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Oregon Democrat Steve Novick has become a media darling in recent weeks. Yes, he’s the scrappy underdog in his state’s senatorial primary. Yes, he has an exceptional background, having earned a law degree from Harvard at age 21. But let’s be honest. You know about him because of his hook hand.
Novick has made his hook the centerpiece of his campaign. His smart political spots don’t try to avoid the prosthesis. They show it off. In the best-known ad, he cracks open a beer with the hook.
This would make Novick part of a long tradition of congressmen with deformed hands. You’ve got Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who lost three fingers on his left hand in a meat grinding accident. There’s Rahm Emanuel, who in high school sliced his finger in an Arby’s machine then went for a swim in Lake Michigan. Surgery left him with a stub for a middle finger. He still uses the stub regularly.
Former senators with manual problems include Bob Dole, who carried a pen in his paralyzed right hand to signal that he couldn’t shake hands properly, and Max Cleland, who lost two legs and an arm in Vietnam after bending down to pick up a grenade.
Others?
Update 1:35 p.m.: Arizona Rep. Jeff Flake lost the tip of his right index finger in an alfalfa field when he was 5.
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For a while earlier today, Yahoo! News had this photo illustrating an article about alleged White House plans to attack Iran -- a piece that had nothing to do with John McCain.
The photo's fixed now. Maybe Obama's attempts to tie McCain to Bush are paying off.
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For a candidate trying to combat portrayals of himself as a fey elitist, Obama could be choosing his speaking venues more carefully.
A headline in today’s Des Moines Register announces that Obama “returns to D.M. today for east-side rally.” The city’s east side is home to many of the sort of white, working-class voters Obama has struggled to win over; you’d think he was trying to reach out. But read further down, and you see that it’s actually the “East Village” where he’s speaking.
Trailhead reader and Obama supporter Doug Cutchins describes his disappointment: “[T]he East Village is a wholly different entity – it’s the gentrified, buy-warehouses-and-turn-them-into-condos-with-an-art-gallery neighborhood of Des Moines. Yuppie latte central. So instead of reaching out, he’s playing to his base (and stereotypes).”
Obama might as well be holding his rally in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Here’s how Adam Nagourney described the area in the New York Times back in December: “The East Village streets, spread out under the State Capitol, were aglow with lights — lavender, icy blue and, of course, red and green — strung out for Christmas. They were bustling with boutiques, bookstores, coffee shops, culinary stores and Smash, an edgy T-shirt shop where the proprietors were listening to Band of Horses while making slightly off-color T-shirts celebrating the Iowa caucuses.”
You can’t blame Obama for wanting to return to the site of his first major victory, and the rally is just blocks from Iowa campaign headquarters. But Clinton’s Kentucky win will be yet another reminder of Obama’s weakness among blue-collar whites. In the past week, Clinton has dropped her argument that Obama can’t win this group, presumably because of the negative reaction to her comment about “hard-working white Americans.” But with venue selection like this, Obama is practically making it for her.
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Barack Obama stepped up his anti-lobbyist rhetoric yesterday after a fifth McCain staffer, former Texas Rep. Tom Loeffler, resigned due to lobbying ties. Obama took the opportunity to reiterate his stance on lobbyists: “We're not gonna take money from PACs, we're not gonna take money from federally registered lobbyists, because we want to be accountable to the American people.”
But it’s almost impossible to get elected without relying to some degree on lobbyists, and the Obama campaign is no exception. Candidates need to know the best-connected people in Washington; and the best-connected people in Washington tend to lobby. So, naturally, any candidate needs to make some exceptions. Here’s a rundown of the campaign’s lobbying loopholes, from smallest to largest:
State and local lobbyists are OK. In January, former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges became Obama’s national co-chair, despite having founded the state-based lobbying firm Hodges Consulting Group in 2003. Likewise, his New Hampshire co-chair is a state lobbyist for the pharmaceutical and financial services industries. Taking money and services from state lobbyists is fair game, Obama says, because he doesn’t have any influence on the state level. But that didn’t stop him from criticizing John Edwards in January when it was revealed that a contributor of his was a state lobbyist. So when you hear the candidates talk about rejecting “Washington lobbyists,” remember that “Washington” is a qualifier.
Employers of lobbyists are OK. Obama has taken $15 million from lawyers/law firms, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and many of those firms employ lobbyists. Clinton has taken slightly more from this group ($15.4 million) while McCain has taken less ($4.2 million).
Employees of firms that lobby are OK. Take Tom Daschle. The former senator was an early and avid Obama supporter and is now a national campaign co-chair. Daschle is not himself a federally registered lobbyist, but he works at Alston & Bird, a firm that employs federally registered lobbyists and raked in $2.6 million in lobbying fees in 2004.
Advice is OK. Obama does not ban even current lobbyists from lending advice to the campaign—which could be considered an “in kind” contribution. Moses Mercado, a former adviser to Dick Gephardt and a lobbyist for Ogilvy Government Relations, volunteers his advice and time for the campaign but declined to be on payroll.
Spouses and family members are OK. Even if being a lobbyist makes you an untouchable scumbag, that doesn’t mean your spouse is. Back in December, The Hill reported that an Obama fundraiser had encouraged a lobbyist to have his wife contribute. “I was quite taken aback,” the lobbyist said. There’s currently no database of spouse contributions.
Former and future lobbyists are OK. The Obama campaign restricts current lobbyists from joining the campaign. But a bunch of former lobbyists have helped out—including deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, Teal Baker, and Emmett Beliveau—who could easily slip back onto K Street once the campaign is over. Obama now has 14 bundlers who are also federally registered lobbyists, but they are currently inactive, according to Public Citizen. (Clinton has 22 lobbyist bundlers; McCain has 70.) However, campaign-finance reformers point out that no campaign has ever taken the step of banning current and former lobbyists. “It’s hard to come up with any stronger of a firewall,” says Craig Holman of Public Citizen.
That’s not to say there isn’t a distinction between Obama and McCain. “The McCain campaign, you can’t spit without hitting another lobbyist there,” says David Donnelly, director of the Public Campaign Action Fund.
Likewise, Obama has kept lobbyists at arm's length all along, while McCain’s campaign only instituted its ethics policy last week after two embarrassing departures. (Regional campaign manager Doug Davenport and Republican convention chief Doug Goodyear had both represented the military government in Burma.) “I believe he now understands that it is going to hurt him,” says Holman. “That’s why he’s taken this new ethics pledge. He recognizes Obama has gained the high road.”
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Obama won't declare victory after Tuesday, but only because the
media will do it for him. Clinton's chances sag another 0.1 point to 1.6 percent.
Despite
reports that Barack Obama would declare victory after May 20, when he's
expected to secure a majority of pledged delegates, he's now expected to keep mum.
The reason: Better to let Clinton exit with dignity than to appear to
be forcing her out of the race. This logic reflects the Obama camp's
supreme confidence that the nomination is in the bag.
Media outlets seem to agree. Just look at today's top New York Times headlines. "McCain To Rely on Party Money Against Obama" doesn't even pretend not to know who the nominee will be. Another piece examines
what a Clinton loss means for women: It's either "a historic if
incomplete triumph or a depressing reminder of why few pursue high
office in the first place." Look for more postmortems after Tuesday's
race, barring a Clinton sweep.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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While national security issues have gobbled up most news space over the past week, a couple of harsh analyses of John McCain’s economic plan have sailed under the radar.
The Center for American Progress Action Fund* released a study yesterday concluding that McCain’s plan would create a cumulative debt of $12.7 trillion by 2017—the highest debt since 1951. Corporate tax cuts, a repeal of the Alternative Minimum Tax, and an extension of the Bush tax cuts—all staples of the McCain plan—would cost significantly more than the senator’s proposed earmarks cuts and discretionary spending freeze would provide, the study argues. (PDF here.)
Also this week, FactCheck.org calls McCain’s suggestion that he can balance the budget while extending Bush’s tax cuts “dubious at best.” The main problem: Getting rid of earmarks doesn’t mean the money won’t get spent. It just means it doesn’t happen in the form of earmarks. As the writers phrase it, “earmarks often simply tell agencies how to spend money that they are already getting.” And when it comes to discretionary spending, McCain hasn’t detailed what areas he would cut. He says he would exempt military spending, so that’s out. And because the nondefense budget is only $540 billion, he would still have to convince Congress to “slash 18.5 percent of the funding for everything else in the discretionary budget—things like veterans' health benefits, highway construction, elementary and secondary education, and immigration services.”
McCain’s economic plan has its defenders. But neither they nor the McCain campaign has produced numbers to back up the budget-balancing claims. (At least not that I’ve seen.) The argument seems to be that cutting taxes raises revenues, but even McCain’s own senior policy adviser has rejected that claim in the past. Spokesman Brian Rogers dismissed the CAP study as coming from “a left-wing Democratic front group” but did not provide alternative figures. “The fact that they falsely criticize Sen. McCain’s policy proposals is unfortunate, but it’s hardly surprising,” he wrote in an e-mail.
*Clarification: We originally credited the Center for American Progress. In fact, it's the Action Fund, the center's 501(c)(4) sister affiliate, that published the report.
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The John Edwards endorsement spawns imitators, and Republicans set
their sights on Obama. Clinton's chances wane another 0.1 points to 1.7 percent.
Obama
nabbed a slew of endorsements yesterday on the heels of Edwards'
announcement, including California duo Reps. Henry Waxman and Howard
Berman. Waxman's backing doesn't carry the weight of a Pelosi or a
Reid, but as chair of the House oversight committee, he's considered
one of the most powerful congressmen around. (His may be the most feared mustache
in Washington.) Berman chairs the chamber's foreign-affairs committee,
lending Obama another bit of global-policy cred. Today, fellow
California Rep. Pete Stark followed suit.
That puts Obama 127.5 delegates away from the nomination (or 121.5 if
you count seven pledged delegates who previously supported Edwards).
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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Mike Huckabee’s penchant for dark humor was a minor obsession of ours back when he was still in the race. So it’s good to see he’s still making people uncomfortable. Look what he just told an audience of NRA members after hearing an offstage noise:
"That was Barack Obama, he just tripped off a chair, he's getting ready to speak," said the former Arkansas governor, to audience laughter. “Somebody aimed a gun at him and he dove for the floor."
Maybe Huckabee didn’t get the memo, but assassination jokes aren’t exactly kosher right now. (Not that they ever are, but Obama supporters voice legitimate concern.) It also highlights another reason why Huckabee isn’t a serious vice-presidential pick. Combine his loose lips with the Obama campaign’s umbrage hair trigger and a gaffe-hungry media, and we’d have quips like this splashed across Drudge every week.
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A miniflap bubbled up earlier this week when Barack Obama said that the Iraq war was occupying Arabic translators who could otherwise be working in Afghanistan. OK, so he didn’t quite say that, but he almost said it. (Video here.) It was close enough that ABC still called it a “gaffe,” sparking a testy back-and-forth with campaign spokesman Bill Burton.
But there are a couple of other details Obama might want to get straight before the general election. Here’s his full quote:
So we just don’t have enough capacity right now to deal with—and it’s not just troops by the way, it’s like, Arab, uh, Arabic interpreters. Arab language speakers. We only have a certain number of them. And if they’re all in Iraq, then it’s harder for us to use them. And obviously they may not speak Arabic, but the various dialects that they speak in Afghanistan, oftentimes people who speak Urdu or Pashtun or whatever the languages are, they’re going to be needed in those areas. And a lot of them have ended up being placed elsewhere.
In fact, Urdu is the national language of Pakistan but isn’t spoken in Afghanistan, according to the trusty CIA World Factbook. The Obama campaign points to the presence of foreign fighters in Afghanistan, but it seems clear that’s not what Obama meant by “the various dialects that they speak in Afghanistan.” And Pashtun, which is the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, is not a language. The language is Pashto, sometimes rendered as Pashtu.
Democrats hyperventilated when John McCain appeared to mix up Sunnis and Shiites during his Middle East trip last month. But Obama is considered more vulnerable on foreign policy than McCain is. Slip-ups, however minor, will get interpreted by some as indicators of ignorance or inexperience. Even if Obama's larger point is valid—that Iraq is sucking resources from other conflicts—it's the details that may come back to bite him.
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The biggest news in John McCain’s "2013" speech today is his suggestion that he’d have troops out of Iraq:
By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced.
It’s purely hypothetical—McCain says it’s "what I would hope to have achieved" after his first term—but it’s still a rhetorical shift for McCain. Back in January, he slammed Mitt Romney for what McCain (misleadingly) said was Romney’s commitment to timetables for withdrawal. Until now, he has even declined to say when he’d like to start pulling troops out, let alone when he’d like to have "most" of them out.
Even hinting at a withdrawal date brings McCain way over from his hawkish "100 years" stance to a more palatable middle (even though "100 years" got twisted to sound more hawkish than it was). In the past, McCain has called a withdrawal date tantamount to "chaos, genocide" that would cede Iraq to al-Qaida. But today’s comments will reassure voters that he’s not as excited about keeping troops in Mesopotamia as his opponents claim. No doubt McCain would say that nothing has changed—that he has always "hoped" to be out as soon as possible, but that we’ll only exit once we’ve "won." But in the ears of voters, a date—however vague—sounds a lot more moderate than no date.
Barack Obama, meanwhile, remains tethered to his pledge to have troops out within 16 months—a promise that seems extremely dubious to many experts. He’s had plenty of chances to mitigate that stance, most recently in the CBS debate, when Charlie Gibson asked him whether his pledge was "rock-hard." But Obama refused to wobble. "The president sets the mission," he told Gibson.
The difference now is that McCain has wiggle room where Obama does not. If Obama suggests he might stick around in Iraq for a few more years, he’ll be accused of breaking his pledge. If McCain suggests he’d pull out troops earlier than expected, no one will hold it against him. Obama still has his "I opposed the war" trump card, but McCain’s flexibility in the future could be a strong a weapon as Obama’s correctness in the past.
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Endorsements
from formerly coy John Edwards and the United Steelworkers for Obama
are two more nails in the Clinton coffin. Clinton's odds drop 1.1 to 1.8 percent.
Whatever momentum Clinton picked up from her 41-point West Virginia win
the Obama camp snuffed out with the Edwards coup de grâce. Edwards sat
on his endorsement until long after its game-changing power expired, so
the damage to Clinton's flicker of a campaign is more symbolic than
anything. The crux of his "everyone's doing it" speech last night in Michigan
was that he was mimicking the will of the voters. Because he waited,
Edwards' decision to finally choose a horse reinforces the "it's over"
story line. Watch this narrative get another boost next week when Obama
clinches the pledged delegate lead for good. (He'll hit a majority of
the 3,254 pledged delegates even if he narrowly loses Oregon.)
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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John McCain’s speech on his vision for America may have been comically sunny, but it’s got one nugget of genuine inspiration:
"My administration will set a new standard for transparency and accountability. I will hold weekly press conferences. I will regularly brief the American people on the progress our policies have made and the setbacks we have encountered. When we make errors, I will confess them readily, and explain what we intend to do to correct them. I will ask Congress to grant me the privilege of coming before both houses to take questions, and address criticism, much the same as the Prime Minister of Great Britain appears regularly before the House of Commons."
As anyone who watches C-SPAN knows, the British Parliament’s Question Time makes the most entertaining (and informative) political viewing imaginable. (See here, here, and here.) Members of parliament get to question, prod, and berate the prime minister into defending the government’s stances. Candor is expected, although PMs dodge questions all the time, and witty barbs are often rewarded with cheers and desk-pounding.
Q&A sessions in the House and Senate wouldn’t be the same. The American chambers are a bit more subdued than their British counterparts, and the rhetorical flourishes of American congressmen and congresswomen aren't as impressive. But certain members of Congress would be in their element. Imagine Joe Biden shredding the president over Iraq. Or Barney Frank taking him to task for his tax plan. The policy battles that normally take place through dry memos and the occasional floor speech would become spectator sports. It would also be catnip for journalists.
McCain’s proposal is especially bold given the chances of an overwhelmingly Democratic congress in 2009. But right now, it gives McCain the moral high ground when it comes to transparency. McCain and Obama are locked in something of a transparency arms race. Both senators have released tax returns. McCain promises to hold weekly press conferences. Obama pledges to post more information about federal spending online. By the end of this election, I expect the candidates to release their teenage diaries. But McCain’s Question Time proposal is hard to beat. Unless Obama pledges to install a live feed in Cabinet meetings, McCain may have won this round.
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If you're looking for entertainment, watch Republican candidates try to imitate Barack Obama’s hope/change shtick. In his now-famous Tuesday night memo to Republicans, NRCC Chair Tom Cole wrote that "Republicans must undertake bold efforts to define a forward looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for." In his speech this morning in Columbus, John McCain took Cole up on his offer, although today he took the utopian imaginings a little far.
He not only pledged to have "most" American troops home from Iraq by 2013 (more on that later), but also laid out a litany of other sunny scenarios: "The Iraq War has been won. … The United States and its allies have made great progress in advancing nuclear security. … The size of the Army and Marine Corps has been significantly increased. … The United States has experienced several years of robust economic growth. … Health care has become more accessible to more Americans than at any other time in history. … Obesity rates among the young and the disease they engender are stabilized and beginning to decline. … The United States is well on the way to independence from foreign sources of oil."” (McCain’s new ad, "2013," has a similar message.)
Skepticism was the first response, with one reporter calling McCain’s speech a "magic carpet ride." But McCain knows what he’s up against. It’s official that 2008 is a "change election," whatever that means, and Obama has patented his own brand of Optimism™. McCain can’t let himself get painted as the curmudgeon to Obama’s visionary. When Clinton mocked Obama’s highfalutin tone, it came off as crass and mean-spirited. In this general election, with GOP approval ratings at historic lows, the risk of getting pegged as the naysayer is even greater.
Hence the blindingly sunny forecast. "I cannot guarantee I will have achieved these things," McCain said in the speech. But that’s not the point. No one actually expects complete success. It’s about setting the rhetorical tone. McCain is pre-emptively fending off charges of being the "can’t-do" candidate. But he has to spin it as his own positive agenda, without giving the impression he’s just trying to out-Obama Obama.
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Ever since John Edwards dropped out in January “so that history can blaze its path,” he has been careful not to get in history’s way. Even when his endorsement would have carried real weight—before North Carolina, for example—he was quiet. It almost seemed like he was going far out of his way to make sure his endorsement didn’t matter.
Well, sorry John, but it still matters. Not because it will change the race’s outcome—that was the point of waiting. It matters because it helps redeem Obama among the white working class.
The story line coming out of Obama’s West Virginia thumping is that white working-class voters abandoned him in record numbers, and for possibly ugly reasons. Clinton picked up 69 percent of the white vote, and of the voters who said race influenced their vote, 82 percent went for Clinton. No one thinks Obama’s 40-point loss was enough to derail his campaign. But it does raise tough questions about whether Democrats want a nominee with such paltry support among a potentially key demographic. To put it bluntly: With Kentucky just around the corner, Obama needed some white cred.
Enter John Edwards. By endorsing Obama now, Edwards isn’t handing him the nomination. He’s minimizing the damage wrought upon the all-but-inevitable nominee. Clinton insists a drawn-out election isn’t hurting the party. But it is clearly exposing huge holes in each candidate’s armor. By weighing in now, Edwards is reassuring Democrats—and perhaps telegraphing to Kentucky voters—that Obama is a safe choice.
Plus, Edwards is still influential. Just look at the 7 percent of the vote he picked up in West Virginia—impressive for someone who dropped out more than three months ago. If Edwards supporters in Kentucky take his cue and vote for Obama, it could tighten the margin of victory a bit. Also, cue speculation that Edwards’ 19 delegates will now swing to Obama, pushing him ever closer to 2025. (See Slate’s Explainer on what happens to Edwards’ delegates.) Expect renewed VP speculation as well, especially if Edwards paints himself as the man who could deliver the working class to Obama.
But Edwards’ endorsement isn’t the last round of battle; it’s the first round of cleanup. Both Democratic candidates insist the party will unite once a nominee is chosen. Edwards’ move tells party officials, more than any endorsement so far, that that moment has arrived.
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Twenty-four hours later, the verdict seems to be that West Virginia’s results weren’t ideal for Obama, but they haven’t hurt him in any lasting way. Still, he’d no doubt prefer to avoid repeating the same experience in Kentucky, a state that’s a lot like West Virginia, but bigger. Can Obama prevent another rout?
The demographics suggest it will be tough. Kentucky is slightly less overwhelmingly white than West Virginia—90.2 percent instead of 94.9 percent—and has a black population of 7.5 percent compared to West Virginia’s 3.3 percent. But if Clinton attracts 69 percent of the white vote, as she did in West Virginia, there’s not much Obama can do to lessen the blow, even if he sways 90 percent of African-American voters. And look at the populations: Kentucky has 4.2 million people; West Virginia had only 1.8 million. After netting about 150,000 votes in West Virginia, Clinton could plausibly net twice that in Kentucky. A win of that size wouldn’t close Obama’s popular vote lead—unless you count Florida and Michigan, which she does—but it would bring her within striking distance, especially if she manages to keep Obama’s Oregon lead in the single digits.
Obama also has the (chosen) disadvantage of not visiting Kentucky. We’ve seen that when he shows his face in a state, as he did in Pennsylvania, he cuts into Clinton’s lead. But Obama logged one paltry stop in West Virginia before the primary, and one in Louisville on Monday, with no more events planned. If 90 percent of life is showing up, Obama hasn’t gotten the message. His strategy of focusing on the general election—he’s in Michigan now—may well pay off. But ignoring Clinton might not work so well if she’s racking up vast margins.
Not that Obama isn’t competing there. He has TV spots up across the state touting his ethics legislation and commitment to “clean coal.” The campaign is also sending out mailers that show Obama standing in front of a big gleaming cross. (Smart move, given many Americans’ impassioned determination to believe that Obama is Muslim.)
It’s clear Obama thinks he can afford to lose Kentucky—even by a landslide. And he’s probably right. He’s 140 delegates away from the nomination, which is ultimately the only metric that counts. But at the same time, he’s giving Clinton yet another reason to hang on through June 3, marshal her own popular vote numbers (counting Florida, Michigan, and Puerto Rico), and make one final plea to supers to make her the nominee.
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Tous les blogs are aflutter today, less over Clinton’s West Virginia victory than over Democrat Travis Childers’ thumping of Republican Greg Davis in Mississippi’s First District special election. Despite the NRCC sinking $1.8 million into the race—plus robocalls from President Bush and a personal visit by Dick Cheney—Childers managed to pull off a 54-46 win in a district held by the GOP since 1994.
This is now the third special election—the first was for Dennis Hastert’s seat in Illinois’ 14th District, then Don Cazayoux’s Louisiana victory on May 3—in which a Democrat has defeated a Republican on his own turf.
How bad is this for the GOP? Judging by NRCC chief Tom Cole’s panicked memo last night, pretty bad.
One easy way to predict how screwed Republicans are is to compare these three districts with other Republican-held House districts that won’t have an incumbent running in November. Here’s each district’s Partisan Voter Index, which measures how strongly a district leaned over the past two presidential elections.
Special elections already won by Democrats:
IL-14: R +5
LA-6: R+7
MS-01: R+10
Districts held by retiring Republicans:
AL-2: R+13
AZ-1: R+2
CA-4: R+11
CA-52: R+9
CO-6: R+10
FL-15: R+4
IL-11: R+1
IL-18: R+5
KY-2: R+13
LA-4: R+7
MN-3: R+1
MO-9: R+7
MS-3: R+13
NM-1: D+2
NM-2: R+6
NJ-3: D+3
NJ-7: R+1
NY-25: D+3
NY-26: R+3
OH-7: R+6
OH-15: R+1
OH-16: R+4
PA-5: R+10
VA-11: R+1
WY-At large: R+19
Now for some pseudoscience. If you average out the PVIs of the districts Democrats have already won, you get 7.3. Average out the PVIs of the districts that vote in November, and you get 5.6. In other words, on average, the districts already won by Democrats are more Republican than the nonincumbent GOP district Democrats need to win in November.
Of course, these special elections aren’t exactly typical. Childers campaigned on a pro-life, pro-gun platform that his Yankee counterparts can’t exactly emulate. Nor was Cazayoux’s Louisiana win particularly overwhelming. But as a general indicator, the races give House Republicans reason to squirm.
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The past 24 hours have been a combination of sky highs and brutal
lows for Hillary Clinton. She won by double digits in West Virginia—one
of her biggest victories yet. But a superdelegate shutout (Obama won
four today to her zero) and a crippling campaign debt suggest the
victory will be short-lived. We'll bump her up 1.3 points to 2.9 percent, if only because tonight's victory all but guarantees she'll stick around a few more weeks.
First, the good news: Clinton's West Virginia victory gives her what she most desperately needs—arguments.
Her win, while expected, managed to suck away much of Obama's normal
coalition (minus blacks, who made up 4 percent of the electorate). She
can say Obama is weakening, that he's vulnerable in the general, and
that voters want her to stick it out. Not even a landslide victory
would earn Clinton enough pledged delegates to challenge Obama's tally,
and Obama's popular-vote lead
remains daunting. But she now has an excuse to stay in. In the words of
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, Clinton is now an "understudy candidate,"
waiting in the wings to see if Obama catches the flu.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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CNN’s projecting that Hillary Clinton will win West Virginia big time. The question is how, if at all, this can help her. She’s been running out of arguments for weeks. But here are a few ways she can spin today's results:
1) Obama’s coalition is splintering. Clinton’s major argument has been that Obama can’t win working-class white voters, and that he relies on too narrow a coalition. Well, tonight helps her case. Clinton won almost every single demographic normally loyal to Obama. She won all income slices, although less decisively among wealthier voters. She won 54 percent of independents, as well as 59 percent of conservatives. She took college graduates by 57 percent. (She even won voters with postgraduate work, 51-47. Hey now!) And, most surprisingly, she won young voters (age 17-29) with 57 percent. Everyone expected Clinton to win West Virginia because of its demographics—they didn’t expect Obama to slip quite so much among his usual fans.
2) He’s too vulnerable. It looked like Obama’s campaign disasters—the Rev. Wright, “bitter,” the flag pin—didn’t hurt him much in Indiana and North Carolina. In West Virginia, though, they clearly did. Fifty-one percent of voters told pollsters they thought Obama shares Wright’s views. Only 47 percent of voters said Obama shares their values—a pretty clear stand-in for questions of patriotism. Clinton could argue that these voters are the tip of a big, judgmental iceberg of general election voters. If you think Obama’s having trouble now, wait till all the racists come out of the woodwork in November.
3) Economy blues. Consider this: Sixty-four percent of voters named the economy as their top issue. At the same time, a whopping 63 percent said her gas tax holiday proposal was a good idea. That despite almost unanimous opposition to the idea by experts. Clinton can now say she’s got the people on her side. She can also argue that if the economy crashes between now and November, she stands to benefit much more than Obama.
4) It’s not over! According to Fox News, 78 percent of voters think Clinton should stay in the race. That includes a good chunk of Obama supporters. If Clinton needs to persuade superdelegates to hold their tongues until June 3, this is the stat she’ll cite. And right now, buying time is the best thing Clinton can do.
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This presidential race is full of celebrity look-alikes. Hillary Clinton and Star Trek's Tasha Yar. Fred Thompson and Javier Bardem. But rarely does someone intimately involved in the race look exactly like someone else intimately involved in the race. Behold the eerie resemblance of new Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr to America's most famous pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
Other things the two men have in common: outspoken personalities, a love of TV cameras, and a roughly equal chance of winning the presidency.
Thanks to Slate's Bill Smee for spotting the resemblance.
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Following up on my last item on West Virginia, a reader spotted another problem with Clinton’s claim that “[e]very nominee has carried the state’s primary since 1976, and no Democrat has won the White House without winning West Virginia since 1916.”
“How many of those West Virginia primaries only had one candidate on the ballot?” Jason Bryant asks. “WV is about the 50th contest in this primary season. If it's been that way for a long time then it seems there wouldn't have been many contests where everyone other than the front runner hadn't dropped out.”
It’s true, West Virginia has traditionally been one of the last states to vote. This year, it’s the 51st contest. In 2004, it was the 40th. It came 43rd in 2000. Bill Clinton was the presumptive nominee before West Virginia’s primary in 1992, as was Michael Dukakis by the time he won the state by a landslide in May of 1988.
So really, it’s not that West Virginia is a litmus test for who becomes the Democratic nominee; it’s that the nominee is usually already decided by the time West Virginia rolls around. It looks like this year will be the exception.