Politics 2008 Archives

Most anyone watching the primaries had expected all along that Obama would win North Carolina - where the Democratic primary electorate is dominated by African-Americans and college towns - and Hillary would win the more conservative white Democrats in Indiana last night, but Hillary's relatively narrow margin of victory in Indiana and the simple fact that Obama notched a victory in a state of significant size after a string of losses both add up to an undeniably good night for Obama. Let's update the chart I ran previously of the popular vote since the beginning of March:

As you can see, over this period - covering the time after the genuine cracks in Obama's previously untouched public brand image had appeared - Obama is still behind in the popular vote, and with only Oregon on May 20 as a likely source for significant number of votes for Obama, that's not going to change.

That's even before you deal with the exit polls - I'll leave the dissection of those to others, but it seems pretty clear that Obama is getting crushed among white and Latino voters, and you can't win much of anything in these United States without those two groups. It's also before you deal with the popular vote for January and February, which is harder to measure because you get into the question of how to estimate the caucus popular votes (in some states, these were not recorded) or whether to count Florida and Michigan:

Here's the remaining schedule, with a chart showing the most recent poll I could find - I used Rasmussen for West Virginia, Kentucky and Oregon, a mid-April Dakota Wesleyan poll for South Dakota, a mid-April Puerto Rico poll, and, lacking a head-to-head poll, I used Rasmussen's general election numbers for Montana, which show Obama polling much better, but with basically similar numbers to the South Dakota poll (but note that unlike earlier Obama mountain-state victories these are primaries, not caucuses). I then projected the number of voters - for the states, I used the number of ballots cast for Democrats in the House in 2006*, since this seems to have been a fairly reliable proxy for the number of ballots cast in the primaries in Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina; Puerto Rico is more challenging, but to be conservative I just assumed a turnout of 1.2 million voters, which is roughly 60% of the 2004 gubernatorial general election turnout (in which above 80% of registered voters voted); as Ben Domenech has noted, given Puerto Rico's traditionally high voter turnout and the realization that this may be a unique opportunity to affect the mainland presidential election, if Hillary's still battling at this point the turnout could be much closer to the general election figures:

Obviously, these are very rough estimates, especially since some of these polls have upwards of 20% of the electorate undecided, but you get the general idea. Much will depend on the turnout, especially in Puerto Rico, but I think it's a safe bet that when all is said and done, Obama will be down somewhere in the neighborhood of 400,000 votes for the period covering the last three months of the primary campaign. Heck of a way to launch a general election campaign.

You, Too, Can Lead A Mass Movement - If You Limit The Seating Enough

If you watched the election returns tonight, you undoubtedly saw Barack Obama win North Carolina by a fairly wide margin. Of course, that's North Carolina's Democrats, and even among the Democrats he yet again got clobbered among white voters ... but if you slice the salami of the electorate until it looks like the kind of people who vote in Democratic primaries in a state like North Carolina, Obama is indeed the people's choice. It's easier, after all, to be the people's choice if you choose the right people to be the choice of.

If you watched him on television, you undoubtedly saw Barack Obama speak tonight before a large and enthusiastic crowd at Reynolds Coliseum on N.C. State's campus. But just as with the North Carolina Democratic primary electorate, it turns out that the illusion of Obama's enormous popularity is a function of limiting the people - in this case, roping off a single corner of the arena. Mary Katherine Ham has a great post contrasting the picture you see above (her image) with what you saw on television.

The rest of those seats will be reserved for general election voters. Individual results may differ.

The hottest topic in Republican circles, ever since John McCain iced the nomination, is who he should pick as his running mate. There are many interesting names floated, and McCain will have good reason to make a show of talking to a bunch of candidates for the job, as a way of courting different groups and party leaders and feeling out people who might end up with other jobs in his Administration.

But realistically, there are a number of constraints on what kind of candidate McCain can or should pick. The Vice Presidency isn't like other appointments, since he or she is independently elected and can't be fired. And McCain's choice will be of particular significance for a few reasons. First, because of his age, voters will want more assurance than usual that his running mate is ready to step into the job at a moment's notice. Second, also because of McCain's age, he's seen as less likely to serve two terms; his running mate, win or lose in 2008, will have a leg up to be the heir apparent in 2012. And third, many conservatives are unhappy with McCain as the party leader, and want to see that the moderates have not taken permanent control of the party.

Let's start with the Don'ts, which will be especially important in this process. I'm not saying that McCain will necessarily follow these rules, but he should and I suspect he will. And I'm not saying that it's impossible that he will take someone who breaks them, but it will be a very heavy burden to overcome, and probably fatal for anyone who violates more than one of them. (This list is not necessarily presented in any particular order of importance).

1. No Senators: In every presidential election year, many Senators don the red shirt
and run for the White House, but only two sitting Senators have been elected President, Harding and Kennedy, for a variety of reasons - Senators aren't executives, they vote too much and govern too little, and they tend to speak their own arcane language ("I voted for it before I voted against it"). With approval ratings for Congress at or near all-time lows (Congress, with a 13% approval rating, is less popular even than President Bush, at 34%), putting a Senator on the national ticket would be a bad idea. It's too late, of course, to avoid the fact that both parties will nonetheless be nominating sitting Senators in 2008, but at least McCain can take someone who isn't yet another Senator to balance out the ticket. Also, with the Senate's partisan balance so delicate, taking an incumbent out of the Senate - even one who can be replaced by an appointed Republican - will force the GOP to work still harder to maintain its foothold in the upper chamber.

Could McCain choose someone from the House? Possibly, but it still means the downsides of a Senator's association with the current Beltway conditions, and without the gravitas and name recognition the Senate enjoys.

2. No Bushies: After 8 years of any president, the public wants a new team in place; with Bush's approval ratings in the dumps, and particularly given that those low approval ratings are driven so heavily by unhappiness with Bush's executive management during his second term, especially Hurricane Katrina, the management of the Iraq War and lower-level screwups such as former Attorney General Gonzales' mishandling of what should have been a routine decision to remove a number of U.S. Attorneys, McCain needs a clean break from anyone seen as being part of Bush's management team. That means no Condi Rice, whatever her other virtues as a candidate - McCain's been arguing for five years against parts of the Administration's approach in Iraq, and regardless of the merits of those arguments he couldn't well turn around and pick Bush's single closest foreign policy advisor. It also means no Chris Cox, even if he'd be a fine pick for many of the reasons Quin Hillyer identified in early March; with the collapse of Bear Stearns, Cox has also had a recent education in why being the SEC Chairman is a better way to become a scapegoat than to advance to higher office. And it probably means no Rob Portman, either; while the former six-term Congressman's popularity back home in Ohio will earn him a serious consideration, and while his tenure as Bush's Trade Representative and then Budget Director hasn't made him a high-profile Administration figure, and while most of the grievances with Bush's spending policies predate Portman's tenure at OMB, the simple fact of haling from the Bush White House probably counsels against taking Portman.

3. No Old Retired Guys: McCain's age is a double-edged sword, as it does help him connect with older voters, while alienating young voters who are more interested in "cool" and "change" than understanding the actual requirements of the job. Either way, it would be folly to exacerbate the old-graybeard image by adding a candidate who is old, bald and recently pulled out of mothballs like Fred Thompson or Phil Gramm. An active governor like 66-year-old Don Carcieri might not have the same problem, but I'd still bet on someone with some non-white hair left.

4. No Rookies: On the other end of the spectrum, a large part of McCain's argument, especially against Obama, will be that McCain is experienced, battle-tested, and ready to take the now-proverbial 3 a.m. phone call. But as I noted above, given his age, he'll be undercutting that argument if his running mate doesn't also clearly pass that 3 a.m. test - and that means no first-term Governors or Senators, no Lieutenant Governors or state legislators, no business people without government experience. It has to be someone who has more experience and credibility than the Democrats' presidential nominee.

5. No Novice Politicians: This is a similar but related issue, and trips up people like Rice and Colin Powell who might pass the test for foreign policy credibility: the Obama campaign of late has been yet another illustration of why and how inexperienced politicians get in trouble trying to run national campaigns - there's too much new stuff to come out, they don't do damage control well, they react badly when people throw rotten fruit and the kitchen sink at them. McCain will need someone who knows how to stand in and take it in the closing months of a tense campaign.

6. No Pro-Choicers: McCain, unlike Rudy Giuliani, has been able to pass all the minimal-acceptability thresholds for social conservatives, particularly pro-lifers. But social conservatives remain uneasy with him, and he can't afford significant defections from his base if he is going into a difficult fight in the fall. The one thing that's certain to set off a huge and ugly battle within the party is taking someone who supports legal abortion.

Rudy, had he won the nomination, would have needed an especially vigorous pro-lifer as his running mate; McCain doesn't have to go that far, but he does need a running mate who is at least meets the same minimal standards of trust with pro-lifers. That rules out open pro-choicers; it also rules out people whose views on this crucial issue are simply unknown or not fully formed.

7. No Iraq War Opponents: McCain's signature issue in this campaign has been his steadfast support for the Iraq War. McCain can and possibly should take someone who has criticized aspects of the war-fighting strategy and tactics employed over the past 5 years, as he has; but it would create an impossible muddling of McCain's message to have a running mate who opposed or came to oppose the war.

8. No Democrats: I like Joe Lieberman as much as the next guy, and would trust him to be the next Commander-in-Chief...but the presidency isn't only about foreign policy. McCain still needs Republican votes to win, and - again with the age factor - while many Republicans would be happy to see a Democrat like Lieberman in the right job in a McCain Administration (i.e., in a job whose responsibilities are limited to his areas of agreement with McCain), the Vice Presidency has to go to someone Republicans could get behind as a president.

9. No Closeted Gays: There's not a real good way to say this, but...well, if you look at the publicly floated lists of potential running mates on both the Republican and Democratic sides you see some people who have long been rumored to be gay. I have no inside insight or information about any such people; I can only know the rumors, but I assume the people vetting the candidates are better suited to get at the truth. I do know this: whether or not you believe America is ready for an openly gay candidate on the national ticket, it would be a complete political catastrophe for either party (albeit for different reasons) to pick a closeted candidate who then gets forcibly 'outed' during the stretch run of a national campaign - and you'd be a fool to bet against that happening (I discussed a similar issue here). For the GOP in particular, after the Larry Craig and Mark Foley fiascoes, this would be the equivalent of sticking your face on a land mine and hoping nothing bad happens.

10. No Lobbyists: As a general rule, "lobbyists" is one of those words that when you hear a politician use it, you can be sure that the entire sentence containing the word is utter baloney. That said, this campaign season has seen more than the usual blather about lobbyists, and McCain and his more likely opponent, Obama, both like to posture about separating themselves from the whole DC lobbying scene ... I just can't see McCain choosing a running mate who has actually worked as a lobbyist at any point, like Fred Thompson or Haley Barbour.

11. No 2006 Losers: You sometimes see people throw around names of various Republicans who got voted out of office in 2006. To be blunt: give it up. When you start trying to figure out how to turn around the GOP's setbacks in the last election and how potential running mates could help McCain, you're not going to choose anybody who lost their last election, especially not just two years ago.

12. No Perennial Short-Listers: This might be called the Jack Kemp category - there are certain people in Republican politics (mainly former House members like Cox, John Kasich, and JC Watts) who have been mentioned continually for years and years for higher posts: Senate, Governor, Vice President, federal judge, high Cabinet posts - and somehow never end up in the race. There's usually a reason for that. Sometimes, it means the guy has skeletons in the closet, sometimes it means he lacks the "fire in the belly," ... whatever the reason, discount rumors about people who have been passed over many times before.

13. No New Mothers: OK, this is a one-candidate category, but Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin gave birth less than a month ago, and her fifth child has Down's Syndrome - even leaving aside her relatively short resume in office, no way you take a new mother, let alone one with that family situation, and put her on the national campaign trail a thousand miles from home. She'll have to wait for the next cycle.

14. No Dynasties: No Jeb Bush, no Liddy Dole. The American people are just ready to move on, at least for now; McCain needs a second different name on his ticket, after the GOP running a Bush or Dole on the national ticket in every election since 1976.

15. No Affirmative Action Candidates: With Obama or possibly Hillary as the opponent, there will be a lot of sentiment for McCain picking a female or minority-group running mate. All things being equal, that would be a great idea, and indeed the GOP has a number of candidates who at first blush would seem to meet one or another of the job requirements - but when you start ticking off the list above, most of the possible candidates fall by the wayside, at least for this election cycle until the next generation of candidates is ready.

If voters vote on identity politics instead of qualifications, McCain loses. His argument has to be that you don't vote for groups, you vote for people who can do the job. I'd love to see him with a non-white-male running mate, but if it's someone who doesn't seem to be qualified for the job, he'll just look like he's desperate to mimic the other side. And that's always a losing strategy.

Now, the Do's - none of these are as litmus-test critical as the Don'ts, but they are also important considerations:

1. Executive Experience: Successful presidential candidates almost always have it - but McCain doesn't. It will help greatly if he has a running mate who can demonstrate the ability to run something larger than a Senate Committee.

2. Outside the Beltway: Like #1, this points to a Governor: Washington's unpopular right now, moreso even than usual; bringing in someone untainted by the current mess in DC will help, even if it's someone like Mark Sanford who was once a Congressman years ago.

3. Swing Stater: Historically, it's hard to measure the impact of a VP choice, but it's generally thought that a candidate who is popular in his or her home state can help deliver that state, and in a closely divided election, swinging a single mid-size state can be a big plus. That argues in favor of Portman (Ohio) or Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, and against Sanford or against candidates from deep blue states like California or Rhode Island. On the other hand, while I'm in the camp that thinks the GOP has had trouble with the perception outside the South that the party has become too Southern, I think McCain is sufficiently non-Southern himself that he doesn't need to avoid a Southerner (and might even benefit from one).

4. Yes, It's The Economy: Historically, McCain hasn't been at his best addressing economic issues; it would help a lot to have a running mate who can talk about bread-and-butter issues with credibility and persuasiveness, rather than taking another national security professional.

One odder consideration that has focused attention on Mitt Romney in particular is the issue of money, of which McCain has far less than Obama. But as Brad Smith has explained, with public financing McCain should actually be in good shape for the general election campaign after the conventions, so the money issue is more time-sensitive - he needs cash now.

I'll get back another day to who this leaves as alternatives, but if you are guessing that I think Sanford and Pawlenty remain the logical frontrunners, the only two guys who really sweep through all the check boxes unscathed, you are right - but while I wasn't ready to back Romney as a presidential candidate, he also should not be ruled out of the veepstakes, as there's no one consideration that really knocks him out, either.

UPDATE: Jim Geraghty likes Carcieri. I'm definitely leanining towards him as one of the top candidates despite his age (he's 65, not 66 as I said above).

We had a roundtable discussion among the RedState Contributors on the latest twists in the Obama/Wright flap - you can read my take and that of my colleagues here; I also had a post there last week on some comments by Obama's campaign manager that I never got around to cross-posting here (sometimes I write here first, sometimes there).

In case you missed it yesterday morning - opinion in Bloomberg v. Beretta U.S.A. here. Basically, the court found that the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act is a constitutional exercise of Congress' Commerce power, doesn't violate the 10th Amendment, and bars New York City's lawsuit seeking under state law to enjoin gun manufacturers' lawful firearms sales on the grounds that those sales resulted in diversion of guns to the black market.

Barron YoungSmith at The New Republic thinks conservatism should be studied in schools. Up to a point, YoungSmith is right; the ignorance of conservative ideas never ceases to amaze. But I would disagree with this:

American conservatism actually has nothing to do with Burke, other than drawing street cred off his deceased personage. The conservative movement began with William F. Buckley, Frank Meyer, and Russell Kirk himself during the 1950s, in a magazine called National Review--and it was revolutionary, bombastic, and eager to overhaul American society, not Burkean.

This rather reinforces the point about ignorance. Some people just can't understand the difference between wanting to remake society and wanting to remake government to get it out of society's way. As I have said before: conservatives believe that governments cannot change men, but we do believe that men can and should change their governments. That's why Burke himself was favorably disposed towards the American Revolution (YoungSmith's cramped concept of Burkeanism assumes that a conservative can never be a revolutionary) but not the French.

There's a growing school of thought among Republicans that even despite his massive fundraising machine, pop culture cache and messianic aura, Barack Obama may yet turn out to be a much weaker general election opponent than Hillary Clinton. Hillary is certain to be a competitive candidate, but has enormous built-in negatives; any election involving her is likely to be very closely divided. But Obama, while he seems to have a much higher ceiling, also faces a much more significant risk of getting completely Mondaled. And a new poll from Rasmussen helps explain why - even moreso than Hillary, Obama matches up terribly against McCain on which candidate is more trusted on a host of key issues. Here's the key findings in tabular form:

Is Obama actually the easier target? Maybe, maybe not; any one poll is just a snapshot, and it's a long way to November. But more and more Republicans are eager to find out.

Far be it from me to knock fancy Ivy League law degrees, but you know, with Obama and Hillary the last two choices standing, it appears that the Democrats will pick a candidate from Harvard or Yale for the sixth straight election - Fritz Mondale was the last time they took a candidate educated entirely outside those two universities. Perhaps, if they are concerned about the constant battle to establish that their candidates are normal people rather than captives of a lot of ideas, beliefs, and associations that don't really exist outside the left-wing academic hothouse, it may be time to fish in wider waters. Consider:

1988 - Dukakis (Harvard Law)
1992 - Clinton (Yale Law) & Gore (Harvard College)
1996 - Clinton (Yale Law) & Gore (Harvard College)
2000 - Gore (Harvard College) & Lieberman (Yale College & Yale Law)
2004 - Kerry (Yale College)
2008 - Obama (Harvard Law) or Hillary (Yale Law) (and both are married to graduates of the same law school)

Patterico has done some serious original digging with this post.

This, from Hillary Clinton, is a reminder why candidates with their backs against the wall are so dangerous - like Bob Dole and George H.W. Bush (in 1992) in the last weeks of their losing campaigns, Hillary has really hit her stride and found her voice as a candidate in a way that was never in evidence as long as she had some plausible case to be a frontrunner - but unlike those candidates, Hillary still has months to go before she can be formally pulled from the stage:

I know his supporters say, well they did like the last debate in Philadelphia, the questions were kind of mean and they were sort of tough, ...You know, I've got to say, tough questions in a debate is nothing like the tough decisions you've got to make in the White House. I think that this state deserves a debate. So here’s what I'm offering. How about this -- no moderators just the two of us on a stage for 90 minutes asking each other questions, talking about whatever's on our minds, just like the Lincoln-Douglas debates, and I think, you know, we could even do it on the back of a flatbed truck, doesn’t even have to be in a fancy studio somewhere.

(H/T). Is this a sign of desperation? Sure, these kinds of challenges always are. But then, those of us on the Right never did figure out how to make the Clintons go away, no matter how much hot water they were in. Not only does Obama have to keep taking this, but he has now reached the point where he basically has to hide from debating her again for his own protection, stop doing press conferences, and generally go into a protracted defensive crouch, while McCain is doing blogger calls, touring traditional Democratic strongholds and generally having himself a good time.

The Supreme Court this morning, by a 6-3 vote in Crawford v. Marion County Elec. Bd., upheld Indiana's voter ID law. This is a major defeat for the Democrats' efforts to prevent states from requiring valid identification to vote. The lawsuit was brought by the Indiana Democratic Party.

The Court took a fractured approach. Justice Stevens, joined by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy, found no showing of an undue burden on various voters who challenged the voter ID law on its face. Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito would have upheld the law on the broader ground that it imposed the same requirements equally on all voters. Both opinions give great weight to the state interest in ensuring that only eligible voters cast ballots. Justice Souter, joined by Justices Breyer and Ginsburg, dissented on the grounds that they felt the statute did, in fact, unduly burden some voters. Justice Breyer wrote separately.

Justice Scalia's separate opinion is redolent of the judicial hangover from Bush v. Gore in its emphasis on the hazards of permitting case-by-case judicial review of neutral rules established by state legislatures before an election takes place. This is a point I've been making since the Bush v. Gore decision came down: the most important thing about that case is the fact that the SCOTUS was reviewing a non-statutory judicial remedy crafted by an appellate court after the election had taken place, when all the participants knew - or at least thought they knew - what remedies would benefit which candidates, as opposed to a statute of general applicability enacted before the election, setting out rules and procedures that all participants knew from Day One they would have to comply with.

Extended excerpts from the Stevens and Scalia opinions, and commentary, below the fold. Note that this is the third election-law case this Term (I discussed the first two here and here), and the democratically-enacted statute won in each case.

(UPDATES also below the fold).