Golf Store Follies

Steve shared this with me through Reader: McCain's golf equipment store accepts comments.

Pick Biden, because he's a dick!

There are quite a few Veep choices that Obama has that I approve of. Biden is one of them. And Ezra Klein neatly summarizes the case:

VEEPSTAKES: THE CASE FOR BIDEN: "EJ Dionne's column arguing that Joe Biden should be considered for Obama's VP slot makes a lot of sense. Biden is, arguably, the most effective voice Democrats have on foreign policy. And here's why: Joe Biden is an incredibly arrogant jerk. And that's exactly what Democrats need."

BEER

I think the fair way to read this is as a Freudian slip produced by boredom, not animosity. McCain hates giving speeches, and would really rather just be having a beer.

And I don't blame the guy. If I were running his campaign, I'd want to be drunk 24/7 too.

Obama Fundraising?

AFAIK, Obama hasn't been on the fundraising circuit for months. But now that the nomination is his, he's hitting up Clinton's big money people all over the country:

STLtoday - Obama urges unity at STL event: "Besides congeniality, the event also provided Obama with more campaign cash. Local organizers predicted that close to $1 million was raised from supporters who contributed $500 to $2,300 apiece."

Meanwhile, all John McCain does is fundraise, and I don't think he's having many million dollar days. If things stay the way they are, Obama could out raise McCain by an order of magnitude difference.

All fifty

Hmmm

Obama's 50-state strategy: It's official, his campaign will be everywhere - On Politics - USATODAY.com: "Democrat Barack Obama's deputy campaign manager, Steve Hildebrand, just announced in an e-mail to supporters that the campaign will compete all over the country this fall.

'Today, I am proud to announce that our presidential campaign will be the first in a generation to deploy and maintain staff in every single state,' Hildebrand said in the letter."

The guy that runs the blog should probably tell the guy who writes political articles for the AP. Readers could get confused.

Sexism and Republicans

As I'm reading through these NYTimes retrospectives, I see that both Jane Swift and Heather Wilson agree with Christie Whitman that Clinton lost because of sexism.

Both Jane Swift and Heather Wilson, like Christie Whitman, are female Republican politicians, currently not serving in office.

Two reasons the times couldn't get any Democratic women to write this crap:

1. Democrats want Barack Obama to win. Crying sexism over Hillary might help McCain. Some "anonymous GOP strategists" have even argued that McCain should put a woman on the ticket to attract their votes. I wonder if Christie Whitman, Jane Swift, or Heather Wilson know any prominent female Republican politicians currently not serving in office.

2. It's not true. The reason we don't have more female elected officials is because the perception of sexism discourages women from running. Once they decide to run, women who run as Democrats have the same chances as men as winning elections (anyone who wouldn't vote for a woman is already voting Republican anyway). In fact, women actually have an advantage in Democratic primaries, since most Democrats are women. After the Clinton/Obama race, I'd be surprised if the Democratic Party nominates another boring white guy any time soon.

Trivialities

It's an old story. Somebody asks a losing candidate how he lost. The response: the other guy got more votes!

If you're a well-respected political journalist and the New York Times asks you to dissect the failings of the Clinton campaign, your best bet is to offer up something trivially true that won't upset any of your sources or your readers, but might strike someone as interesting, which is why Mark Halperin can get away with explaining that Hillary lost because she lost the black vote.

Well, umm, duh.

Ana Marie Cox thinks that sometimes media coverage is stupid. Thanks, Ana.

Bob Kerrey kinda sorta thinks that she lost because Obama was a better candidate. But in order to take the edge off, he elevates Obama into the Best. Candidate. Ever. Because, you see, it's in Bob Kerrey's interest to avoid the perception that he picked a shitty candidate out of crass political opportunism and calculated poorly.

Mark Penn and the Epic Fail

Nothing illustrates the folly of all the Clinton Campaign post-mortem's more than Mark Penn's The Problem Wasn't The Message — It Was The Money.

It's not that Penn is wrong*, it's that he's not even bothering to try and answer the question. Penn has two conflicting interests here: the interest he has in being taken seriously as a political commenter, and the interest he has in getting paid for message-crafting in future campaigns. But the degree to which he is taken seriously in the future is almost completely dependent on whether or not he works for campaigns in the future, and not at all on whether or not he gives a good answer to this question. So Mark Penn has zero incentive to inform the public here, and every incentive to shift blame away from himself (as most of the commentariat currently places the lion's share of the blame for Clinton's campaign on him).

Similarly, Christie Whitman has zero incentive to accurately assess the level of sexism Clinton faced, but every incentive to complain about the difficulties for female politicians, which, as I point out, does female Republican politicians a lot more good than Democrats. Whitman, of course, is a female Republican politician.

*For an analysis of the substance of Penn's piece, lookie here.

Racism v. Sexism

Exit polls from the Democratic Primary Race:

Georgia:

In deciding your vote for president today, was the race of the candidate:

Category	% Total	Clinton	Edwards	Obama
Important	21	24	3	72
Not important	78	34	1	65

In deciding your vote for president today, was the gender of the candidate:

Category	% Total	Clinton	Edwards	Obama
Important	18	42	3	54
Not important	81	29	1	69

Wisconsin:

In deciding your vote for president today, was the gender of the candidate:

Category	% Total	Clinton	Obama	Uninstructed
Important	15	63	37	-
Not important	84	38	61	0

In deciding your vote for president today, was the race of the candidate:

Category	% Total	Clinton	Obama	Uninstructed
Important	13	46	50	-
Not important	86	40	59	0

Ohio

In deciding your vote for president today, was the gender of the candidate:

Category	% Total	Clinton	Obama
Important	17	60	40
Not important	82	53	45

In deciding your vote for president today, was the race of the candidate:

Category	% Total	Clinton	Obama
Important	20	59	39
Not important	79	53	45

Kentucky

In deciding your vote for president today, was the gender of the candidate:

Category	% Total	Clinton	Obama	Unc.
Important	16	79	19	1
Not important	82	63	33	3

In deciding your vote for president today, was the race of the candidate:

Category	% Total	Clinton	Obama	Unc.
Important	21	81	16	2
Not important	78	61	35	3

Georgia, Southern and half Black; Wisconsin, Northern and all White; Ohio, mixed and mixed; Kentucky, Southern, and all White.

In Georgia, and in other Southern states with a high concentration of African-American voters, Barack Obama's race helped him. In Wisconsin, a state full of Northern whites, it also helped him, albeit slightly. In Ohio, voters who said they prefered Clinton because of race provided half of her margin of victory. In Kentucky, full of white Southerners and not much else, Clinton crushed Obama, with over 15% of voters admitting that his race was an important factor.

By contrast, aside from a slight deficit in heavy African-American areas, Clinton's gender was an overall aide to her.

This just reflects a truth that's been obscured during the campaign — despite the fact that the media sometimes engaged in easy misogyny, the make-up of the Democratic Electorate (women outnumbered men in every contest) made Clinton's gender a major asset, not an obstacle to be overcome.

Sorry, Christie, but you're just wrong.

To be fair to Whitman, she's a Republican, and women who want to run as Republicans do face hurdles because of their gender. But them's the breaks when you belong to the asshole party.

Hillary Dead-Enders

The last people to leave the party are always the craziest. But as far as these things go, Hillary's hold-outs won't even be as effective as Ron Paul's renegade brigades.

And we can all be assured, that if their positions were reversed, and Hillary had somehow managed to win the nomination, Obama's base would have been much, much, much crazier.

Huckaveep?

This is worth reading: Huck Yeah. Ross Douthat argues for Huckabee's place on McCain's ticket as a way to start the inevitable post-election GOP infighting before the GOP actually loses this fall.

It's been pretty obvious for a while now (at least since 2004) that the future of the GOP is as some sort of "Christian Democrat" party. They'll need to move left in order to make up for the declining demographics of their constituency, and the party's southern base will force the move on economic issues, rather than foreign policy or social issues.

Or to put it another way, while Mike Huckabee is too flawed a candidate to ever become President, some form of Huckabeeism will lead the GOP out of the post-Bush wilderness.

McCain and evangelicals

This is correct:

The Washington Monthly: "In a nutshell, this is McCain's problem, and I don't see any way out of the box for him. His entire persona is based on being a moderate, reasonable guy, and if he keeps that up he loses a big chunk of the evangelical vote. But if he tries to move right and pick up the evangelicals, the independents will desert him in droves and vote for Obama. He just has no way of putting together a winning coalition."

But it's not the whole story. By my estimation, John McCain is boxed in on at least three levels: evangelicals, Hispanics, and lobbyists. Social moderates v. Evangelicals, as Keven explains; Hispanics v. GOP Xenophobes (or Southwest v. Southeast), and his Reformist allies v. Republican financiers. He's fucked in every way imaginable.

The only GOP group that McCain doesn't have some sort of problem with is the Neocons, and there aren't many of them outside of D.C. think tanks.

The race in six words

Johann Hari: it's hip vs hip operation, folks

Confusion

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JEFF ZELENY, NYT:

A Republican strategist said that, according to party monitoring services, Mr. Obama’s campaign had inquired about advertising rates in 25 states, including traditionally Republican states like Georgia, Mississippi and North Carolina. That would constitute a very large purchase. President Bush, whose 2004 campaign had the most expensive advertising drive in presidential history, usually ran commercials in a maximum of 17 states.

By Charles Babington, AP:

From now on, the great majority of Americans can be excused if they barely realize a presidential election is under way. They will see virtually no TV ads, visits by candidates or local news coverage.

That's because this campaign, like the last two, will focus on about 15 competitive states. Both parties see the other states as reliably in their camps and not needing attention, or totally out of reach and not worth the effort and expense of trying to win them. In either case, these states will largely be ignored.

So, who's lying to whom, about what, and why? Cui bono? Considering that Obama's campaign is in the habit of bragging about its 50-state strategy, it appears that both of these stories rely upon Republicans as sources. It could be that they're trying to minimize what Obama's going to do. But that doesn't make any sense, after all, people are going to notice a nationwide ad blitz.

Most likely: Republican operatives, and the media scum they inform, have no fucking clue what's coming next.

And we can be reasonably sure that Mr. Charles Babington is an idiot.

Ignored Media Narratives

Several things things that will be crucial to the outcome of the 2008 election are just being ignored by the media. I will attempt to explain these in greater length:

1. The real reasons Hillary Clinton lost.

2. The nationalization of the Democratic and Republican parties.

4. The shift towards a "Responsible Parties" model of government.

5. The Hispanic vote.

6. Explaining and understanding the "Eight year itch".

7. Deterministic models predict the election months in advance — finding the holy grail of political science.