Chutzpah

Just received what I consider to be an outrageous campaign email from Joe Biden:

David --

President-elect Obama and I have been assembling our team, and we plan to hit the ground running next month.

We want to be ready to go, and that's why I'm asking you to help us honor an outstanding commitment we made during the election.

Our campaign pledged to help Senator Hillary Clinton -- one of the vital members of our team and our future Secretary of State -- retire her campaign debt. That's the money her campaign owes to the vendors across the country that make our political process possible.

Barack and I had the deepest respect for Hillary as an opponent on the campaign trail. Her undeniable intellect, talent, and passion strengthened Barack as a candidate and tested our movement for change.

We welcome Hillary as a partner in our administration, and I hope you will show your support by helping Barack fulfill our campaign promise.

Will you make a contribution of $100 or more now to retire Hillary's campaign debt?

I saw your generosity and commitment to this team throughout the election, and I know we can do it.

In the general election, Hillary was one of our strongest advocates. She traveled the country and did more than 70 events, raising money and bringing new supporters into our campaign.

As Secretary of State, she will be indispensable in furthering Barack's agenda for change.

Let's welcome Hillary to the team and thank her for her efforts in support of our campaign by helping to retire her debt to the hard-working individuals and small businesses that were a part of the election:

[url removed]

Your support and generosity got us this far, and I know I can count on it now.

Thank you,

Joe

I've never understood this. In the first place, if as a candidate you borrow a whole bunch of money and then can't repay it, that's your problem--it's not your supporters' problem, and it's certainly not your opponent's supporters' problem. Second, it is my understanding that the Clintons are worth tens of millions of dollars. And they want my money? Are they fucking joking?

This is the first email from the Obama campaign that has actively pissed me off.

Yglesias demoted

Before today, my top political bloggers were Sullivan, Yglesias, and Klein, in that order. But after Yglesias' dumb post today and Klein's several awesome ones, Klein is my new #2. This is especially true now that we are in full DC-inside-politics mode with Obama building his administration and gearing up for the legislative battles ahead.

Let me filter some excerpts from Ezra Klein's blog, which has been on fire:

On Daschle and healthcare reform:

CNN is reporting that Tom Daschle will not only be Health and Human Services Secretary, but also health reform czar under the Obama administration. This is huge news, and the clearest evidence yet that Obama means to pursue comprehensive health reform. You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players.

...

Compare the choice of Daschle to Clinton's decision to task Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner with health care reform. Neither Clinton nor Magaziner had any relevant experience in Washington, either with the health care bureaucracy or with the legislative branch. They did not have deep relationships on the Hill or a nuanced understanding of the players. Hillary Clinton had spent the last few decades in Arkansas. Magaziner had helped Rhode Island build a new economic plan. Both of them were, fundamentally, policy wonks. And so they built a process that was, in essence, by wonks and for wonks. The resulting bill might have passed a meeting of the Brookings Institution's Executive Committee. It was an elegant and innovative policy idea. But it was not a robust piece of legislation. It was not responsive to the concerns of the public, and it was not built to win votes in Congress. All of this is explained at greater length in the lessons of 1994.

The choice of Daschle suggests that the Obama team has learned those lessons well.

On Lieberman:

Here's what you need to say about Lieberman: His heterodoxies have remained contained. Unlike John McCain, who conveyed his post-2000 disgust with the Republican Party by sponsoring a lot of liberal legislation on essentially random issues, Lieberman's fight with the Democrats has not strayed from foreign policy. For instance: His 2007 AFL-CIO voting record was 84 percent. That's exactly the same as his lifetime AFL-CIO voting record. In the most recent Congress, his score from the League of Conservation was 96 percent (which is actually a recent career high). Lieberman is, arguably, an extremely reliable Democratic vote. The exception, of course, is foreign policy, where he's an extremely reliable Republican vote.

On Rahm, Hillary, and the generally centrist feel of Obama's administration so far:

Rahm Emanuel sez:

He stressed that the new administration would "throw long and deep," taking advantage of the economic crisis to push wholesale changes in health care, taxes, financial re-regulation and energy. "The American people in two successive elections have voted for change, and change cannot be allowed to die on the doorsteps of Washington," Mr. Emanuel said.

Of course, the key is not what they want to achieve, but what they can achieve. The clear theme of Obama's transition team, White House staff decisions, and leaked cabinet appointments has been experience. Rahm Emanuel. Tom Daschle. Eric Holder. John Podesta. Hillary Clinton. Jim Messina. Pete Rouse. Phil Chiliro. And on, and on, and on. There's not much "change" here. Rather, the emphasis is on folks who know how Washington works, with the clear operating theory being that they'll know how to get things done. That's a different conception of "change" then presidents who come in and bring a lot of new people, which is what Clinton did (though, to be sure, Clinton didn't have a successful recent administration he could draw on for talent).

...

...[D]eciding to shorten the executive learning curve as much as possible and appoint folks with the experience to harness a transient opportunity isn't an implausible strategic decision. The staff will carry out the president's agenda. What's being sought out, then, is not brilliant new ideas for what that agenda should look like, but indisputable technical competence.

And there you have it.

The mind boggles

I just now watched the "full interview" of Sarah Palin after having only seen a few clips here and there. Unfortunately the whole thing is very heavily edited, leaving us to wonder what was left out (and, really, why can't they just post the thing in its entirety somewhere on their website?).

Anyway--wow. The word "farce" comes to mind. She simply could not answer the questions. He'd ask a very specific question--what three changes will you make to the Bush economic policy? should the U.S. cross into Pakistan to attack Al Qaeda?--and she would repeat the same scripted phrases over and over, phrases that did nothing to address the question. And in the cases when she finally relented and did answer the question, she rarely made much sense. For example, one of the three "changes" she would make to the Bush economic policy is "cut taxes". Are you serious?

What a train wreck of an interview. So unprepared. So unqualified. So ignorant. Could you imagine her in a debate with Hillary Clinton?

Words are useless. Just watch it for yourself. I'll save you the YouTube search:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
  

From Kennedy to Clinton

From Bill Clinton's speech to the convention, a truly Kennedy-esque inversion:

People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.

What a wonderful, succinct way of drawing the contrast between the demented Republican view of the world--in which we are forever serving up bluster and brinkmanship out of some abstract fear of "emboldening the enemy"--and the coolly pragmatic and principled view offered by Barack Obama. What an immense difference in maturity, pragmatism, temperament, optimism, and basic human decency there is between Clinton's speech and Giuliani's sneering diatribe against "liberals", against civil liberties, against imagined Democratic "elites" who, he fantasizes, spend their days looking down on their fellow countrymen and devising politically correct ways of saying the word "terrorist". One man is reasonable, says reasonable things, and is grounded in the empirical world; the other is completely unserious, says unserious things, and seems to be living in some kind of grotesque cartoon where upholding the Constitution comes in a distant third to eavesdropping on the American population carte blanche and unilaterally bombing the shit out of some distant country to show someone, somewhere, who is boss.

I mean--really. This has got to be the lowest, most ideologically bankrupt, most shameful moment in the history of the Republican Party. There are no ideas, only a Down Syndrome baby passed awkwardly from Palin to Palin. There is no acknowledgment of reality, only the bizarre and Orwellian spectacle of a ruling party calling for a "change" in Washington as if it hadn't had a stranglehold on power for the previous eight years. Stern promises that suspected terrorists will be tortured are met with whoops and energetic chants of "USA! USA!" Declarations that evil will be defeated are swallowed whole by an eager audience that is either unaware of or unconcerned by the fact that such statements contain virtually no information, that they are vapid, trivial appeals not to reason but to the raw emotions of nationalistic fervor.

That Republican convention hall is a crystal ball filled with dark, dark visions of a possible future that I hope with all of my being never comes to pass. And over the last few days, listening to the Clintons, Kerry, Gore, Obama--the decent ones, the right ones, the calm ones, the adults--I have never been prouder to be a Democrat.

Clinton's debt

I really don't understand this idea that Obama has some sort of obligation to Hillary Clinton to help her pay her debt from the primary campaign. Attitudes like this are completely mystifying to me:

Some Clinton supporters are grousing that Mr. Obama has yet to make the symbolic gesture of writing a check for $2,300, the maximum allowable campaign donation, to help retire her debt of over $12 million.

Am I missing something here? Clinton went into debt because she made the calculated decision to borrow money to win the primary. Why should someone else pay it off, let alone the very rival she borrowed the money to defeat? Moreover: aren't the Clintons supposed to be worth far more than $12 million? When their tax returns were released a few months ago, it was revealed that they had earned no less than "$109 million in the the last eight years". So it seems to me that Clinton ought to be more than capable of paying off her debts by herself.

'Tis but a scratch

This is the best leveraging of a Monty Python bit to take down a politician I've seen yet.

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

Fighting to the end

Hillary Clinton supporter Ellen Malcolm wants her to fight it out to the end:

So here we are in the fourth quarter of the nominating process and the game is too close to call. Once again, the opponents and the media are calling for Hillary to quit. The first woman ever to win a presidential primary is supposed to stop competing, to curtsy and exit stage right.

I can sympathize with her anger over people calling for her candidate to quit. If nothing else, it can look like the woman is being condescendingly patted on the head and ushered out of the still-very-male-dominated process--and I don't think even the appearance of that is acceptable.

But let's put things into perspective a little bit. It is not as though Clinton was the scrappy underdog who, through grit and determination, miraculously rose in the ranks to become a real contender for the nomination. The opposite is true: she was the heavy favorite to win, the "inevitable" candidate, the establishment favorite. By all accounts, she probably wouldn't be about to lose today if she hadn't shot herself in the foot in several creative different ways. So I think the victimization narrative that Malcolm is trying gin up here doesn't harmonize well with the facts.

In the end, I have no problems with Clinton finishing out the primary cycle, especially if she and her supporters feel that it is the fitting way to conclude things. But it's just an empirical fact at this point that Clinton has no chance of winning the nomination, and Clinton needs to recognize this. If she doesn't--and continues the harsh negative attacks, or, heaven help us, drags out the fight all the way to convention time--then she really will do serious harm to the Democratic Party.

Ironically, in the final analysis it is Malcolm who seems to be underestimating Clinton's power--by pretending that she is so marginalized that she cannot tear apart the party.

Hillary Clinton's quest to piss off everybody

Her latest inflammatory comments:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," she said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Now, in a primary race against the first serious black nominee ever, that's a pretty dumb thing to say. I don't think there was intentional malice here--I don't think she was making some kind of political calculation to be racially divisive--but I do think that she has got it into her head that, somehow, in making this kind of observation she is simply being a political realist, and that the thought of her being racist in any way is so laughable that no one would ever think of calling it racially divisive. And so she goes ahead and says it.

But in doing so, she's pissing everybody off. For example, she's certainly got Bob Herbert's hackles in the 12 o'clock position:

He can’t win! Don’t you understand? He’s black! He’s black!

The Clintons have been trying to embed that gruesomely destructive message in the brains of white voters and superdelegates for the longest time. It’s a grotesque insult to African-Americans, who have given so much support to both Bill and Hillary over the years.

...

But it’s an insult to white voters as well, including white working-class voters. It’s true that there are some whites who will not vote for a black candidate under any circumstance. But the United States is in a much better place now than it was when people like Richard Nixon, George Wallace and many others could make political hay by appealing to the very worst in people, using the kind of poisonous rhetoric that Senator Clinton is using now.

The crazy thing about it is, I'm sure the Clintons are so steeped in their perception of themselves that they'll fail to see how opinions like Herbert's have a legitimate basis. They'll probably come to the conclusion that Obama supporters are playing the race card on them, accusing the Obama campaign of turning a non-racist comment into a semi-racist one.

And none of this does the Democratic Party any good whatsoever.

Tact

There's been a bit of a dust-up recently over some comments that Hillary Clinton has made about Iran:

"I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran (if it attacks Israel)," Clinton said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."

"In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them," she said.

"That's a terrible thing to say but those people who run Iran need to understand that because that perhaps will deter them from doing something that would be reckless, foolish and tragic," Clinton said.

The thing is, though what she is saying is correct--any policy of deterrence entails the sort of massive retaliation that she is talking about--the way that she says it makes her sound unnecessarily aggressive.

In the first place, the question itself was a fairly outlandish hypothetical--there is absolutely no one who seriously believes that Iran would launch a direct attack against Israel. In fact, the reason this is the case is precisely because Iran and everyone else already knows that the United States would retaliate in such a situation (in addition to the retaliation that would be carried out by Israel itself). Therefore, Clinton's first reaction should have been to give a careful preface to her answer to make it clear that this was a purely hypothetical question with no immediate relevance to the current situation with Iran.

Next, rather than use colorfully bellicose language like "totally obliterate", she should have couched her answer in the most boring technocratic terms possible. I mean, you don't want to sound like you relish the idea of having to retaliate. Non-emotional, bureaucratic, mechanistic--this is how you want to express a policy of deterrence, because it gets the substantive point across without making anyone nervous or sending any confusing rhetorical messages. Moreover, she could have even avoided singling out Iran altogether, instead choosing to give her answer in terms of what the US generally does to protect close allies, Israel being one of them.

Obama, I think, is perceptive in seeing the potential trouble that remarks like Clinton's are likely to cause down the road:

"When Iran is able to go to the United Nations complaining about the statements made and get some sympathy, that's a sign that we are taking the wrong approach," Obama said.

Moreover, he seems to know how to give the more careful answer that I think is better to give:

"We have had a foreign policy of bluster and saber-rattling and tough talk, and in the meantime have made a series of strategic decisions that have actually strengthened Iran."

Israel is "the most important ally" the United States has in the Middle East, and that Washington would respond "forcefully and appropriately" to any attack, Obama said Sunday.

"But it is important that we use language that sends a signal to the world community that we're shifting from the sort of cowboy diplomacy, or lack of diplomacy, that we've seen out of George Bush," he said. "And this kind of language is not helpful."

It is not as if the sort of cowboy-diplomacy sloppiness of Clinton's remarks can be attributed to hers being off-the-cuff comments--she had already said earlier that Iran would undergo "massive retaliation" for an attack on Israel, and so she should have had her wording on this issue down pat.

In the end I think it comes down to a sort of fearfulness on the part of Democrats that has been ingrained in them by Republicans on national security issues, especially since the Republicans rose to dominance in the 90s: they don't want to look weak, and so they protect themselves from this perception by mimicking the Republicans, in style if not in actual policy. The result has been the dangerous lack of a counterweight to the sort of macho, with-us-or-against-us Bush foreign policy--an imbalance that expressed itself most painfully in the Democrats' non-existent opposition to the Iraq War resolution in 2003.

One thing I like about Obama is that he doesn't seem to have this fear. I greatly look forward to him taking on McCain on foreign policy in the general election.

...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.

"Race is over", NYT meta-declares

There is a NYT front page article that says that the punditry says that--with Obama and Clinton splitting North Carolina and Indiana yesterday--the race is over:

Very early this morning, after many voters had already gone to sleep, the conventional wisdom of the elite political pundit class that resides on television shifted hard, and possibly irretrievably, against Senator Hillary Clinton’s continued viability as a presidential candidate.

The moment came shortly after midnight Eastern time, captured in a devastatingly declarative statement from Tim Russert of NBC News: “We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it,” he said on MSNBC.

The comment was echoed on Drudge and soon repeated by many others.

Of course, the pundits will inevitably start talking about the NYT article...it's turtles all the way down, I'm telling ya.

Sixty minutes of Clinton

In case you're interested, here's an unvarnished hour of George Stephanapoulous questioning Hillary Clinton in a "town-hall" setting. She double-downs on the gas tax holiday nonsense, including the surprising statement that she "doesn't throw in her lot with economists". Huh?

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.

Gas tax holiday

The best, tightest explanation I've seen about why McCain's--and now Clinton's--proposed "gas tax holiday" doesn't make any sense is at Krugman's blog:

Why doesn’t cutting the gas tax this summer make sense? It’s Econ 101 tax incidence theory: if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Is the supply of gasoline really fixed? For this coming summer, it is. Refineries normally run flat out in the summer, the season of peak driving.

So the actual price of gasoline this summer is going to be what it's going to be, whether a portion of that price is paid to the government (in the form of a tax) or not. Eliminate a tax of 5%, and the price will rise 5%.

If you actually wanted to save the consumer money--which is what McCain and Clinton cynically claim the "gas tax holiday" will accomplish--you would have to introduce price controls. That is, you would have to have the government enforce some kind of maximum above which the price of gasoline could not rise. But of course, this wouldn't really work: though you'd save the consumer money, you'd also cause gas shortages that would hinder the consumer from getting gas at all.

At the end of the day, the price of gasoline is being driven up by scarcity--world demand is increasing significantly faster than world supply. No legislative gimmickry or tax holidays are going to change that basic fact.

Obama, at least, has had the backbone to speak this truth to the American people.

Clinton the underdog

I know it's William Kristol, and so anything he has to say about Democratic politics probably shouldn't count, but this just seems so crazy to me:

The fact is Hillary Clinton has turned out to be an impressive candidate. She has consistently defeated Barack Obama when her back was to the wall — first in New Hampshire, then in several big primaries on Super Tuesday, on March 4 in Ohio and Texas, and then last week in Pennsylvania, where she was outspent by almost 3 to 1, yet won handily.

Whoa there. When this thing started, Hillary Clinton was the overwhelming favorite: she had name recognition, the vast Clinton Rolodex at her disposal, and she was perceived to be the "inevitable" nominee by the press and the party elite. Now she is the feisty, embattled underdog. That's quite a distance to fall--and hardly "impressive".

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 same mistake again

I'm getting pretty tired of seeing this error in reasoning:

Obama's recent problems have caused some Democrats to worry about his chances of winning the general election. His performance in Ohio, they argue, where he won only a handful of counties and lost some by huge margins, will make his prospects there difficult, they say.

A candidate's performance in a primary does not imply anything about how that candidate will do in a general election. Just because Obama lost to Clinton amongst Ohio Democrats does not mean that Obama will lose to McCain amongst all Ohio registered voters. I wish the Washington Post and other media outlets would stop uncritically echoing this fallacious Clinton argument.

EDIT: The quote is actually taken from Dan Balz' campaign blog, and not from a regular Post article--so it seems in this instance that my issue is with one writer in particular, not the whole editorial board of the Washington Post.