that an aberration (before that it was 1964 as well). Now it’s true that voters are registering Democratic in record numbers in places like North Carolina, but this doesn’t necessarily point to a red-blue shift in these states. Rather, it seems that Democrats, or Democatic-leaning voters are excited about their choice, and that means high turnout and registration. But the jury’s still out on whether all these new potential Democratic votes will be enough to flip these states in the general election. Also read Holly Yeager’s take from last week on the main site.

Dinauer is certainly right that Democratic enthusiasm and registration in traditionally red states like North Carolina and Indiana is quite high, but I think she’s wrong to totally take North Carolina off the map. Rasmussen released a poll on April 12th showing McCain and Obama in a dead heat at 47% each and McCain leading Clinton by 11 points. And although this could be attributed to the attention Obama is showering on North Carolina, it still indicates that even if Obama can’t win in red states like North Carolina or Virginia, he can still make McCain fight for them, thus spreading his resources thinner and making it so he can’t spend as much time in swing states. Spreading the map liket his can be a valuable asset – just imagine if Kerry had been able to spend all the resources that he put into Pennsylvania at the end of the 04 campaign into Ohio. Clinton, while being stronger in big swing states like Ohio and Florida, doesn’t have the ability to even feign at expanding the map like Obama can.

Michael Barone claims that when you look at key rust belt states (and Florida), Clinton is more electable than Obama:

There are states where Obama runs stronger than Clinton. They include most of the West — notably Colorado, a state Democrats lost in 2000 and 2004 but which has trended their way since. They include states in the Upper Midwest, like Minnesota, and New England states like Connecticut and New Hampshire, which Democrats won in 2004 but where Clinton seems weak.

But Clinton seems to run stronger than Obama in the industrial (or formerly industrial) belt, running west from New Jersey through Pennsylvania and Ohio to Michigan and Missouri. Obama’s weakness among white working-class voters in the primaries here suggests he is poorly positioned to win votes he will need to carry these states in November. This is not a minor problem — we’re talking about 84 electoral votes.

Obama has also fared poorly among Latino and Jewish voters in every primary held so far. This is of consequence most notably in Florida, which has 27 electoral votes. In 2000, Al Gore won 67 percent of the vote in Broward County and 62 percent in Palm Beach County — both have large Jewish populations. In this year’s Florida primary, Obama lost those counties to Clinton by 57 percent to 33 percent and 61 percent to 27 percent. No Democrat can carry Florida without big margins in Broward and Palm Beach.

Obama’s weakness among Latinos and Jews could conceivably put California’s 55 electoral votes in play. Los Angeles County delivered an 831,000 vote plurality for John Kerry in 2004. Most of that plurality came from areas with large numbers of Latinos and Jews.

Let’s just document the silliness here. Here’s one thing that Barone ignores when he makes the baffling claim that a Democrat could possibly lose New Jersey, Michigan or Pennsylvania. These are states that Kerry won by 7, 3 and 2.5 points respectively. Considering how generically bad the environment looks for Republicans, to think that Democrats will lose ground in any of these states – especially core blue states like New Jersey or Michigan – is just BS concern trolling. As for Missouri, Obama won that state and has the support of its popular senator Claire McCaskill. While it would certainly be a stretch for either Obama or Clinton to flip it (Bush by 7 points), if anyone could, it would be Obama. So, among those four core industrial states, Clinton or Obama will both win New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Michigan, while either them could (but probably won’t) win Missouri. So it’s a wash.

Florida, of course, is trickier. While this is a state that Obama will have a harder time flipping than Clinton, it won’t be because of the Latino vote. The first thing that should be obvious is that those Latinos who heavily support Clinton are Democrats who voted in a Democratic primary, so it’s quite a jump to say that they’ll support McCain if Obama is the nominee. Latinos have always been a Democratic leaning group, and especially considering the increase in xenophobia among the Republican base and McCain’s abandonment of comprehensive imigration reform,  Latinos should be voting for any Democrat in record numbers in 2008. Jews are a bigger concern for Obama, but even so, it’s not clear if he really needs their support. Barone is right to be concerned about the Jewish vote. Considering that there’s been such a successful stealth campaign to convince hawkishly pro-Israel Jews that Barack Hussein Obama is somehow soft on Israel, I won’t be surprised if he gets the lowest margin among Jews in quite a while.

But leaving all that aside, Obama doesn’t even need to win Ohio or Florida to win the general election. Here’s how. If Obama (or Clinton, for that matter) can flip Iowa, New Mexico and Colorado, he or she will get 273 electoral votes and win the election. So can Obama do it?

Bush won Iowa by a mere .67% in 2004 and Obama is leading by 9 points there compared to McCain. Also, it has a minuscule black population, putting it on the left hand side of David Sirota’s race chasm. Considering the generic Democratic advantages going into this race as well as Obama’s specific popularity there , Iowa should be in the bag.

New Mexico was another state Bush barely won in 2004, with only a .79% advantage. Once again, the general popularity of Demcrats, not too mention Bill Richardson’s Obama endorsement, should easily put him over the top.

Colorado is a state Bush won more handily, with a 4.7% advantage. But it’s one that has been trending seriously Democratic since 2004. Since 2004, it went from being a state with two Republican senators and a Republican governor to having a split delegation and a Democrat in the state-house. Democrats also hold the majority in the Colorado State Senate as well as in the State Assembly. This a state that has gone from red-tinted purple to almost solidly blue. Obama is also very strong in the Mountain West. This is a very winnable state for him.

So there you have it, Obama (or Clinton!) can win the 2008 election without winning Florida or Ohio. In fact, Obama is exceptionally well positioned to secure the nomination without those two states. Sure, Ohio and Florida are almost totemic in the minds of many Democrats, but the map has changed considerably since 2000 and even more since 2004, and so we shouldn’t be stuck in thinking that we have to win these states, when we pretty clearly don’t.

*Also, Barone is hitting the pipe pretty hard if he thinks there’s even a remote chance that Obama could lose California. I’m sorry, but a twenty point swing for the Republicans in the largest, most liberal state in the country? I don’t think so.

Via Jeralyn at  Talk Left, who of course takes Barone’s tenuous claims at face value.

Sure, I can make a perfectly reasonable “substantive” case for Obama. The two issues I care most about are civil liberties and foreign policy, and on these issues, Obama is light years ahead of Clinton. He’s also more likely to win the general, to get Republicans to come over on some issues and expand the coalition. There’s also the myriad reasons why Clinton isn’t that great -  instinctive hawkishness, the amount of crap she throws at Obama, her testy relationship with the truth, her ability to galvanize Republicans and her association with retro, scared centrist politics.

But I would be dishonest if I said those were the only reasons I support Obama. The fact that the current frontrunner for the presidency of the United States – the most powerful office in the world – slipped in a Jay-Z refrence during a speech is something that not only makes Obama unique, but also makes him awesome. HE BRUSHED THE DIRT OFF HIS SHOULDERS. No candidate has come anywhere near to being this…cool. To make the contrast more clear, Clinton is all about Fleetwood Mac, Celine Dion and Elton John as far as music and pop culture goes, while Obama is giving oblique shout-outs to J-HOVA.

Go to 2:20.

Via 2 Old for Maxim.

Rebecca Traister’s  most recent Salon essay very artfully engages with a tricky topic. That topic is the feeling that many young, progressive women get that the young, progressive guys that support Obama so fervently, and are thus so dismissive and disdainful of Clinton, may have a little sexism lurking within their politics. Traister is right recognize that this is subtle – there aren’t very many liberal guys who are publicly going after Clinton for being a woman, but there is still something to be said about the tone of much of the criticism aimed at Clinton. That being said, it’s ultimately an unfalsifiable hypothesis.

Traister empathizes that much of the frustration with Clinton among young liberals is based mostly around their adoration of Obama, and now with Clinton in a seemingly impossibly position, that frustration has been amplified by her refusal to get out of the race. She implies that if another candidate were in Clinton’s position, he wouldn’t get the same opprobrium, and she may be right, but there’s no way to know. All we do know is that Clinton is currently acting in what I, and many others, view as not conducive to the sucess of Democrats in the general election or American liberalism. And I think that commentators should be unafraid to make this point, strongly even, without fear of being tarred as sexists. Unless there’s obvious sexism in language or a special virulence towards Clinton, it’s an imposition of bad faith to say that those who think Clinton should step-down is just promoting the idea that aging women should leave public life, or some other sexist shibboleth.

Traister seems to confirm this suspicion when she gives other examples of sexism within Democratic politics:

These women –- and the movement whence they sprang -– have never been the most popular girls in the Democratic Party, even if the party’s male elders have grown up enough to know that they’re not supposed to say so out loud anymore. At least not until they find themselves pinching Clinton’s cheek like Chris Matthews, or accusing her of destroying the party by staying in a race in which she is still competitive. It’s like how Democrats love women, just not those goddamned women with their single-issue reproductive rights obsession that sticks us with Lincoln Chafee and Joe Lieberman.

I don’t understand. There are plenty of women from the Second Wave generation that are very popular within the party. Kate Michelman, Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer are just three examples of very progressive, avowedly feminist Democrats who are recognized as party luminaries and leaders. Traister also is being exceedingly charitable to Clinton – it’s not as all clear that she’s still competitive. Under basically all foreseeable circumstances, she will be behind in popular votes and pledged delegates by the time the primary is over, and most observers put her chances of winning at around 10%. Now whether she should still stay in is one question, but Traister is making the race seem much closer than it actually is – all to advance the point that we Democrats who think that Clinton is doing the party a disservice by staying in are just another example of faux-progressives who can’t handle powerful women.

Which leads in to the next problem with this paragraph. NARAL was being both selfish and stupid when they endorsed Lincoln Chafee in 2006. Not only because the marginal victory for reproductive rights would have been far outweighed by the awfulness of a GOP senate majority, but also because endorsing individual Republican lawmakers doesn’t make sense on its own merits. That’s because even if pro choice Republicans are reliable votes on individual pieces of legislation, they still vote for Republican committee chairs and what not, meaning that they enable the passage of anti-choice legislation and the confirmation of anti-choice judges. In the case of cloture for Alito, who could very well be the key vote to overturning Roe or at least weakening it, these pro-choice Republicans all voted for cloture. And it wasn’t like Chafee and Lieberman were running against Bob Casey, but instead they were running against Sheldon Whitehouse and Ned Lamont, two liberal pro-choicers. Were the causes of abortion rights or the Democratic party, which are really inextricably connected, advanced by either endorsement? No, and there’s nothing sexist about saying so.