Re: Gas Tax Holiday

Via Yglesias, it looks like at least one reporter is actually calling bullshit on the "gas tax holiday":

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.

Wisdom: received

From David Brooks' infuriating op-ed:

Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos of ABC News are taking a lot of heat for spending so much time asking about Jeremiah Wright and the “bitter” comments. But the fact is that voters want a president who basically shares their values and life experiences. Fairly or not, they look at symbols like Michael Dukakis in a tank, John Kerry’s windsurfing or John Edwards’s haircut as clues about shared values.

Do they? We all know that the media presumes that these events are meaningful to voters. I mean, after all, if Dukakis loses the election after appearing silly in a tank, then it follows that Dukakis lost the election because he appeared silly in a tank. I mean, there's no logical fallacy with a fancy Latin name lurking anywhere in that reasoning, right?

Clearly, when any candidate loses an election, the loss can be attributed to whatever gaffe that candidate committed that the media played up the most. Based on this, Brooks' assertion that voters care about shared-values-and-life-experiences clues cannot be denied. Oh, and also: knowing how to bowl is sufficient for two people sharing the same "life experience".

I see nothing wrong with any of this.

Obama ex post facto

He looks a lot better after the debate--and is having a lot more fun:



UPDATE: Shamefully, I was too white to pick up the subliminal pop-cultural reference. Which probably means that, therefore, Alex is less white than me. Oh man.

A depressing view of a journalist's job

David Brooks had an uncharacteristically off-base comment about tonight's Democratic debate:

First, Democrats, and especially Obama supporters, are going to jump all over ABC for the choice of topics: too many gaffe questions, not enough policy questions.

I understand the complaints, but I thought the questions were excellent. The journalist’s job is to make politicians uncomfortable, to explore evasions, contradictions and vulnerabilities. Almost every question tonight did that. The candidates each looked foolish at times, but that’s their own fault.

Wrong, David. Though the journalist's job often entails making politicians uncomfortable in a variety of ways, this sort of gotcha-game is not the journalist's job per se.

It is not helpful to "expose" a "contradiction" of some candidate when there is nothing at stake besides making the candidate look momentarily foolish; there's got to be some substantive and pressing issue that the interrogation is leading up to, some civic payoff. Thus, grilling Hillary Clinton about her sniperfire remarks is fine but only if it's leading up to some hard questions about just what her claims of experience amount to; and hammering Obama on the Wright issue is appropriate so long as it serves as an entry point into what Obama's views of race are. But lingering for 45 minutes on this stuff with no substantive upshot is nothing more than the fetishization of insider campaign politics.

Absolut power

Upon reading Maureen Dowd's insider account of the drinking habits of the various candidates, I was struck by the prevalence of vodka as the go-to alcoholic beverage of the power elite:

McCain’s pals know him as a man who enjoys libations of vodka with little green cocktail olives. Over the years, at dinners with reporters, I noted he had the habit of ordering one double vodka and sipping it slowly. And there was that famous Hillary-McCain Estonian drink-off in 2004, when Hillary instigated a vodka shot contest and McCain agreed with alacrity (even though he later offered a sketchy denial)....

...[Obama] is boringly abstemious — and reporters traveling with him find him aloof. On a 2005 trip to Russia, he priggishly requested that his vodka shot glass be filled with water.

Oddly, Hillary, a Tracy Flick Goodie Two Shoes growing up, is the only one who seems to be enjoying her vices.... Her campaign doesn’t deny that she likes to kick back, at the end of a long day, with a vodka on her plane.

I've heard that in the bartending world, the rap on vodka is that it's the sort of "universal solvent" of alcohols--tasteless, odorless, and good for nothing except getting trashed in a cut-to-the-chase kind of way. I wonder if the preference for vodka amongst powerful politicians comes from a desire for undiluted medicine that would cure them of the incredible stress and anxiety that comes with their occupation--or maybe the purity of the vodka is a delightfully crisp and refreshing contrast to the constant bullshitting that politics requires.

In either case, if it were me I'd be drinking scotch. I've always felt it to be nothing less than civilization distilled into a glass with two two ice cubes.

Democratic libel

In his latest column, Frank Rich correctly calls out both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for misrepresenting John McCain's "100 years in Iraq" comment:

REALLY, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton should be ashamed of themselves for libeling John McCain. As a growing chorus reiterates, their refrains that Mr. McCain is “willing to send our troops into another 100 years of war in Iraq” (as Mr. Obama said) or “willing to keep this war going for 100 years” (per Mrs. Clinton) are flat-out wrong.

What Mr. McCain actually said in a New Hampshire town-hall meeting was that he could imagine a 100-year-long American role in Iraq like our long-term presence in South Korea and Japan, where “Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed.” See for yourself on YouTube.

...

The Democrats should...stop repeating their 100-years-war calumny against Mr. McCain. There’s too much at stake for America for them to add their own petty distortions to an epic tragedy that only a long-overdue national reckoning with hard truths can bring to an end.

This sort of distortion is especially disappointing coming from Obama, who is supposed to be committed to the raising the level of political discourse in this country. I hope that he issues a public apology to McCain and reiterates both McCain's views and his own in a fair-minded way.

Izott better than PBS?!

An article by one Froma Harrop complains about Hillary-bashing in the press of late, including the coverage of the comment from Sen. Leahy that Clinton ought to quit for the good of the party. Here is the criticism:

The latest collapse started some days ago on what is normally a four-star destination for good journalism, PBS's "NewsHour." The news summary started off with this: "Clinton's fellow Democrat in the Senate, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, today urged her to leave the race for the good of the party."

The "fellow Democrat" also happened to be one of Barack Obama's most ardent supporters, but whoops, they forget to mention that. For days even mainstream media were portraying Leahy, Connecticut Sen. Chris Dodd and other members of the Obama team as "elders" thinking only of the party.

I agree that, if true, that is some biased coverage of the Leahy comment. However, I can plead innocent to this crime. For I included this caveat in an earlier post about the comment:

It should be noted that Leahy is an Obama supporter, so it is not as if he has any kind of neutral-observer/elder-statesman gravitas here.

Dude! I'm like so even-handed.

Political Animal

Hillary Clinton has decided to personally weigh in on the Obama-Wright controversy:

"You know, I spoke out against Don Imus, saying that hate speech was unacceptable in any setting, and I believe that.... I think you have to speak out against that. You certainly have to do that, if not explicitly, then implicitly by getting up and moving."

What is interesting to me about this is the equivalence it strikes between Clinton's relation to Don Imus and Obama's relation to his pastor. In the first instance, you have two publicly-facing figures--Clinton and Imus--who are strangers to each other and yet both occupy a spot on the broad stage of American politics. Their interaction with each other was nothing more than part of the strange kabuki that invariably plays out whenever anyone runs afoul of the (sometimes arbitrary but mostly useful) rhetorical boundaries that separate racist from non-racist speech. Even despite the fact that no one seriously believed that Don Imus was actually a racist--and even though the women who were the target of his unfortunate "nappy headed hos" remark publicly forgave him for the mistake--a long line of unrelated public figures, including Clinton, went on television to "speak out" against Imus and say all sorts of obligatory things meant to send signals of support to those whose political power is expressed, in part, by universal recognition of and adherence to the boundaries that delineate acceptable political rhetoric on race. And, though doing this may have been unfair to Imus on a personal level insofar as it too-quickly castigated him as a racist, there was a political justification for it because it reinforced, re-validated, and re-legitimized the rhetorical boundaries that signify America's rejection of racism. So Clinton subjugated the personal to the political in dealing with Imus' gaffe; but this followed naturally from the fact that Clinton only had a political, and not personal, relationship with Imus.

Obama is in a different kind of bind because the unacceptable remarks were made not by a stranger who shares the national political stage, but a dear friend, mentor, and spiritual guide. If Obama were to "speak out" against Wright and sever ties with him--as Clinton seems to suggest Obama ought to do--he would, at least according to the rhetorical logic of American politics, be "sending a strong message" that no racist speech ought to go unpunished, and would thereby reinforce the legitimacy of America's stand against racism. However, it would also come at a great cost to Obama personally: he would be throwing someone he cares about under the bus, and compromising his integrity in the process. Obama's response was to try his best to have it both ways: while at the same time doing right by his pastor and defending him as a good man who sometimes says inflammatory things, he defused the rhetorical implications of not categorically denouncing him in front of the nation by explicitly addressing race in a major speech. This attempt to have it both ways was risky for Obama because it required Americans--and the media--to hear the speech as something meant to engage them directly and explicitly on race, rather than indirectly through rhetorical code geared primarily toward media consumption and echo-chambering. It is not clear if Obama was completely successful in this, but the fact that his campaign has not entirely collapsed suggests that he was at least successful enough.

Obama's demonstrated ability to survive politically without sacrificing his personal sense of decency puts Clinton's reputation for cut-throat politics into sharp relief. Consider David Brooks' recent devastating assessment of Clinton as some kind of relentless political beast:

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

I have always thought these judgments of Clinton to be unfair; they describe any and every politician, Obama included. But the reason why Clinton gets this reputation and Obama instead gets dubbed "authentic" is not because one is calculating and the other is not, but because one is making a different calculation than the other. While Obama has attempted to bypass the often stifling limitations of conventional political rhetoric to good effect--admitting drug use, conceding that some ideas from opposing ideologies are worthwhile--Clinton has waged political war from firmly within its confines. Such a strategy must have appeared low-risk to her in the short-run; but over time, it has earned her the reputation of soulless, inhuman political animal.

Senator Leahy: "Hillary Clinton is naked!"

Finally a prominent Democrat goes ahead and says it:

Sen. Patrick Leahy has gone where no Democratic leader has dared go. It's time, the Vermont senator said, for Hillary Clinton to get out of the presidential race. "She ought to withdraw and she ought to be backing Senator Obama," he told Vermont Public Radio.

It should be noted that Leahy is an Obama supporter, so it is not as if he has any kind of neutral-observer/elder-statesman gravitas here. But still, by publicly stating the obvious he could end up starting a chorus of Democrats urging Clinton to wrap it up.

If enough voices chime in, the question of whether Clinton should withdraw will start to dominate the news cycle--a development which may or may not be good for the party. On the one hand it might actually push Clinton into withdrawing, allowing the Democrats to consolidate behind Obama and finally begin campaigning for the general. On the other hand, it may further alienate Clinton's many, many supporters, who already feel like their candidate has been unfairly maligned by the media and many in the Democratic leadership (e.g. Nancy Pelosi).

Of course, the best option would be for Clinton to withdraw unprompted, her campaign dying a natural death--but it seems like if this was going to happen, it would have happened by now.

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.

Primary brinksmanship

A Gallup poll result that has been gaining traction on the internets and in the media suggests there will be heavy Democratic defections in the general election to the McCain side. Specifically, it says that 28% of Clinton supporters would vote for McCain over Obama in the general election, and that 19% of Obama supporters would vote for McCain over Clinton.

My intuition is that, if accurate, these numbers will subside dramatically once the primary is over and the general election campaign starts in earnest. In the heat of the primary it can be very emotionally satisfying to say that if X wins, fuck it, I'm voting McCain. Moreover, it also makes sense from a purely tactical point of view: if you can convince other Democrats that you and lots of others will walk if your candidate isn't chosen, it may convince them to vote for your candidate in an attempt to keep you around. Telling a pollster that you favor McCain over your candidate's primary opponent is one way of pursuing this strategy.

So what's happening here, I think, is a mixture of saying the emotionally satisfying thing but also engaging in some political brinkmanship. But I doubt many people will follow through on their threats and actually pull the lever for McCain in November.

At the end of the day, no one wants to stay in Iraq.

The kitchen sink was shaped like a boomerang

After a week of Hillary Clinton on the offensive and Obama on the defensive with the Wright controversy going on, Clinton's positive rating is down from 45% to 38%, but Obama's has remained almost steady:


(Related article)

I think she just may be trying to dig herself out of a hole at this point. The negative campaigning and fratricidal hardball tactics can't be doing anything at this point but polarizing the hardcore Clinton and Obama supporters and alienating the rest of the Democrats, including the Democratic establishment. And yet still she continues on.

I suppose she has somehow justified it all to herself--probably something along the lines of, "Well it's no worse than what the Republicans are gonna do--if he can't handle this barrage, then he wouldn't have won in the general anyway." But when certain things come from a fellow Democrat, it stings more than it ever could coming from a Republican--for example, that McCain has the right experience to be commander-in-chief but Obama does not.

I wish I knew what was going on in that head of hers.

PS: Tim Russert looks like a turnip.

Clinton's Praetorian Guard moves in on Pelosi

According to Reuters, 20 prominent Hillary Clinton supporters have sent a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi politely strong-arming her into retracting her opinion on how superdelegates should vote:

The 20 prominent Clinton supporters told Pelosi she should "clarify" recent statements to make it clear superdelegates -- nearly 800 party insiders and elected officials who are free to back any candidate -- could support the candidate they think would be the best nominee.

Pelosi has not publicly endorsed either Clinton or Barack Obama in their hotly contested White House battle, but she recently said superdelegates should support whoever emerges from the nomination contests with the most pledged delegates -- which appears almost certain to be Obama.

"This is an untenable position that runs counter to the party's intent in establishing superdelegates in 1984," the letter from the wealthy Clinton backers said.

"Superdelegates, like all delegates, have an obligation to make an informed, individual decision about whom to support and who would be the party's strongest nominee," said the letter signed by some of Clinton's biggest fund raisers.

Like most other arguments coming from Clinton supporters these days, this one doesn't make much sense. Everybody concedes that the superdelegates can use whatever criteria they want in casting their vote at the convention. What Pelosi is suggesting is that--given that the superdelegates are free to choose any criteria they want--the criterion that ought to trump all others is whether the candidate won the most pledged delegates. I imagine that her reasoning behind this is that nominating a candidate that has less pledged delegates will be seen as illegitimate by Democratic voters, and that the candidate would therefore not be "the party's strongest nominee" in the general election.

The letter makes it sound like Pelosi is trying to change the rules, when really she is just offering advice to the superdelegates--advice that they can heed or reject without Pelosi having to "clarify" anything.

If you're going to play, play nice

I agree with what Nicholas Kristoff says in his latest op-ed:

If Mrs. Clinton can run a high-minded, civil campaign and rein in her proxies, then she has every right to continue through the next few primaries, and the Democrats might even benefit from the bolstered attention and turnout. But if the brawl continues, then she and her husband may be remembered by many people who long admired them as having the same effect on Mr. Obama this November that Ralph Nader had on Al Gore in 2000.

It's not so much that she's staying in the race even though she doesn't have a chance of winning. It's that she's tearing apart her fellow Democrat--and her party along with him.

Sufficient condition

Based anecdotally on my readin's of the internets over the last month or two, it seems that there is widespread agreement that winning the most states, pledged delegates, and popular votes is a de facto sufficient condition for winning the Democratic Primary. Says one superdelegate from Washington (who originally endorsed Hillary Clinton):

The Democratic party should come together around the candidate with the most delegates, the most states and the largest popular vote, Cantwell said. The pledged delegate count will be the most important factor, she said, because that is the basis of the nominating process.

More evidence of the widespread consensus about the sufficiency of the states/delegates/votes trifecta comes from Clinton supporter Senator Evan Bayh (of Indiana), in the form of an attempt to tack on a fourth meaningful category: the number of electoral college votes from the states won in the primary (surprise surprise--this is a category in which Clinton is leading). Bayh wouldn't have been compelled to make this silly argument if he didn't recognize that the trifecta is indeed a sure path to the nomination.

And the argument is silly--it makes no sense whatsoever. The main mistake isn't in weighting primary states' importance according to their share of electoral votes--the main mistake is in thinking that primary victories correlate with general election victories. Winning a primary in a state does not mean that a general election victory is necessarily likely to follow. There could be a small number of Democrats in the state, for example, or it could be that the Democrats who voted for the primary loser would rather sit out the general election or even switch to the Republican side. So Obama winning lots of primaries in red states such as Idaho does not necessarily mean that he will do well in those states in the general election, since they are overwhelmingly Republican. And, conversely, Obama losing big primaries in California and New York does not mean that he will lose those states in the general election, since they are overwhelmingly Democratic. So, the argument that this electoral votes criterion is some kind of measure of electability in the general is absurd.

In any case, the states/delegates/votes trifecta makes sense as a sufficient condition to win the primary not because it demonstrates the candidate's viability in the general election, per se, but because it is an unambiguous expression of the will of Democrats.

Richardson prefers honey to vinegar

Bill Richardson responds to James Carville likening him to Judas for endorsing Obama instead of Hillary Clinton:

"I'm not going to get in the gutter like that," Richardson said of the comments from informal Clinton adviser James Carville. "And you know, that's typical of many of the people around Senator Clinton. They think they have a sense of entitlement to the presidency."

Yikes. Now, obviously, Clinton herself surely had nothing to do with the Judas comparison--it's just one of her advisers spouting off, and she doesn't really have any control over that. However, I think that in the long run this sort of thing--the internecine name calling, spinning, belittling, misrepresenting, arm-twisting--has really soured the Democrat establishment on the Clintons. It has certainly soured Richardson.

Moreover, Obama seems to have taken the opposite tack, as illustrated in Richardson's entertaining account of how Obama once saved him during one of last year's Democratic primary debates:

"I had just been asked a question -- I don't remember which one -- and Obama was sitting right next to me. Then the moderator went across the room, I think to Chris Dodd, so I thought I was home free for a while. I wasn't going to listen to the next question. I was about to say something to Obama when the moderator turned to me and said, 'So, Gov. Richardson, what do you think of that?' But I wasn't paying any attention! I was about to say, 'Could you repeat the question? I wasn't listening.' But I wasn't about to say I wasn't listening. I looked at Obama. I was just horrified. And Obama whispered, 'Katrina. Katrina.' The question was on Katrina! So I said, 'On Katrina, my policy . . .' Obama could have just thrown me under the bus. So I said, 'Obama, that was good of you to do that.'"

You have to wonder how little things like that affected Richardson's decision to endorse...

Conservatism, Bush, and Obama from the--er--gay HIV-positive conservative libertarian Catholic perspective

Andrew Sullivan's views of conservatism, Bush, and Obama in a nutshell:

Conservatism, at its core, is about the frailty of human goodness, the limits of human knowledge, the virtue of self-doubt when that is required, restraint on government executive power, and the correction and admission of error when necessary. What has happened to conservatism under Bush is that it has become a messianic, ruthless, totally certain imposition of ideology (fused even more lethally with theology). Obama is not the answer to this conservative predicament. He is a "progressive" liberal - but his liberalism contains more conservative elements of reason and prudence and restraint than the current Republican party.

I don't think the word "conservative" conjures up a rational and skeptical worldview in the heads of very many Americans, liberal or conservative--which is too bad. We'd all be a lot better off if it did.