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If there’s a lesson to be learned from Geraldine Ferraro’s fast-motion disintegration, it’s gotta be: Don’t fight it.
After her initial slip-up—Ferraro said that Obama was a successful candidate only because he’s black—she could have apologized and walked away. As a member of the fundraising committee, she didn’t rank particularly high on Clinton’s staff list. Instead, she decided to double down. She called back the Daily Breeze, the paper in which her comments first appeared, and accused the Obama campaign of “attacking me because I’m white.” In other words, she played what Ben Smith calls the race card card. That move ratcheted up the rhetoric another notch, all but guaranteeing her demise.
At the bottom of Ferraro’s rants, she had a kernel of a point: This election, like all elections, is largely about identity. As she herself acknowledged, “[I]n 1984, if my name was Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro, I would never have been the nominee for vice president.” But what then? Was she suggesting that Obama should “admit” that his race is a factor in his candidacy? If so, that’s a losing battle. Should John Edwards then have admitted he was getting some votes because he was a white male?
Ferraro prided herself on not taking orders from the Clinton campaign, but this time she should have listened. In a mere two days, she managed to resurrect the subject of race—relatively dormant since South Carolina*—and give the Obama campaign reason to take offense. It also let them twist the Clinton campaign’s logic about Samantha Power’s “monster” remarks. If Clinton hadn’t demanded Power’s resignation, Ferraro might still have a job on the campaign. Howard Wolfson’s rebuttal—that Ferraro wasn’t as big a part of Clinton’s campaign as Power was for Obama—held water at first. But once Ferraro lashed out again, it was over.
In an ideal world, neither Power nor Ferraro would have had to resign. But the logic that both campaigns have imposed on the race—that wanton (Update 1:47 a.m.: Sorry, not "wonton.") surrogates have to go—made Ferraro's demise inevitable.
*Correction: We originally said North Carolina. That would be impossible, seeing as North Carolina hasn't voted yet.
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People have been talking about the popular vote as a possible trump card for Clinton. As in, Yes, Obama is going to win the pledged delegates. But what if Clinton wins the popular vote? The implication is that a popular vote win by Clinton could convince superdelegates, who will decide the election, to swing toward her instead of Obama.
Here’s the problem with that: The popular vote isn’t as pure a number as people think. For all the biases of the Democrats’ pledged-delegate selection system—proportional allocation, caucus math, open vs. closed voting—the popular vote has its own inadequacies. Namely, it understates Obama’s success in caucus states.
Caucuses have relatively low turnout compared with primaries. “To me, the caucuses don't provide the broad base of participation that I have fought for my entire life,” Clinton said even after winning Nevada. That’s why Obama’s strength in caucuses—he’s won all but two of the 15 caucus states so far—irks Clinton so much. They privilege energetic young people with free time, also known as Obama’s base.
But when you’re talking about the popular vote, the relatively low caucus turnout turns into an advantage for Clinton. Obama won Kansas, for example, with 74 percent of the vote. But only 37,000 of the state’s 401,000 registered Democrats—about 9 percent—turned out to caucus. Primary turnout, on the other hand, has been more than 30 percent in many states this year (although each state’s registration system is different, making the exact numbers difficult to measure). So had Kansas held a primary instead of a caucus, the state would have contributed more toward Obama’s popular vote tally. (For relative turnout in the 2004 caucuses and primaries, see here.)
The Clinton counterargument would be, Well, if Kansas had held a primary, Obama wouldn’t have won by as much, if at all. But that doesn’t change the fact that the popular vote does not fully reflect the results of the system agreed to by the party. You could conceivably calculate an alternative “popular vote” that extrapolates caucus results to imagine what the total tally would have been, had more people showed up to caucus. But that comes with its own dangers, since you don’t actually know how those people would have voted.
Still, the main point stands: The popular vote is tainted. If Florida and Michigan revote, there’s a chance Clinton would narrow the lead in the popular vote, and possibly even take it. (She still probably can’t catch up delegatewise.) In which case, keep in mind that even the popular vote has its flaws.
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On a Washington Post chat today, former John Edwards campaign manager Joe Trippi seems to hint that Edwards will not be endorsing:
John Edwards led on every single issue and pushed both Clinton and Obama on everything from the war in Iraq to Poverty. He has had an enormous impact on this election cycle and still will. I would caution that he may play a key role in bringing the party together by not endorsing -- that may not help him personally but it may be exactly what the party and the country needs.
Hear that? He will play a “key role” by not endorsing. Other leaders will look to his nonendorsement for guidance. Doesn’t Trippi know he doesn’t have to spin anymore?
Later, Trippi is a bit less decisive, “I really do not expect John Edwards to endorse at this point. Or I should say I would be surprised if he does. But then again he could surprise me.”
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A Rent-style song about Barack Obama.
An Obama-themed online Ro-Sham-Bo game called Barack, Paper, Scissors.
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In a campaign full of bizarre, vaguely defensible analogies—Obama is a Mac, Clinton is a PC! Obama is Starbucks, Clinton is Dunkin Donuts!—here’s a new one to consider: Obama is The Colbert Report, Hillary is Saturday Night Live.
Facile analogies aren’t particularly productive, but in this case, the two comedy shows’ campaign coverage is starting to reflect it.
After a skit last Halloween featuring Obama, SNL has seemed to drift Clinton-ward. First their sketch about how the media are “in the tank” for Barack. Then Tina Fey’s joking-but-actually- serious “bitch is the new black” endorsement of Hillary Clinton. Then Clinton herself went on the show. She didn’t get the show’s explicit endorsement, but they resurrected the old media-fawns-over-Obama trope in that episode.
Meantime, the crew over at Comedy Central is looking more and more Obama-friendly. Take the latest argument over whether “big states” matter. The Clinton campaign has claimed that Hillary’s strength in California, New York, and Ohio will matter in the general election. The Obama campaign is trying to flip Clinton’s argument around, pointing out in a recent memo that “more than 55% of her popular vote total and nearly half of her pledged delegates have come in just five states.”
But they might as well have just linked to Stephen Colbert’s withering takedown. “It’s not how many votes you get,” he snarked on Monday’s show. “It’s the geographic boundaries that contain those votes. Getting 10 million votes in one state is way better than getting 12 million votes split between two states.” As Jonathan Chait put it when Sinbad challenged Clinton’s account of her Bosnia tour, “When your main campaign theme is foreign policy experience, and that experience is persuasively refuted by a comedian, it's time to find a new theme.”
Also, look at the demographics. Obama is most popular among college-age kids with too much time on their hands, same as Colbert. Clinton, meanwhile, relies on older voters, just as SNL is also a boomer phenomenon that, compared with Colbert’s energy and pace, just feels tired. No doubt both shows strive for equal-opportunity mockery, but their roots show. You can’t help but think that Obama’s rise and Colbert’s supplanting SNL atop the political satire pile is no coincidence.
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Obscured in last night’s Mississippi results was the announcement by CNN that Obama won the Texas caucuses. The counting’s not done—we won’t have final results until March 29—but CNN still projected the likely delegate split:
After a comprehensive review of these results, CNN estimates that Obama won more support from Texas caucus-goers than Clinton. Based on the state party's tally, Obama's caucus victory translates into 38 national convention delegates, compared to 29 for Clinton.
And though Clinton won more delegates than Obama in the primary, 65 to 61, Obama's wider delegate margin in the caucuses gives him the overall statewide delegate lead, 99 to 94 — or once superdelegate endorsements are factored in, 109 to 106. [Emphasis added]
So … Obama won Texas? Depends on which count you think matters more—the popular vote or the delegate count. (There's plenty of debate over that.) It also depends on whose numbers you believe: MSNBC still has Texas as tied. But at the very least, if the final tallies on March 29 corroborate these numbers, Obama can make the case that he won Texas. (A case that, to be fair, his campaign has been making all along.)
Also, as First Read points out, this means that Obama’s victories in Wyoming and Mississippi do indeed cancel out Clinton’s March 4 victories. She netted about 15 delegates in the primaries that day, but Texas’ caucuses cut that number to six. In Wyoming, Obama netted two delegates and another five last night in Mississippi—thus erasing Clinton’s surge.
The math just gets uglier and uglier for Clinton.