March 25, 2008

3/25: Mounting Frustration

As the contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton grows increasingly heated, so do the arguments in the liberal blogosphere. Several prominent liberal bloggers were annoyed when Clinton supporter/IN Sen. Evan Bayh suggested that superdelegates consider "who carried the states with the most Electoral College votes" when deciding whether to support Clinton or Obama. These bloggers perceived Bayh's Electoral College metric as yet another attempt by the Clinton camp to spin the results in order to show that Clinton is ahead. Pro-Clinton bloggers responded by arguing that all proposed metrics for superdelegates to consider are necessarily arbitrary -- including selecting the candidate who's won the most pledged delegates.

These debates between pro-Obama bloggers and pro-Clinton bloggers will undoubtedly continue for the next few weeks, if not months. However, primary fatigue is clearly setting in among many of the leading liberal bloggers, who feel that the Obama-Clinton race is no longer benefiting the party and is in fact benefiting John McCain (as polls suggest). But is there anything the netroots can do to stop the Dem race from lasting until June (at the earliest) or the convention? Right now, the matter appears to be out of their hands.

DEM FIELD: Running On Fumes

Several liberal bloggers think the Clinton-Obama race is no longer constructive:

• Open Left's Chris Bowers: "OK, I'll say it: the nomination campaign is played out. [...] Basically, after fourteen months of hashing out the differences between the candidates on virtually every other metric, with four weeks until the Pennsylvania primary, with no revotes in Florida and Michigan, and with less than 20% of the voting actually remaining, it seems that all we have left is a long argument about electability. That is a problem because, let's face it, long arguments about electability are really boring because they are ultimately unprovable and go nowhere."
• Bowers continues: "Barring something shocking, like the Michigan delegation being seated as is, the delegate math is clearly laid out before us, and Obama will slowly slog toward clinching the nomination sometime between May 20th and June 21st. For now, unfortunately, we are stuck in a holding pattern of an endless electability argument. I don't think that this sort of campaign will carry with it the benefit of the first two months of the year, where an intense, high-profile Democratic nomination campaign was largely helpful to the party. That is demonstrable by McCain taking the lead in general election matchups over the past two weeks. Without any voting to maintain interest between Mississippi and Pennsylvania, the void has been filled with electability and race (with the latter really being about electability). That is not the kind of discussion that Democrats need to win."
• TPM's Josh Marshall: "It seems to me that the real reason the Democratic primary race has gone from heated to vicious (at least among the candidates' supporters, if not the candidates themselves) is precisely because we're in this awkward seven week hiatus in which there are no actual elections being held. [...] Without [elections], we are stuck with the same, unchanging stubborn set of facts: Obama has a relatively narrow lead which, under the DNC's rules, is nevertheless extremely difficult to overcome. And each side is left cycling over into more and more heated iterations of the same arguments, like a cascade into mounting levels of mania [...] That doesn't mean that both side's arguments have equal merit. For my part, I think the Obama campaign has far the better part of it. But I think it does explain why we're now in this self-escalating spiral."

DEM FIELD II: Like A Train Wreck In Slow Motion

Conservative bloggers are enjoying the increasingly nasty Clinton-Obama race, and they're convinced that McCain is benefiting:

• Commentary's Jennifer Rubin: "While the Republicans warm up their veepstakes, the greatest show in town is still the Democratic primary race. On one hand we have the Lady Macbeth of politics. She's proven ready to burn down the Democratic party if that's what it takes to grab the nomination. On the other hand we have the rookie who has accomplished absolutely nothing in his life other than convince about thirteen million people to vote for him [...] At this rate McCain (who already attracts independent voters that detest this sort of mud wrestling) may have a double digit lead over both of them by the beginning of the summer. So to these ill-mannered Democrats, their Republican adversaries can only say: Keep up the good work! Ain't it grand?"
• Hot Air's Ed Morrissey: "Perhaps the Democrats should listen to the Cassandras forecasting disaster. According to Rasmussen, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have begun to melt down in the crucible of an increasingly nasty primary fight. McCain leads Hillary by seven and Obama by nine, well outside the margin of error. [...] Clearly, the negative campaigning from both Democrats has proven remarkably effective...for McCain."
• RedState's Pejman Yousefzadeh: "Back in 1992, when George Bush the Elder and Ross Perot were killing each other, Bill Clinton used what was called 'The Manhattan Project' (in light of the Democrats' decision to hold their convention in New York City that year) to rehabilitate an image that had taken a battering during the course of the primaries. John McCain, it would appear, is ready to undertake the same kind project himself. And Democrats are giving him the time to do it."

CLINTON: Spinning Into Oblivion?

Several prominent liberal bloggers were annoyed by Sen. Bayh's suggestion that superdelegates consider "who carried the states with the most Electoral College votes" when deciding whether to support Clinton or Obama:

• Marshall: "The system is based on pledged delegates and super-delegates. Period. There's a set of rules everyone agreed on. The wisdom of those rules is irrelevant at this point. The Clinton campaign is entitled to do whatever it wants to get superdelegates to come over to her side to even out the pledged delegate deficit. My take is that whatever the arguments, the superdelegates aren't going to go against a clear pledged delegate leader. And I think they'd be extremely ill-advised to do so. But the superdelegates do have this power under the rules. But these constant efforts to say the rules aren't fair are just silly, and truth be told I think they're more undermining of the Clinton campaign than they realize."
• Daily Kos' Markos Moulitsas: "Josh [Marshall] is right, of course. The Clinton campaign has realized that the rules don't work in their favor, that if we follow the rules as agreed upon before the first caucus vote was cast in Iowa, that they have no chance of winning. Part of me is bitter about this, since I've been railing against our stupid primary system (and the caucuses) for years, but that never mattered to the Clinton camp at the time. It only mattered after she lost the election based on the rules. The media narrative is finally starting to reflect this reality. Again, as I noted before, the only way Clinton can win this race is with a coup by superdelegate, which would necessarily create civil war in our party. And of course, Hillary Clinton doesn't care. That's the bottom line. All the other noise in this contest are just ex post facto justifications for that coup attempt."
• The Carpetbagger Report's Steve Benen: "It's just not credible to keep searching for new ways to juggle the results to get the conclusion one wants. If the Clinton campaign had recommended this metric tally in, say, December, it'd be easier to take it seriously now. As it stands, though, it starts to look like the campaign will keep looking for new counting methods until it's pleased with the one that shows its candidate ahead."
• The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias: "I believe that by the Duhem-Quine thesis there are actually an infinite number of arbitrary criteria we could devise to prove that our preferred candidate is 'really' winning. For example, Obama's leads in delegates and votes are relatively narrow, but I bet that if we counted by mass his disproportionately male base of support would have a much larger edge."
• Atrios: "I do my best (though it's hard) not to judge the candidates by their campaigns or surrogates. [...] But for several weeks now there's just been this steady stream of downright insulting stuff coming out of the Clinton campaign. It's the kind of stuff that would come out of Ari Fleischer's mouth back in the day. Stop it!"

CLINTON II: Time To Pack Up And Go Home?

Several liberal bloggers are echoing Moulitsas' call to end the primary campaign as quickly as possible:

• AMERICAblog's Joe Sudbay: "Hillary Clinton has lost. She cannot win the Democratic nomination without causing a civil war in the Democratic party. Her recent actions, especially comparing herself to, and praising, McCain while undermining Obama, make it appear that she is willing to do just that -- split the party in two. [...] The Superdelegates and the DNC need to decide if they want two more months of the vitriol, and a divided, bitterly divided party, or do they want a Democratic White House come next January? It's time for some leadership -- or something more akin to an intervention. Otherwise, we're on a path to Mutually Assured Destruction."
• Bowers: "Here is the choice I think we face. On the one hand, we can pretend that Clinton still has a chance to win the nomination, and that the credentials committee and the majority of the delegates at the convention won't be controlled by some non-Obama power once Obama reaches 2,024. On the other hand, we can face reality that Clinton has no real chance to win the nomination because she further lost ground in March, a time when her own campaign admitted it needed to gain ground. Second, we can pretend that having prominent Democrats and the entire Republican Noise Machine use the same talking points on our presumptive nominee won't damage our general election chances, or we can start to build a united front against these attacks and succeed where we failed in 2004. Third, we can focus on the nomination campaign forever, or we can start to focus our attention on some downticket campaigns, too. From where I sit, the best path we can follow right now is to try and end the nomination campaign as quickly as possible, because Barack Obama is going to be the nominee and we desperately need some big wins in November up and down the ticket."

Meanwhile, Open Left's Matt Stoller explains how he became "a moderately strong Obama supporter": "One, Bill Foster's victory in IL-14, and the coattails Obama showed, really do signify something. [...] Two, Clinton has basically shown, through her misstatements around taking incoming fire in Bosnia to her belief that Iraq was worth it to her praise of McCain as commander-in-chief to her recent suggestion that Bob Rubin and Alan Greenspan be on a board of experts to deal with the credit crisis, that she is a completely transactional politician. If there's a problem, Clinton's first instincts are to put a right-wing spin on it and get a bunch of wealthy establishment guys in room to design a plan to fix a problem they caused. That's not how Obama approaches problems."

Atrios explains why he is "increasingly" (albeit tepidly) leaning toward Obama: "I've long said that if I ever felt like a candidate supporter I'd say so, but I just don't. [...] I've said I tend to lean Obama more often than I lean Clinton, and that's increasingly true when the campaign insults my intelligence on a regular basis. Longtime readers of this blog should understand pretty well why Hillary Clinton isn't an obviously perfect fit for me, but longtime readers should also know why Obama isn't one either. I've been rather critical of the senator from Illinois many times. [...That said], there are times when I've rooted for Obama because I want this thing to be over. Clinton can stay in the campaign as long as she likes, but I do wish she'd have focused her fire on McCain, instead of arguing that he's so awesome that Obama couldn't beat him."

CLINTON III: Pro-Clinton Bloggers Fight Back

Clinton's online supporters and sympathizers are pushing back against the criticism of the Clinton camp:

• MyDD's Jerome Armstrong doesn't share Marshall's belief that "the superdelegates aren't going to go against a clear pledged delegate leader": "[Marshall] must believe that there's an un-spoken moral argument to be made that a 'pledged delegate leader' trumps everything, even though it'd only be a plurality lead, not the majority that grants the nomination. Unfortunately for his logic, this take would be exactly the sort of 'rule change' he's saying leads down the rabbit hole into a 'different set of rules' than the one that exists."
• TalkLeft's Big Tent Democrat accuses Marshall of harboring a pro-Obama bias: "Josh's feigned bafflement at the difficult task of counting the votes is thoroughly amusing, indeed, to coin a phrase, almost parody. [...] Josh basically just whined about how unfair the Clintons are being and then wraps up his piece accusing the Clinton forces of whining about 'unfairness.' The irony is stark and the 'undermining' of TPM as a reliable source of information and opinions about this campaign continues apace."
• Big Tent Democrat also accuses Moulitsas of harboring a pro-Obama bias: "Kos uses the pejorative term 'coup' to describe the Super Delegates not voting for the pledged delegate leader. [...] It seems to me that it is Obama supporters like Markos who are complaining that the rules MAY NOT favor Obama. It is they who are whining that the rules permit Super Delegates to pick a nominee who is not the pledged delegate leader. [...] The whining about the existing rules comes from Kos and Josh Marshall and other die hard Obama supporters. THAT is a fact."

TalkLeft's Jeralyn Merritt thinks superdelegates should support Clinton because she leads in all of the important metrics: "Hillary's ahead in popular vote and electoral votes, in the big states and the states most likely to go Democratic in November. She's ahead in the big states that are critical for Dems in November. Obama's got a small lead in overall pledged delegates and has won more Republican states that have a slim to no chance of going blue in November. The superdelegates need to consider who will bring it home for Democrats in November. The results so far indicate that person is Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama."

Meanwhile, MyDD's Todd Beeton thinks the Clinton camp could be making more effective arguments to superdelegates: "[Bayh's argument] is essentially a variation on the big state argument the Clinton camp has been making for a while now [...] The problem with it is that it implies a correlation between primary performance and general election performance, which is hardly a proven correlation. [...] A far more compelling argument to superdelegates, I would think, is to constantly remind them about Michigan and Florida. Not because they're 'two of the big four' necessarily but rather because had they moved to legal dates they would have represented two additional early Clinton wins, likely big ones, and the mere fact that Obama would have had to compete there would have meant fewer resources for him to expend in other states. In other words, Obama's pledged delegate and popular vote leads, such as they are, have an unavoidable asterisk next to them."

CLINTON IV: Look Out For Snipers!

In a departure from their usual Obama-bashing, conservative bloggers are currently directing their fire at Clinton for falsely claiming that her plane came "under sniper fire" during a '96 trip to Bosnia:

• Power Line's John Hinderaker: "In support of her claim that eight years as First Lady qualify her as a foreign policy expert, Hillary Clinton has told dramatic stories about landing in Bosnia under sniper fire and having to run for cover. I'm not sure that, even if true, this would endow her with much diplomatic skill, but it has become clear that Hillary's story is false."
• RedState's streiff: "Is telling the truth and respecting the intelligence of your audience a disqualifier for the Democrat presidential nomination?"
• Ed Morrissey: "Caught by two videos of her visit to Tuzla, Bosnia in March 1996, Hillary Clinton's campaign has the unenviable task of acknowledging that Hillary lied about the danger she faced in flying into one of the most secure facilities in the Balkans. [...] Not only did she 'misspeak', but she almost outright called Sinbad a liar when he corrected her. Hillary apparently figured she could bluff her way out of the lie she constructed in Tuzla, even though Sinbad was on the same plane and provided eyewitness testimony. That bluff got called by the Washington Post and by Newsbusters, when contemporaneous video showed Hillary strolling off the plane, with her 15-year-old daughter in tow, and no sense of anxiety on anyone's face."
• NRO's Jim Geraghty: "What's really revealing about this little brouhaha is that it appears that after the first time she told the story and questions were raised, there was no one around to tell Hillary to drop the story. A good candidate needs someone around them they trust who have the guts to tell them when they mess up, and Hillary was making a very avoidable mistake by telling a story that was so easily checked. (It also didn't pass the smell test -- the Clintons would expose then-16-year-old Chelsea to potential sniper fire?)"

MCCAIN: Bomb, Bomb Iran

The netroots are again criticizing McCain for falsely claiming that Iran is training Al Qaeda in Iraq, which they see as evidence that McCain wants to invade Iran:

• Digby: "In [McCain and George W. Bush's] comments of the last few days about Al Qaeda and Iran wanting to build nukes to threaten nations, it all leads in one direction: war with Iran. The only question is whether it would happen before Bush leaves office or after McCain takes office. Either way, you can tell by their 'gaffes' that they both believe that Iran is a threat to the US. And there is no doubt that they both believe the US has the right under the Bush Doctrine to preempt Iran. Anyone who votes for McCain in November is voting for war with Iran. It's that simple."
• Salon's Glenn Greenwald: "These Iran/Al Qaeda episodes occurred when McCain was traveling around the Middle East with his closest ally, warmonger Joe Lieberman -- who has already explicitly advocated an American military attack on Iran -- and it involved McCain's repeatedly making patently false assertions in order to tie Iran to Al Qaeda and to exaggerate wildly the Iranian threat, exactly the sort of deceit that misled large majorities of Americans into believing that Saddam was responsible for the 9/11 attacks."

The netroots are also criticizing the media for failing (in their view) to provide adequate coverage of McCain's foreign policy views:

• Arianna Huffington: "Does the country want another George Bush in the White House? Voters should at least be given all the facts so they can make that decision for themselves. The problem is that the media have got an image in their creaky narrative machines about John McCain and they're sticking to it. It's much easier to just present the tried-and-true version of McCain that that has prevailed since 2000 instead of presenting the new McCain as he's become: cavalier, dismissive, and lazy about the facts."
• Benen: "McCain has made a series of bizarre and demonstrably false claims about foreign policy, military affairs, and national security. Some have registered in the media, some haven't. Either way, reporters have already made up their minds -- McCain knows his stuff, even when he doesn't, and all reporting on the senator's campaign will be refracted through that agreed upon prism."
• The Washington Monthly's Kevin Drum unloads on the media's coverage of McCain: "Let's recap. Foreign policy cred lets [McCain] get away with wild howlers on foreign policy. Fiscal integrity cred lets him get away with outlandishly irresponsible economic plans. Anti-lobbyist cred lets him get away with pandering to lobbyists. Campaign finance reform cred lets him get away with gaming the campaign finance system. Straight talking cred lets him get away with brutally slandering Mitt Romney in the closing days of the Republican primary. Maverick uprightness cred allows him to get away with begging for endorsements from extremist religious leaders like John Hagee. 'Man of conviction' cred allows him to get away with transparent flip-flopping so egregious it would make any other politician a laughingstock. Anti-torture cred allows him to get away with supporting torture as long as only the CIA does it. Remind me again: where does all this cred come from? And what window do Democrats go to to get the same treatment the press gives McCain?"

MCCAIN II: Campaign Finance Hypocrisy?

Liberal bloggers are also criticizing McCain for breaking the speneding limits imposed by the presidential public financing system:

• Daily Kos' mcjoan: "When you're a maverick, the spending limits don't apply. At least that's what McCain's lawyers say. See, McCain was all for public financing of his campaign before he was against it. He says that he withdrew from the public matching fund. There's just this little problem with the FEC who has yet to grant his request to withdraw because they don't have enough information about that $4 million loan he took out against the collateral of public funds."
• Firedoglake's Christy Hardin Smith announces a contest for Firedoglake readers: "Here's the contest for all of our readers: whomever digs up the most clearly applicable quote from St. John McCain on the importance of following campaign finance laws -- a statement filled with finger-wagging solemnity about the dastardly, smarmy politicians who would dare to try and end-run the vaunted McCain-named campaign finance laws in all their glory -- will win a copy of John Anderson's book 'Follow the Money' [...] Sen. Do As I Order But Not As I Do needs to be hoisted on his own sanctimonious, federal election law violating petard, don't you think?"

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: It Ain't Over Till It's Over

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder responds to Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen's argument that the Dem race is all but over:

"...The '10 percent' that the Clinton adviser is hanging onto is premised on the unlikely event that that some fatal flaw will be discovered about Barack Obama. Perhaps he has a second family living in Idaho...that type of thing. [VandeHei and Allen] dismiss this as silly. Surely it is not an argument. But it's not dumb. Two weeks of discussing Obama's relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright has pushed Obama's net favorability ratings down and did indeed freeze the superdelegates. Obama's negatives in some of the robot polling are above 50% now. [...]

John Edwards, Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid -- if these folks came together and threw their weight behind the nominee, Hillary Clinton would probably drop out by the end of the week. But the party elders have in some cases explicitly abstained from making such a determination because in their minds, the racetrack is open and horses, to beat that metaphor to death, are still trotting around."

LEST WE FORGET: Ghost Ridin' the Prius

Stuff White People Like explains why white people like San Francisco:

"The City of San Francisco has a very multicultural population that ranges from white to gay to Asian. Within white culture this known as 'ideal diversity' for its provision of exotic restaurants while simultaneously preserving property values. [...] However, it is important to be aware of the fact that regions outside of San Francisco feature many people who are not white, gay or Asian. They are greatly appreciated during the census, but white people are generally very happy that they stay in places like Oakland and Richmond. [...]

Still, the presence of other minorities are welcomed by white people for so many more reasons than just statistics! Much in the way that white people in Brooklyn feel a strong and unfounded connection with The Notorious BIG, white people in San Francisco feel the need to identify with rappers from the East Bay. Interestingly enough, the further they venture from San Francisco, the stronger their need to represent their region.

'Oh man, I went to the Too Short show last night. So hyphy man, so hyphy. You should come by some time and we'll ghost ride the Prius.'"

Posted by Ian Faerstein at March 25, 2008 12:56 PM