Category: Politics

Is Obama’s Gaffe Hillary’s Salvation?

American Research Group‘s latest Pennsylvania poll shows a dramatic swing in the Democratic primary race from a 45-45% tie early this month to a 20-point Clinton lead this weekend. Could this be the turnaround for Hillary? If electability was what matters, yes, but electability is not what the Democrats are looking at in this race.

There have been many on the Democratic side calling for Clinton to withdraw from the race. In the end, Hillary Clinton may have made the right tactical call in hanging on as long as she has—the longer Obama goes under the spotlight the greater the chance of him saying something that would land him in trouble. Even though Hillary has made her own mistakes, nothing she’s said has been as destructive as Obama’s comments. Even though the electoral tide is still against her, by Denver it is possible that Hillary could come into the convention with a credible case for the nomination. Obama may lead in elected delegates, but he won’t be able to win without the superdelegates any more than she will. If Hillary leads in the popular vote when all is said and done—and that is quite possible—are Democratic superdelegates really going to vote against the majority of Democratic voters?

On the other hand, it’s not as though Hillary Clinton is a woman of the people either. Both Clinton and Obama grew up arguably middle class, they have a record of associating themselves with the academic elites. Clinton is hardly the poster child for a campaign against liberal condescension. Her outright falsehoods about sniper fire in Bosnia and her record during her husband’s Presidency don’t help her image.

The Politico has an excellent article on what Clinton wishes she could say, but can’t do so without jeopardizing her own candidacy:

There’s nothing to say that the Clintonites are right about Obama’s presumed vulnerabilities. But one argument seems indisputably true: Obama is on the brink of the Democratic nomination without having had to confront head-on the evidence about his general election challenges.

That is why some friends describe Clinton as seeing herself on a mission to save Democrats from themselves. Her candidacy may be a long shot, but no one should expect she will end it unless or until every last door has been shut.

Skepticism about Obama’s general election prospects extends beyond Clinton backers. We spoke to unaffiliated Democratic lawmakers, veteran lobbyists, and campaign operatives who believe the rush of enthusiasm for Obama’s charisma and fresh face has inhibited sober appraisals of his potential weaknesses.

The Politico article is right—Obama has not taken the kind of lashing that he will invariably get in the general election. The Clinton camp can quite credibly claim that if Barack Obama gets the nomination, he will lose in a landslide. The Democrats will do very well with urban professionals and African-Americans, and lose rural voters, women, Jewish voters, and Reagan Democrats. Beyond the Obama hype lies the cold reality of the electoral math: and all Clinton needs to do is carry the states that Kerry won in 2004 and win one swing state like Ohio, Florida, or Nevada. What states has Clinton done well in? Ohio, Florida, and Nevada. The electoral math favors Clinton, and the Clinton camp knows it.

Despite all this, Obama will still get the nomination. The Democrats are increasingly young, liberal, and affluent. Obama appeals to the New Democratic Party, while Hillary Clinton appeals to the old. Hillary Clinton, much to her dismay, is not the face of American liberalism today. It is hardly shocking that outspoken liberals who want to see America remade in the “progressive” image are flocking to Obama. He’s one of them.

The fact that this is a recipe for electoral disaster is not a factor in the Democratic race. Democrats voted with their heads rather than their hearts in selecting John Kerry in 2004 on the basis that Kerry was “electable.” Barack Obama is Howard Dean without the crazy and with the added benefit of being someone who can play to the African-American base of the Democratic Party. Even though Clinton probably has the better argument on electability, she’s winning the wrong contest. The Democrats don’t want electable, they want someone who represents what the Democrats want to be: a party that is unabashedly liberal wrapped in the mantle of “progressivism.” Obama is comfortable with the Daily Kos set, and it is that demographic that now controls the Democratic Party.

Obama has definitely hurt himself and that gaffe undoubtedly will help Hillary Clinton carry Pennsylvania, and perhaps win the popular vote. Yet the heart of the Democratic Party is understandably with Obama, and even though Clinton is the more electable of the two, electability is not the factor that will influence who will win the nomination this year.

Is This How We Improve Our Image Abroad?

John Fund writes on the Democrats’ opposition to free trade with Colombia. In a time when both Democratic candidates are promising to improve our foreign relations, both are flunking this key test of leadership.

Colombia is a democratic ally fighting off a vicious Marxist insurgency being aided by the autocratic regime of Hugo Chávez. President Alvaro Uribe is fighting to keep his country from becoming a tool of Chávez’s hegemonic ambitions and trying to prevent narcotics from funding terrorism. He has done a great deal to stop the violence that has ravaged Colombia—the murder rate has dropped precipitously under his leadership, and the Marxist FARC guerillas have been unable to destabilize the government and turn Colombia into a Communist puppet state.

Yet the Democratic Party has decided to turn against Colombia—for reasons that reek of politics rather than substance:

President Uribe made clear how disappointed he was that the Democratic front-runner had chosen domestic politics over geopolitical stability: “I deplore the fact that Sen. Obama . . . should be unaware of Colombia’s efforts,” he said in a statement. “I think it is for political calculations that he is making a statement that does not correspond to Colombia’s reality.”

The simple truth is that the opposition to the trade agreement–from the Democratic presidential contenders to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi–has nothing to do with reality. Rep. Charles Rangel, chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, admitted as much recently: “It’s not the substance on the ground–it’s the politics in the air.”

The reality is that Colombia is not a threat to American workers. The free trade agreement submitted for ratification lowers trade barriers on both sides and gives US manufacturers greater access to Colombia’s markets. 90% of good coming from Colombia are already imported duty-free. The argument that this bill would be injurious to the interests of American workers has absolutely no basis—nor do the attacks against President Uribe accusing him of attacking union organizers in Colombia.

The Democratic Party has developed a knee-jerk reaction to anything that resembles free trade—and for a party that claims the “progressive” mantle that sort of isolationism is a throwback to the days of nativist protectionism. What’s worse is that it compromises the Democrats’ promises that they will “restore America’s reputation” abroad—exactly why should anyone trust us if we’re willing to slander one of our strongest regional allies in Latin America?

If the Democrats’ rhetoric on international relations was more than empty words, they would be working to ensure that President Uribe is not threatened by his neighbors and would be pledging to support his democratic government. Instead, both candidates are engaged in a war of words against an American ally. That is hardly the way to go about restoring our image abroad.

For Hillary, Is Geography Destiny?

One of the joys of the Internet is that there are some really smart people who have access to a lot of data that can be combined in ingenious ways—and this very detailed examination of geography and voting trends in the Democratic race makes a fascinating argument. Overlaying the voting patterns of the Clinton/Obama race with a map of Appalachia, it’s quite clear that there’s a trend: Appalachian voters overwhelmingly support Clinton.

That means something in terms of the upcoming contests. The states that are coming up: Pennsylvania, Indiana, North Carolina, and Kentucky are all states that make up the main part of the Appalachian region. They’re perfect territory for Hillary: largely white, economically distressed, and made up of voters who are more concerned about issues like national security. Could she win 60% in those states? The author of this analysis thinks it’s very possible.

Despite the general loathing of the Clinton machine, the reality of the race is that neither Obama nor Hillary can claim that they have the race in the bag. Obama is ahead, but not enough that he won’t likely have to use the superdelegates to get enough to win. He’s ahead in the popular vote, but if you take out Cook County, Illinois where his home base is, he’s not ahead by all that much: and it’s quite possible that Hillary could pull ahead.

As much as some Democrats would like Hillary to step aside, it doesn’t make sense for her to do now, at least as far as the electoral math is concerned. The Obama campaign does not have this race locked up, and they’re about to fight on some very inhospitable territory. Hillary Clinton will not let this race go until it is clear that she cannot win, and that may not be until she steps out onto the convention floor.

Time For A New Map?

Michael Barone had an interesting column arguing that the old red state/blue state divide won’t be in play in 2008:

Voters have a clear generic preference for the Democratic Party, but recent polls show a McCain-Obama race to be close. And don’t be surprised if those numbers move around in the course of the campaign.

It’s not like we haven’t seen voters move around before. At the beginning of the 1990s, it was conventional wisdom that Republicans had a lock on the presidency and Democrats had a lock on Congress, or at least on the House of Representatives. After all, Republicans had won five of the last six presidential elections and Democrats had held control of the House for 36 years.

But in 1992, voters elected a Democratic president, and in 1994 they elected a Republican House (and Republican Senate, as well). In 1988, Florida and New Hampshire voted 61 percent and 62 percent for George H.W. Bush — solidly red states. But in 1992 and 1996, New Hampshire voted for Bill Clinton. And in 1996, Florida did, as well. In 1992, Montana, Colorado and Georgia voted for Bill Clinton. By 2000, these were solidly Republican states.

Barone is the dean of American politics these days, and for good reason. The 2008 map may not like much at all like the maps in 2000 and 2004. Take Pennsylvania, a state that was solidly Democratic in 2000 and 2004. Should Obama get the nomination, it could be up for grabs. Republican states like Nevada may also swing the other way. The traditional “swing” states from 2000 and 2004 are also up for grabs: New Hampshire, Ohio and Florida could all swing from one party to another (as New Hampshire did between 2000 and 2004). There’s a new crop of potential swing states: Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa are all states that could become major battlegrounds in the coming months.

Barone’s right: trying to shoehorn this race into the 2000/2004 paradigm is not necessarily such a smart idea. The idea of a monolithic bloc of “red” or “blue” states is the exception rather than the rule. There will be new dynamics in play in this election, and new battle lines drawn. That will make this election much harder to predict, but also far more interesting…

Richardson Endorses Obama

Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson is set to endorse Barack Obama today. This is somewhat surprising given that Richardson has long been a political patron of the Clintons and was one of the top picks as Hillary’s VP.

It’s easily foreseeable that a deal was struck to make Richardson Obama’s VP. What are some of the top things that Obama will need? Outreach to Hispanics and foreign policy experience on his ticket. Richardson provides them both. Richardson has an equally strident pro-surrender stance in Iraq, and has some appeal with both the far left and moderates. He didn’t set the world on fire as a Presidential candidate, but he’d be a solid VP pick for Obama.

…then again, maybe not…

Obama’s Wright Speech

Matt Drudge has the full text of Barack Obama’s speech on the Rev. Wright affair. As is typical with an Obama speech, it has some excellent rhetoric:

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

Rhetorically, Obama is putting himself firmly in the American story, despite his multicultural background. It’s an effective technique, and it’s one that Obama has used and will continue to use to reach out to the various groups that make up his coalition.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Sounds like a disavowal, right? Except that it isn’t:

Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

Rhetorically, this is brilliant stuff. But like everything else that Obama says, once one gets past the wonderful words, the message itself is largely meaningless. Sen. Obama admits that Rev. Wright is a racist with a deeply disturbing view of America. Yet he won’t back down from him (any more than he already has). On one hand, he thinks that this country needs to have a conversation about race—on the other, he is siding with people who preach a gospel of racial division.

Sen. Obama just can’t have it both ways.

Finally, Obama ends with the sort of populist flourish that could have come from any of John Edwards’ speeches. He argues that Rev. Wright is wrong for seeing all the bad in America, and then he ends his speech by arguing that despite all the progress we’ve made, America is still in the doldrums. The final story about “Ashley” the campaign volunteer is the sort of overwrought and blatantly emotional story we’ve heard countless times before—and almost all these stories turn out to be something other than what is presented.

I will give the Senator this: this is a very well-crafted speech. Sen. Obama is a gifted wordsmith, and it seems like his words are more or less his own. The problem is that there’s no substance to his messages. To borrow from Cicero, he’s full of oratio, but he’s lacking in the ratio. He can generate much emotion, but he lacks in logic.

I don’t think this speech will ultimately help him. He is trying to stake a brave political ground, but in the end his message ends up being schizophrenic. He admits he disagreed with Wright, but not once did he think that he should stand up for his own country. If Barack Obama cannot defend his own country from his own pastor, how can he expect us to believe he’ll defend this nation abroad? When the President of Iran calls the United States “the Great Satan” will Obama be as passive as he was when Rev. Wright accused the US of creating AIDS? If our allies denigrate this nation, will Obama have the courage to defend us? Or will he go along with the crowd as he did at Trinity?

The damage to Obama has been done. He isn’t helping himself by condemning Rev. Wright, but only so far. He had this opportunity to have his Sister Souljah moment, and he failed to do so. He had an opportunity to clearly stand up for his country, and he failed to do so. The reality is that whatever Sen. Obama does now is too late: his time to take a stand was when Rev. Wright was making those statements. He could have stood up and defended his country against the kind of attacks that Rev. Wright was launching. Yet when Rev. Wright said that America deserved attack, that we created AIDS, that we should say “God damn America” instead of “God bless America,” Barack Obama sat passively by and let those assertions go unchallenged. That says enough about the character of the man.

His speech may be filled with lofty rhetoric, but it is far too late to make the difference. The American people have begun to see a new Barack Obama—not the charismatic reformer, but the man who sat by while his country was slandered and did nothing. A man who can’t stand by his country against someone like Rev. Wright cannot be expected to stand by his country against far more pernicious attacks. The damage has been done, and while Obama’s efforts at damage control are formidable, he can’t undo his own past.

Prostitution, Society, And The Law

Megan McArdle has an interesting piece explaining why she isn’t a prostitute, despite being for the decriminalization of prostitution. She argues that there is a social stigma against being a prostitute, but that social stigma isn’t enough to justify criminalization:

So I need a better reason than “it’s icky” or “there’s something wrong with a woman who would do that” to justify either a moral or a cultural ban on the practice. I’m probably more open than Will or Kerry to being convinced, but I’d take some pretty strong convincing that prostitution is so inherently damaging to society that we should declare war on it. I start with the principles that sex has equal moral significance when performed by a man or a woman; that it isn’t anyone’s business how many or what kind of partners you choose; and that government intrusion on private, voluntary exchange should be sharply limited to a) practices which produce demonstrable harm to third parties, and b) you can reasonably expect to control. This quickly leads me to “don’t you have something better to do than poke your nose into someone else’s hotel room?”

From a libertarian perspective, sex is just another voluntary human exchange that the government has no business regulating. The reason why I’m not a libertarian is because things like sex are more than just voluntary human interchanges. Humans are social creatures. Sex is, or at least should be, a deeply personal relationship between two people. A culture of casual sex and legal prostitution “diminishes the currency,” so to speak. When sex becomes something as prosaic as getting an oil change, it loses that personal value.

The other problem is that prostitution—even legal prostitution is innately exploitative. Even in a place like Amsterdam where prostitution is legal and there’s much less of a social stigma, there are plenty of women who are the victims of human trafficking and sexual slavery. The proponents of legalized prostitution argue that there’s only a minority of women who are treated that way. Perhaps so, but even that small minority deserves protection. Even in an environment where prostitution is very well regulated, you cannot prevent the exploitation of women. Even if there are success stories of prostitutes who end up leaving the business successfully, that doesn’t justify the perhaps millions of women across the globe who are systematically brutalized by the “sex industry.”

Society also has an interest in the family. We look down on things like prostitution, adultery, and pornography because they’re not good for the family. In order for a society to continue, it needs to keep its population growth at a sustainable rate. In order for that society to function, it not only needs people, but it needs people who can function well with other members of society. We don’t like married men visiting prostitutes because it’s deeply harmful to their wives, their children, and their families. The family relationship is the mortar that holds society together. Every other institution in society can fall apart: the government, religion, commerce, but if the family remains intact society can grow again. Without the family, there is no society. Anything that harms the family should rightly be looked at with close scrutiny because the value of family is so critically important to every other larger unit in society.

There’s also something that bothers me about a feminism that equates sex with “empowerment.” Does anyone really think that Ms. Dupré, a naïve 22-year-old woman who never finished high school and was living well beyond her means, was really “empowered” by having sex with people like the former Gov. Spitzer? Feminism rightly criticizes a culture that treats women as sex objects and values them only from the neck down. Yet at the same time, it’s hard to say that treating women as sex objects is a bad thing even if those women ostensibly consent to it. If every woman wanted to be a prostitute, would that be good for women? Even if a significant minority of women wanted to be prostitutes, would that be good for women? The feminist argument for prostitution doesn’t seem to hold much water to me.

The libertarian critique fails on its own terms. You cannot say on one side that the government should not interfere with what consenting adults do without explicitly giving the government the power to determine whether or not there really is consent—at that point, the government is poking its nose into someone’s hotel room, just perhaps not as far as if prostitution were banned outright. A self-regulating “sex industry” just isn’t a good idea, and if the “sex industry” can’t be self-regulating then even libertarians have to give the government some ground to regulate. At that point, it’s no longer a question of whether government has a role, but a question of what that role should be.

There will always be prostitution—there’s just too many incentives for women to sell themselves and far too many men willing to do the buying. Even so, that doesn’t mean that society should recognize prostitution. There is a social stigma against prostitution not because people are overly judgmental, but because that stigma is in many ways deserved.

Obama’s Guilt By Association

Barack Obama is going to have a lot to explain after it has been revealed that his pastor, Jeremiah Wright has engaged in some rather incindiary anti-American rhetoric:

Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor says blacks should not sing “God Bless America” but “God damn America.”

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side, has a long history of what even Obama’s campaign aides concede is “inflammatory rhetoric,” including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own “terrorism.”

In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” He said Rev. Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.

Rev. Wright married Obama and his wife Michelle, baptized their two daughters and is credited by Obama for the title of his book, “The Audacity of Hope.”

Sen. Obama is going to have to go a lot further than that. He’s going to have to disassociate himself with Wright and explain exactly why he never bothered to speak out against Wright’s rhetoric.

The answer to the latter, I suspect, is that Sen. Obama doesn’t necessarily disagree with Rev. Wright. His responses to this controversy have been rather specious—Obama’s campaign has said that “Sen. Obama does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms.” The problem with that statement is that Wright himself makes it clear that his sermons are political—and by their own content it’s blazingly obvious that they are designed to be political. Sen. Obama can’t claim ignorance and he can’t claim that he wasn’t paying attention to what Wright was saying all this time. Sen. Obama’s biography makes it obvious he’s had aspirations for higher office for some time now—when your pastor starts saying that the 9/11 attacks were examples of “chickens coming home to roost” would it not behoove a smart candidate to be on the record as denouncing those statements as soon as possible?

How big an issue this will become is unsure, and depends largely on how well the Obama campaign handles the issue—and given the Obama campaign’s past performance this could end up spiraling into a major scandal unless they start managing the press more adeptly.

What this incident exposes is that for all Sen. Obama’s rhetoric about racial and political healing, he comes from an atmosphere of liberal extremism and an atmosphere that is radically out of synch with the American mainstream. That may give him great appeal with the base of the Democratic Party, but it will be an albatross around his neck should he win the nomination.

The Widening Chasm

I’ve been holding the somewhat controversial position that Barack Obama’s ascendence within the Democratic Party is a bad thing for the Democrats. To understand why, the first place to start is with Ronald Brownstein’s look at the new face of the Democratic Party. The Democrats are becoming a party that is younger, more affluent and more liberal:

In the Democrats’ longtime upscale-downscale divide, these changes are tilting the party away from blue-collar and often gray-haired “beer track” voters toward younger and more affluent “wine track” voters.

Since 1968, Democratic presidential candidates who relied on beer track voters (such as Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, Bill Clinton, and Al Gore) routinely defeated rivals who depended mostly on wine track supporters (Eugene McCarthy, Gary Hart, Paul Tsongas, and Bill Bradley). But now Obama, an upscale candidate, is on the brink of capturing the nomination from Clinton, who has constructed a classic beer track coalition.

Obama is succeeding where his wine track predecessors failed, largely because he has won overwhelming majorities of African-Americans, who in the past generally sided with beer track candidates. But his success is also tied to the party’s changing composition. Two of Obama’s most supportive groups — the young and the affluent — are expanding their influence in the party. Clinton’s strongest support has come from seniors and noncollege white voters, two groups that are waning in significance.

These shifts could create long-term strains for the Democratic Party. In particular, Democratic candidates may face tensions in reconciling their growing reliance on upper-income voters with the party’s increasing emphasis on an edgy populist message that portrays the economy as unfairly tilted toward the affluent.

If one takes a look at the exit polls from this Tuesday’s primaries the same pattern emerges: Clinton won older voters, voters who were concerned about the economy, and women. Obama won young urban voters and black voters. All the data supports Brownstein’s thesis: that the Democratic Party is becoming younger, richer, and more urban.

The Democrats’ Divide

Obama is appealing to the new face of the Democratic Party, while Clinton is appealing to the old face of the Democratic Party. The argument against Obama being the savior of the Democrats is this: Obama’s appeal is with voters who are likely to vote Democratic anyway. For all the insistence that Obama has massive appeal with independents and even Republicans, there’s little solid evidence which supports that conclusion. Secondly, what happens to that new Democratic Party when Obama passes into history? Is this new Democratic Party a durable political movement?< ?p>

Look at the demographics of the country: the nation is getting older. In the next few years, the number of 20–64 year-old voters will decrease while the retiring Baby Boomers will remain a potent demographic force. Like most industrialized democracies, the United States is seeing a demographic shift from old to young. In the near-term (until the middle of this century) older voters are going to be the key voting bloc that parties will need to target to win. Barack Obama has very little appeal to older voters, while McCain and Clinton can capture that crucial bloc. The demographic tide is against the new face of the Democratic Party.

One of the fastest-growing segments of the population are Hispanics. Hispanics are culturally conservative, which gives some advantage to the GOP. Hispanics do tend to vote Democrat, but not by the incredibly lop-sided margins that we see with African-American voters. Clinton carried the Hispanic vote in Texas by a wide margin. Can Obama reach out to Hispanics? It’s possible, but McCain will be far more competitive with Hispanics against Obama than Clinton. Again, the demographics don’t favor Obama.

Finally, there’s no certainty that the youth vote will remain Democratic forever. One of the biggest shifts in voting activity involves marriage and family: married women tend to vote Republican far more than their single counterparts. Affluent voters tend to vote Republican, especially those voters who start to notice when Democratic tax increases hit their wallets. As voters get older, they tend to become more conservative rather than less.

Why Clinton Is The Stronger Candidate

Hillary.jpg

Forget the conventional wisdom. Hillary Clinton is the stronger of the two candidates. She is a known quantity. Her negatives may be high, but they’re not insurmountably high. The people who hate Hillary Clinton with a passion are not likely Democratic voters, and the people who support Hillary tend to be the same voting blocs that got her husband elected. The Democrats cannot win on the backs of rich white liberals and African Americans. They have to get soccer moms, NASCAR voters, gun owners, Southerners, and a majority of independents. Obama’s appeal is strong with groups that are already reliably Democratic, and if he can’t pull in a clear majority of Democrats in Democratic primaries, can he really pull of a major victory against McCain? Obama won states like Georgia by a wide margin, but there’s absolutely no chance of Georgia flipping to the Democrats any time soon. If one takes a hard look at the electoral landscape, where can Barack Obama make against against McCain? Perhaps Iowa, but the Republicans can win without Iowa. Can he get Ohio back in the Democratic column? It’s unlikely. Florida? Same story there? What swing states will Obama be able to bring into the Democratic fold? I’m hard-pressed at this point to see him bringing any key states over to the Democratic side, and there’s a good chance that states like Pennsylvania, Washington or New Hampshire could flip over to the Republicans.

Hillary Clinton can reach out to Reagan Democrats. Barack Obama will have a much harder time doing so. Hillary Clinton can appeal to voters concerned about national security. Obama so far has not reached beyond his anti-war base. The saliency of the Iraq War as a political issue is decreasing as American casualties drop and signs of success become unmistakable. Does Obama really think tying the war to McCain will hurt him? When McCain can say that it was his policies that helped win the war, and he was the one who pushed Bush into changing course? That doesn’t seem like a very strong argument.

In the end, Hillary has demographics on her side. The Democratic Party is changing its face, just as Brownstein observed. The problem is that in doing that the Democratic Party is painting themselves into a demographic corner. As they become younger and liberal they leave behind the moderates, middle class voters, and older voters behind—and John McCain is the candidate with the most appeal with those voters. Obama’s surface appeal is just that—surface appeal, and for all the hype about his brand of “hope” it will not be enough to build a lasting political legacy and it will lead the Democrats into becoming a minority party at the same time the Republicans have the opportunity to reach out. 2008 could prove to be a realigning election, just as many Democrats hope, but it won’t necessarily be the sort of realignment they would like.

Lo, How The Mighty Have Fallen

I do have to admit a certain amount—okay, a great amoumt—of schadenfreude over the results of last night’s Son of Super Tuesday primaries. Hillary Clinton managed to come back and beat Barack Obama in two major contests, which still puts Obama in the lead, but only narrowly. Effectively, this race is tied, and if Hillary wins the key state of Pennsylvania in a few weeks, it will remain tied right through to the convention.

At the same time, that schadenfreude only goes so far. For one, I still maintain that Hillary Clinton is the bigger threat to McCain than Obama is. If Obama gets the nomination, it will produce a split in the Democratic Party with some rather far-reaching consequences. (More on that subject later…) If Hillary wins, those people who say that they won’t vote for her probably will. Granted, Hillary Clinton would be preferable to Obama, but only in the sense that being torn apart by wild dogs is preferable to being gnawed to death by rabid badgers.

It would also be exceedingly nice to purge this country of Clintonism. The “campaign war room,” the ravenous and reflexive partisanship, the self-adulation of the Clinton tribe have all diminished American politics. Draining that festering boil would be a welcome relief for the nation. However, to replace it with an Obama cult of personality would hardly be much better.

I doubt there will be a resolution of this race until at least Pennsylvania, and I’m not sure that even that will end it. Neither candidate has enough delegates to win, and while Hillary is behind, she’s not far enough behind to make it logical for her to drop out any time soon.

Meanwhile, John McCain can consolidate his base and prepare for the general election. His biggest problem will be figuring out who he should be running against.