Clinton campaign post-mortem

For those of you addicted, here's some pretty high-quality crack.

Thanks sis!

The rare apt WWII analogy

From the AP:

"They had an inevitability strategy, which was sort of a political Maginot line. It was illusionary. You just went around it, and, you know, Barack Obama did that."

-Dick Harpootlian, a former South Carolina Democratic chairman and Barack Obama supporter on Hillary Clinton's campaign strategy

...letting it die

Looks like the Obama campaign is going to let the Hillary campaign run its course, as it should:

Its campaign quarry finally cornered, the Obama high command gave it space. The Illinois senator was on track to become the first black presidential nominee of a major party and aides produced a small trickle of superdelegate supporters. But there was nary a word about hastening Clinton's departure.

"I think that it would be inappropriate and awkward and wrong for any of us to tell Senator Clinton when it is time for the race to be over," said Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill, speaking on a campaign-sponsored conference call with reporters.

Of course, I don't want to jinx anything--but the whole tenor of the media has suddenly shifted. Clinton's stock is plummeting. Can it be that we're finally nearing the end?

Clinton campaign must die a natural death

I think it's clear at this point that the Clinton campaign is in its final throes. Assuming realistic outcomes for the remaining contests, she cannot win in pledged delegates, and she will undoubtedly lose the popular vote, as well. Her remaining trump card--reinstating Michigan and Florida--would require the determined support of the party elites, but her support with them is waning: every day she bleeds a few more superdelegates.

However, the smart thing for the Obama campaign to do would be to pretend that none of this is the case, and to stop harping on tactical arguments as to why Clinton should drop out of the campaign "for the good of the party". Leave that argument for the punditry to make; coming from the Obama camp, all it does is raise the hackles of Clinton's base of supporters and make them feel like their candidate is getting elbowed out of the process.

If there is the appearance that Clinton withdraws from the race entirely of her own volition, it will go a long way towards healing the rift that has cropped up in the Democratic Party over the course of the long primary season. I know that if the situation was reversed and Obama was facing bleak prospects for the nomination, I'd certainly be happier with Clinton and the Democrats if they allowed my candidate to withdraw from the race on his own terms.

And if it turns out that Clinton is just absolutely determined to drag things out until the convention, then, well--there wasn't anything anyone could do about it anyway.

Geez, Bill

Looks like Bill got a little carried away:

Former President Bill Clinton was in West Virginia on his wife's behalf. In Clarksburg, he called her a scrapper and contrasted her appeal among working-class voters with the elitists he said support Obama.

"The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it's by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules," he said. "In West Virginia and Arkansas, we know that when we see it."

That's the "great divide" in this country? And I like how Obama supporters are the ones who are playing by "a different set of rules" when in fact it is Hillary Clinton who is trying to reverse the rules agreed upon with regards to the Michigan and Florida delegates.

Although maybe I should hold back--there doesn't seem to be much context given in the article, and so his comments could very well have been less sweeping than it appears here.

Responding to Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman has an op-ed today that makes a couple of points defending Hillary Clinton and a couple of points questioning Barack Obama. As a dutiful Obama supporter, I'll try to make arguments against some of his points.

Mr. Obama was supposed to be a transformational figure, with an almost magical ability to transcend partisan differences and unify the nation.

This is the common misunderstanding of Obama's rhetoric when content is confused with process. When Obama talks about "transcending" partisan differences, it does not mean that somehow everyone will hew to the same ideological line, or that ideological differences will go away. Rather, it means that the process of politics will be executed in good faith, and that the opposition will have its voice be heard and not be shut out of the process, encouraging pragmatic resolutions to the immense problems our nation faces: the Iraq War, the upcoming recession, health care affordability, rising energy prices, global warming, terrorism, etc. There is nothing "magical" about any of this, and there is no rule that says that only Obama is capable of achieving it. Clinton could have chosen this route of conciliary and empathetic politics, but instead has opted for 90s-style ultra-partisan warfare politics and its incessant "fighting" of the "Republican machine". This difference in political methodologies between the candidates is a substantive one. As Clinton herself demonstrated in the early 1990s with the 'Hillarycare' debacle, the wrong political strategy can doom even the most well-thought-out policy.

Once voters got to know him — and once he had eliminated Hillary Clinton’s initial financial and organizational advantage — he was supposed to sweep easily to the nomination, then march on to a huge victory in November.

If the implication is that this was the Obama campaign's prediction of how things would go, then it is wrong. In fact, the Obama campaign has for a long time been soberly predicting that Obama's margin of victory would not be large and that there would be absolutely nothing easy about toppling the Clinton machine. So there is more humility to the Obama campaign, I think, than Krugman lets on.

Well, now he has an overwhelming money advantage and the support of much of the Democratic establishment — yet he still can’t seem to win over large blocs of Democratic voters, especially among the white working class.

As a result, he keeps losing big states.

It has always been predicted that Obama would lose big states such as Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania (at around Super Tuesday, the Obama campaign itself predicted losses in these states by 4, 7, and 5 percent, respectively). This is part of the reason why Obama's campaign strategy has been to capitalize on lopsided margins in smaller states and/or caucus states where superior organization pays off.

And general election polls suggest that he might well lose to John McCain.

Tellingly, no citation. In the helpful metapoll over at RealClearPolitics, it shows that Obama is polling on average 1.5 points ahead of McCain, and Clinton is polling 0.6 ahead. In other words, even though the Democrats are currently campaigning against each other, they are both essentially in a dead heat with McCain (good news for Democrats). So I don't know where Krugman is getting his polling data from.

According to many Obama supporters, it’s all Hillary’s fault. If she hadn’t launched all those vile, negative attacks on their hero — if she had just gone away — his aura would be intact, and his mission of unifying America still on track.

But how negative has the Clinton campaign been, really? Yes, it ran an ad that included Osama bin Laden in a montage of crisis images that also included the Great Depression and Hurricane Katrina. To listen to some pundits, you’d think that ad was practically the same as the famous G.O.P. ad accusing Max Cleland of being weak on national security.

It wasn’t. The attacks from the Clinton campaign have been badminton compared with the hardball Republicans will play this fall. If the relatively mild rough and tumble of the Democratic fight has been enough to knock Mr. Obama off his pedestal, what hope did he ever have of staying on it through the general election?

I agree with Krugman that many Obama supporters overstate the damage done by Clinton's attacks, and tend to exaggerate the actual negativity of the ads themselves. At the same time, though, I don't think it makes sense to judge the negativity of Clinton's ads by using Republican attacks as a yardstick. Even if a Clinton attack is substantively less negative than a Republican one, the fact that it is uttered by a fellow Democrat can make it far more damaging. For example, the suggestion that Obama is less prepared to be President than John McCain is very damaging coming from the mouth of a leading Democrat, but is par for the course coming from a Republican.

Moreover, I think Krugman and Clinton supporters in general should be on guard against facile arguments of the type "what Clinton did was justified in the primary because Republicans will do the same thing in the general". To a certain extent it's fair--and in fact desired--for primary candidates to take off the gloves a little bit and go after each other's weak spots, especially the ones that will likely be exploited in the general election. Hillary's prevarications, Obama's preacher--bring it on. However, as I argue above, there are some attacks that cannot be made by Republicans, that can only inflict pain because they are uttered by Democrats. It doesn't make sense to say of these Democrat-on-Democrat attacks that they are some kind of precursor of what is to come in the general election, and therefore fair game.

[M]aybe his transformational campaign isn’t winning over working-class voters because transformation isn’t what they’re looking for.

From the beginning, I wondered what Mr. Obama’s soaring rhetoric, his talk of a new politics and declarations that “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (waiting for to do what, exactly?) would mean to families troubled by lagging wages, insecure jobs and fear of losing health coverage. The answer, from Ohio and Pennsylvania, seems pretty clear: not much. Mrs. Clinton has been able to stay in the race, against heavy odds, largely because her no-nonsense style, her obvious interest in the wonkish details of policy, resonate with many voters in a way that Mr. Obama’s eloquence does not.

I agree absolutely with Krugman: the majority of the sorts of "troubled" working-class families described above are going to favor Clinton's no-nonsense wonkish approach over Obama's admittedly airy-fairy rhetoric of "change" and "transcendence". No one's saying that Clinton doesn't have strengths--indeed, I think Obama has learned from Clinton that often times conveying wonkish competence and mastery of details can be more comforting than high-flying oratory. However, just because these voters prefer Clinton to Obama does not mean that they will prefer McCain to Obama. If these voters are really as policy and detail minded as Krugman suggests, then they will certainly choose any Democrat over any Republican in the general, come what may. The same is not necessarily true, however, for many Independents and new voters who do respond to Obama's soaring oratory--which is why I think Obama is better positioned than Clinton to win the general election in November.

Tellingly, the Obama campaign has put far more energy into attacking Mrs. Clinton’s health care proposals than it has into promoting the idea of universal coverage.

During the closing days of the Pennsylvania primary fight, the Obama campaign ran a TV ad repeating the dishonest charge that the Clinton plan would force people to buy health insurance they can’t afford. It was as negative as any ad that Mrs. Clinton has run — but perhaps more important, it was fear-mongering aimed at people who don’t think they need insurance, rather than reassurance for families who are trying to get coverage or are afraid of losing it.

To say that Obama "has put far more energy" into attacking Clinton than promoting universal coverage is, I think, an obvious exaggeration. But I do agree that the particular attack ad that Krugman refers to was an inexcusable misrepresentation of Clinton's health care proposals, and should never have been run.

The question Democrats, both inside and outside the Obama campaign, should be asking themselves is this: now that the magic has dissipated, what is the campaign about? More generally, what are the Democrats for in this election?

That should be an easy question to answer. Democrats can justly portray themselves as the party of economic security, the party that created Social Security and Medicare and defended those programs against Republican attacks — and the party that can bring assured health coverage to all Americans.

They can also portray themselves as the party of prosperity: the contrast between the Clinton economy and the Bush economy is the best free advertisement that Democrats have had since Herbert Hoover.

But the message that Democrats are ready to continue and build on a grand tradition doesn’t mesh well with claims to be bringing a “new politics” and rhetoric that places blame for our current state equally on both parties.

I think the Democratic candidate will be able to portray him or herself and the party in all the ways Krugman wants them to be portrayed, whether it's Obama or Clinton. What we're seeing here is the kind of myopia and cognitive dissonance that the long and bitter primary tends to cause amongst Democrats: we tend to lose sight of the fact that both candidates--though different in their political styles and what they emphasize--are overwhelmingly more the same than different, with almost no significant policy differences between them. Moreover, there is no tension between Obama's project of a "new politics" and the idea of building on "a grand tradition" of the Democratic Party, so long as we remember to distinguish between the content of policy proposals (which build on tradition) and the process of getting those policies passed into law (which requires "new politics").

So I think Krugman's criticisms of Obama are overblown. On the other hand, I'm also sympathetic to the article in general: with Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, and even David Brooks cheerleading for Obama week in and week out and bashing Clinton, a Clinton supporter like Krugman must feel obligated to balance out the scales a little bit on the NYT op-ed pages.

The babbling classes

The always thoughtful Stanley Fish directs a well-placed blow at the inanity of the politics of guilt by association:

This denouncing and renouncing game is simply not serious. It is a media-staged theater, produced not in response to genuine concerns – no one thinks that Obama is unpatriotic or that Clinton is a racist or that McCain is a right-wing bigot – but in response to the needs of a news cycle. First you do the outrage (did you see what X said?), then you put the question to the candidate (do you hereby denounce and renounce?), then you have a debate on the answer (Did he go far enough? Has she shut her husband up?), and then you do endless polls that quickly become the basis of a new round.

Meanwhile, the things the candidates themselves are saying about really important matters – war, the economy, health care, the environment – are put on the back-burner until the side show is over, though the odds are that a new one will start up immediately.

"Not serious" is a phrase that has described politics pretty much since I became politically aware in the mid-1990s. I think the fact that Obama at least tries to maintain some level of intelligence and maturity in the discourse of his campaign is one of the reasons he appeals to me.

How to destroy the Democratic Party

As the Democratic primary wears on, it is becoming more and more likely that it will not be decided until the superdelegates cast their 700-odd votes on the convention floor in Denver. There is now a battle being waged for the hearts and minds of these party elites, each candidate trying to demonstrate that he or she is the true choice of the people and most capable of bringing victory to the Democratic Party in November.

The Obama campaign knows that if it can finish the race with more delegates, more states won, and more popular votes, then it will be virtually impossible for the superdelegates to side with Clinton without acknowledging that they are overturning the will of the people and risking widespread outrage and disillusionment within the party. Many ordinary Americans have spent lots of money, time, and emotional energy supporting either Obama or Clinton--they will not be too pleased of their hard work is overturned by a handful of party fat cats all Tammany Hall style. And so Obama will continue to vie for this most-delegates/most-states/most-votes trifecta.

The Clinton campaign, of course, is aware of the situation and is trying its hardest to prevent Obama from doing this. Obama has already clinched the battle for most contests won--he has 28 compared with Clinton's 15, with 12 remaining. Not all data is available for the popular vote, but at this point Obama leads by about a half million votes, roughly 13 mil to Clinton's 12.4. And there is now widespread agreement amongst election mavens that, due to the proportional way that delegates are awarded, Clinton would need to win by unrealistically high margins in the remaining contests in order overtake Obama in pledged (i.e., non-super, or democratically earned) delegates. For example, this last Tuesday, even with the big win in Ohio Clinton still only netted about a 4 delegate gain on her rival.

She's getting good press right now and has been awarded the status of "having momentum", but the picture for Clinton is still bleak--which might explain why she is openly pursuing the nuclear option of trying to get the delegates from Michigan and Florida seated. For those not abreast, Michigan and Florida broke party rules and held their primaries early this year in order to protest the primary schedule. In solidarity with the Democratic National Committee's decision to follow the rules and ban these states from the convention, all the major candidates--including Obama and Clinton--signed a pledge that they would not "campaign" in those states or "participate in any way" for the primary. Though candidates did raise money in the states, there was no actual campaigning (no calls, no ads, no speeches, etc.).

Hillary Clinton won both states handily, but the contests were hardly legitimate. In Michigan, Obama wasn't even on the ballot--Clinton won 58%-37% against "uncommitted". In Florida both candidates' names were on the ballot, but due to her name recognition, Clinton was able to coast to an easy 16-point victory (indeed, Obama's pattern has been to start from behind in a state and close the margin with Clinton rapidly as his campaign picks up steam and he becomes more familiar to voters). In both contests, many supporters for both sides didn't show up to the polls because they were told that their votes wouldn't count anyway.

Before the results of these so-called "beauty-contest" primaries, there was not a peep from the Clinton campaign as to the fairness of the DNC ruling to strip the states of delegates--certainly, the fact that she signed the pledge and didn't campaign there seemed to be indication enough that she agreed with the DNC's decision. However--and with a degree of chutzpah that is rapidly becoming par for the course in the Clinton campaign--after the contests resolved in her favor, she suddenly began to question whether voters in Michigan and Florida were being disenfranchised, and openly requested that the delegates be counted at the convention. From the New York Times:

Ever since it became apparent that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton would win the primary vote in Florida on Jan. 29, when she took nearly 50 percent of the 1.7 million Democratic votes to Mr. Obama’s 33 percent, she has insisted that the state’s delegates be seated at the convention....Phil Singer, spokesman for the Clinton campaign, said today that the senator stands by her wish — restated as recently as yesterday — to have the delegates seated.

Not only is such a position blatantly self-serving and unfair, but it would require the Democratic Party to effectively change the rules midstream in order to help a specific candidate.

It is hard for me to believe that Clinton is unaware of how damaging this is, and possibly will be, to the Democratic Party. If her gambit fails, then she will have needlessly dragged out a long and bitter primary, giving McCain time to consolidate his base as well as ammunition to use in the general election (McCain can now quote Clinton as saying that, whereas McCain has a lifetime of experience and is therefore qualified to be commander-in-chief, Obama has nothing but a speech in 2002 under his belt--ouch). If she wins, she will have alienated the largest and most motivated youth vote in decades, and will have appeared to the African American community to have viciously stolen the nomination from the first viable black Presidential candidate in history. Moreover, the conservatives and independents that Obama has drawn to the Democratic side will flock to McCain. In short: she will have gained the nomination at the expense of hobbling her party.

If Obama secures his most-delegates/most-votes/most-states trifecta and he still loses the nomination based on the whim of the superdelegates, I will be angry and disappointed--but ultimately I will still probably soldier on through to November and cast my ballot for the Democratic side. However, if Clinton only pulls off the superdelegate coup because she was able to reinstate Michigan and Florida, then I am going to have an awful difficult time voting for her in the general election. There are simply limits to far how you can go to secure the nomination, how vicious the internecine battles can get. For her to steal the nomination from Obama in an eerie echo of Bush-Gore 2000 would be too much for me and many other Democrats to bear; it would destroy the party.

As a final note, I will mention that it looks like the DNC and the outlaw states are trying to hash-out a do-over scheme of some kind--there's been talks of holding primaries or caucuses in the two states. This might be a good compromise: even though the rules are the rules and Michigan and Florida willfully broke them, some magnanimity on the issue might be wise so as not to alienate Democrats in these states come general election time.

Evolving the campaign

Carlos has the idea that to really deliver on his message of change, Obama should leverage his massive campaign resources to start producing real results right now, even before he is elected:

It is a necessary evolution of his message, but luckily for Obama, it's also within reach if he acts soon. In this age of gigantic campaign bank accounts (Obama's in particular), and with his fervent support from young liberals and other political newcomers, he is in a unique position to convert his followers into organizers for more than just getting out the vote....

If the Obama campaign organized an event to raise funds for clinics that accept the uninsured in my city, I would be there in a heartbeat, and I'd stand by that campaign through thick and thin. But until he turns his message into action, my support for him will be timid and fleeting.

I think this is a great idea, and jibes particularly well with the sort of out-of-the-box/bottom-up thinking that has characterized the Obama campaign from the beginning. Obama has always claimed that he is but a figurehead for a movement, a grass-roots movement of ordinary people who are desperately worried about the direction of their country and who, if sufficiently well-organized, can usher in a new era of less divisive, more effective politics. If he could actually mobilize his supporters to implement significant local improvements in communities across the nation during the campaign, he would empirically vindicate his own theory of change--he would be demonstrating, in real time, the power of "ordinary people" to work together to achieve "extraordinary things".

There would also be a lot of other benefits. Clinton's primary rebuttal against Obama's "movement for change" argument is that it is nothing but empty rhetoric--flowery and nice, sure, but completely ineffective in a nasty political reality that requires "hard work" and "taking on the Republican machine". Obama would be turning Clinton's argument on its head. "Look," he'd say, "you say I'm all talk--fine. But while you were spending $100,000 on an attack ad in Pennsylvania, my campaign decided instead to help build low-income housing in Philadelphia and to raise funds for a struggling veteran's hospital in Pittsburgh. My 'talk' has resulted in bricks and mortar and hospital beds--what has yours accomplished?" I'm not sure what she could say to this.

Moreover, the whole concept works to Obama's advantage because it--like Obama's candidacy--is in some sense extra-political. Obama frequently claims that he will "transcend" partisan politics by bringing in fresh players to the democratic process and instituting change on a level not possible within the current political framework. Coming together to do community work wouldn't be about the political goal of electing Obama, per se--it would be about the more primal, pre-political desire to work with fellow Americans of all ideologies toward a goal that everyone shares and really believes in.

The press would eat it up. To my knowledge, no campaign has ever done community work unrelated to the campaign to demonstrate a point about itself. Even if Clinton accuses the Obama campaign of cynical motivations, of staging a publicity stunt--who cares? Obama can say with a smile that even when he's cynical he brings people together. He can mock Clinton's distorted, Washington-poisoned worldview, where "integrity" means sliming your political opponents to the max and "cynicism" means organizing people in the community for change.

And, of course, some veterans and low-income individuals might appreciate the effort, too--no matter who gets elected in the end.