I kind of came to think that “Real Dem Moderate” is kind a lame name for a blog, so I’m changing it to a name I had way long ago on blogger: Mad Wombat. As a result, I’ve had to copy my blog to a new wordpress blog, so make sure to visit that one instead now.
Had a certain orange liberal blog posted gracious and well-thought posts such as this and this and this, instead of resorting to mean personal attacks against Clinton, then I might have stayed there. Alas they didn’t, and they showed what they apparently ultimately are.
Of course, the blogs hating Clinton isn’t anything new, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
When the Michigan Democratic Party first came out with it’s 69-59 proposal, I first thought it wasn’t that bad of idea. It seemed to somewhat equitably split up the delegates between Clinton and Obama and would be a valid solution.
However, while I think both Michigan and Florida delegations getting 1/2 votes was the right move, the more I thought about, and the more I looked into the 69/59 compromise, the less I came to see it as a good solution.
The first reason for this change of mind was probably the fact that Obama had built a large enough lead in the delegate count that, frankly, a 77-55 split, with 55 uncommitted delegates - almost all going to Obama - was virtually no different than the 69-59 split, and it wouldn’t provoke the Clinton campaign as much.
The second reason for this change was the fact that I found the reasoning behind giving 59 delegates to Obama rather dubious. First off, it assumed that all uncommitted delegates went for Obama, despite the fact that several other candidates - including Edwards - pulled his name as well. Are they saying that Edwards wouldn’t have won any delegates, or are they just assuming that all of Edward’s delegates would have gone to Obama (not that it isn’t a bad assumption, but you still shouldn’t assume it).
Also, where did they decide to give Obama an extra 4 delegates? Coincidentally enough, 59 is almost exactly between 55 and 64 - 55 being the original uncommitted count and 64 being the number of delegates Obama would have gotten if the delegation was split 50/50. It seems to me that the Michigan Democratic Party split the difference, then came up with a reason to peg the number there other than just saying they split the difference. The reasons they came up with included counting write-in votes for Obama - votes which weren’t supposed to count by Michigan law - as well as using polling, including exit polling which has long been shown to not necessarily be a reliable predictor of the margin, at least within about 5% or so.
So by using 4 pretty dubious standards, the DNC gave Obama all of the uncommitted votes, and then-some - even when most of the original 55 uncommitted delegates had already declared for Obama. So in the name of gaining 4 delegates which Obama didn’t even need, his supporters on the DNC rules committee took an action which provoked the Clinton campaign to the maximum possible extent short of not seating the delegation at all, and causing doubt that the DNC was somehow trying to throw the election in Obama’s favor.
Of course, those 4 delegates did little to help Obama as he would have gotten the delegates anyway, but on the other side, because of that fact, the provocation of Clinton and her supporters was completely unnecessary and will just make it that much harder for Clinton’s core supporters to fall in line behind Obama.
Looking over at Electoral-Vote, perhaps as warning to people that this election is anything but a given, I’m going to occasionally compare Obama’s current electoral vote status vs. McCain and compare it to Kerry’s status on the same date in 2004.
So here we go:
Obama 287, McCain 227, Ties 24
States Kerry was leading in and would eventually lose:
Florida
Iowa
Missouri
Nevada
New Mexico
West Virginia
For a total of 60 Electoral Votes
States Kerry was trailing in but eventually would win:
None
Which states Kerry lead but lost which Obama currently leads in:
Iowa
Missouri
New Mexico
For 23 Electoral Votes
Further states Obama leads in which Kerry lost
Colorado
Indiana (tied with McCain)
Ohio
Virginia (tied with McCain)
For 29 Electoral Votes (53 including tied states)
States Which Obama trails in which Kerry won:
Michigan
For 17 electoral votes
Number of “Strong” Electoral Votes (lead of over 10%)
Kerry: 151
Obama: 190
Number of “Strong” or “Weak” Electoral Votes (lead of over 5%)
Kerry: 216
Obama: 244
Number of “Strong” States for GOP
Bush: 139
McCain: 124
Number of “Strong” or “Weak” States for GOP
Bush: 181
McCain: 202
Thoughts
So, at this time in 2004, the base map was Kerry 216, Bush 181 for a lead of 35 Electoral Votes with effectively 141 in play. Bush would end up losing none of these base states while Kerry would go on to lose West Virginia and New Mexico, for a total of 10 Electoral Votes. Kerry would only go on to win a mere 1/3 of those battle ground electoral votes - and that’s not including New Mexico and West Virginia in that group.
2008 starts off with a base map of Obama 244, McCain 202 for a lead of 42 Electoral votes with effectively only 92 in play. That means that, even more so than in 2004, the nation seems split. Obama would need to win 28% of those Electoral Votes to win the presidency, which is at least the good news for him.
That bad news is that, out of those 92 in play, Both Kerry and Gore only won 24 of those - Connecticut and Michigan, which would put Obama two shy of the Presidency. On top of that, a further 20 Electoral votes which are currently in Obama’s base were lost by either Kerry or Gore or both.
Perhaps the silver lining to this is that Obama has 39 more “strong” electoral votes than Kerry did at this time, while McCain has 15 fewer “strong” electoral votes than Bush did.
In any case, both Obama and McCain are more vulnerable than Kerry and Bush, and in a stronger position than Kerry and Bush, depending on which metric you look at. Obama has more states with stronger support on his side than Kerry, but has fewer total states on this side than Kerry, as well as several states which haven’t necessarily gone Democratic recently. Also, if Obama were to go the same route as Kerry and picks up no more states than he currently has, his margin of error is very slim. McCain has fewer strong states than Bush, but more total states than Bush and is doing considerably better in Florida than Bush was at this time, but also holds a state that the GOP hasn’t won in much recently: Michigan, as well as being threatened in some states that Bush wasn’t threated in.
Since I quit a certain orange blog since their excessive kool-aid drinking for Obama and against Clinton became too much even for me (and I voted for Obama!), I needed a place to put my occasional political thoughts. As a result, I’ll see if I can jump start this blog once again. Here’s to hoping I can actually keep it up this time.
I’ve largely been ignoring this recent “the Clintons are intentionally race baiting!” eruption from liberal blogs for mostly one reason: The blogs hate Clinton.
This isn’t a result of the campaign, either. They’ve always hated the Clintons. Most of the liberal bloggers don’t see the 90s as the time of economic prosperity and peace, but as a time of democrats bending over and taking it in the ass by the GOP (I don’t agree with that by the way).
As a result, not only are callbacks to the 1990s unpersuasive to them as a reason to support Clinton, but it just convinces them further that Hillary would just do whatever the GOP wanted her to do like Bill supposedly did in the 90s.
There are many conspiracy theories thrown out there by conservatives about secret plans that the liberals have in mind - most of them deal with ending civilization by banning religion for making heterosexuality illegal or something like that.
However, many on the more liberal side’s true intentions are largely intentions that not many people are bringing up: the intentional purging from the democratic party anyone to the right of Russ Feingold and the attempt to finally get a “true” liberal in the White House. What better place to start by the most powerful members of the moderate wing of the party - the Clintons. The blogs hate Clinton. Their hatred for her probably is only surpassed by a few members of Bush’s administration (and of course Bush himself).
They didn’t really express this in the campaign, just in case she won, but the amount of vile material that was thrown her way before the campaign and the amount of it being thrown at her now that the probability of her winning the nomination is probably in the single digits now is a testament to this. Probably the only democrat who had more shit thrown at them than Clinton before 2006 was Lieberman, and of course he’s not a Democrat anymore, mostly to great celebration on the blogs. And don’t be a damn bit surprised if the blogs try to Lieberman Hillary in New York in 2010 either. The only reason they didn’t in 2006 was because she was obviously too popular. I’m sure they’re salivating at the chance to in 2010.
Not that all of this excuses some of the things Hillary’s campaign has said and done over the course of the campaign, but typically when one of Hillary’s people does something stupid, it’s all part of her evil campaign plan and shows once again how horrible the Clintons are. If one of Obama’s people does something stupid then, well, that stuff just happens during campaigns sometimes.
They’ve wanted Obama to win from the start, and while many blogs have never endorsed Obama and claim that they are remaining neutral, it’s pretty clear that most liberal blogs have made a concerted effort to downplay Obama’s problems and mistakes while amplifying Clinton’s.
I’ll just give a recent example: Clinton’s campaign that Obama hasn’t passed the “commander-in-chief” test. Now, I think this is a pretty silly exercise by Clinton’s people. However, how did Obama respond? Mostly by either saying “well, if I’m not, then you aren’t” and pointing out the contradiction of Clinton’s campaign making this claim yet at the same time promoting Obama as a possible VP candidate.
The one thing Obama never did - and really never has done that I’m aware of - is actually make the case that he IS ready to be commander-in-chief. While this exercise may seem less relevant against a primary candidate who has little executive and foreign policy experience herself, it will matter quite a bit in the general election against McCain.
What, exactly, makes Obama think he’s qualified (this same question applies to Clinton as well). I’ve never recalled Obama really say anything on the topic, beyond talking about Iraq, and I don’t really think, however right he might have been, that that’s a sufficient enough answer.
However, the fact that Obama has never really done this to my knowledge is never brought up by the blogs, but the fact that Clinton apparently hasn’t done this is brought up all the time (not that I mind that it is, but ask it to both candidates if you do). Of course, their reasoning behind this is the vote to authorize the war, as if that single vote alone is enough to label someone ready or not ready to be commander-in-chief.
It’s kind of a shame we aren’t having another debate (unless they decide to do one in Pennsylvania). I’d like a moderator to ask “when do you think someone has passed the commander-in-chief test, and why do you think you have passed it.”
Also, as much as they laugh at Clinton’s campaigns assertions of winning “states that matter,” the fact of the matter is that, if one were calculating who was winning the nomination based on electoral votes using the popular vote of a state, Clinton would actually by winning 219 to 202 (I am giving Texas to Clinton since she won the primary, which I regard as a better representation of the will of the people in Texas). That is a serious problem in regards to Obama’s potential electability I think.
Obama has won a total of 8 states with 10 or more EVs, and only 2 states with 15 or more - Georgia with 15 and Illinois with 21.
Clinton has won 8 states with 10 or more EVs, and 5 states with 15 or more - California, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Texas.
Really only Georgia and Texas could be considered safe GOP this cycle in that list. The only real swing state on that list is Ohio which, of course, Clinton won by a substantial margin.
And again, this is all NOT including Michigan or Florida.
And while people like to deride Clinton’s “insult 50 state” strategy, the fact is that every state Clinton has won Democrats will win or have a chance of winning, except probably Oklahoma and Texas.
Meanwhile, the bulk of Obama’s wins have come in states which democrats have essentially no shot of winning. Yes, he does at least get wins in some “lock” states such as Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Washington, Maine, DC, Maryland, Hawaii, and Vermont. Yes, he does get wins in some swing states such as Iowa, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, Virginia, and Wisconsin. However, he has a hell of a lot of wins in states which campaign money would be pretty much wasted in if we spent it there in the general: South Carolina, Alabama, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, North Dakota, Louisiana, Nebraska, Wyoming, Mississippi.
This is the core to Clinton’s argument: Obama is strongest in states which won’t help democrates a bit: states which democrats are virtually guaranteed to lose. That might help his popular vote margin over McCain, but it won’t help his Electoral Vote margin, which is, of course, what matters. Meanwhile, Clinton would argue, she has shown a better aptitude at locking down the states that Democrats should win and must win.
Of course, the blogs completely ignore all of this because it’s inconvenient. Not that Clinton’s blowing off states as “not mattering” really helps, but if one is making the argument that the grass is green, but in the process blows off all the other colors, that doesn’t change the fact that the grass is green.
The Wyoming and Mississippi elections are another example of pro-Obama bias. Obama netted maybe 4 total delegates from those two states. The blogs celebrated as these wins seemed to show that Clinton’s momentum had stalled. On the contrary, Obama should have pulled something around 10 delegates from these states. The fact that Clinton held Obama to a net of 4 delegates is a huge win for her, considering the margins Obama had been getting in the south and west. But you won’t hear this on the blogs.
Regardless of what the blogs say, Clinton can still climb back into the race. She absolutely positively must win Pennsylvania by a substantial margin - and that includes the delegate count this time as well - but if she does, Obama is going to have to watch out. He’ll still have the upper hand, but he can’t afford to have Clinton start rallying off wins in May and June like he was going in February or else this race is going to narrow quite a bit very quickly (to say nothing about not wanting to go into the general with stalled momentum if he did survive such a run).
Of course, you won’t hear this on the blogs. You’ll hear how Clinton is trying to campaign even though it is utterly impossible for her to win (unless, of course, she uses the evil, vile superdelegates, which are bane of all civilization, apparently) hoping that she can damage Obama to the point to where he wouldn’t be able to survive a general election campaign.
Of course, what seems to slip past most of the blogs is the idea that when you’re in an election, you typically try to win. Of course, Clinton campaigning to win is abhorrent while Obama campaigning to win is, you know, campaigning.
In any case, I think I’ve rambled enough on this topic.
And Obama people accuse Clinton people of “saying anything to win?
Breaking News: Clinton caught in Rezko Lie!
The “lie” apparently being that Clinton didn’t recall ever having met Rezko. How a single photo, clearly posed, like she’s done with I’m sure thousands of other people, proves that she lied about recalling to meet with him, I’m not sure.
I’m sure I don’t remember everyone I’ve ever met, and I’m not even a Washington politician.
Cross Posted on Daily Kos
One of the biggest recent flaps between Clinton and Obama has been Obama’s statement a while back in which he said, in part, that the GOP was the party of ideas. Clinton has seized on this statement to try to gain an advantage on Obama, and we’ll see whether she’s successful in that endavor. Obama, on the other hand, has countered saying that she’s taking the quote out of context and he didn’t mean anything like what Clinton is suggesting.
The problem is that they both have a problem.
Let’s start with Obama’s claim that Clinton is taking his quote out of context. Here is Obama’s full quote:
The Republican approach, I think, has played itself out. I mean, I think it’s fair to say that the Republicans were the party of ideas for a pretty long chunk of time there for the last 10-15 years, in the sense that they were challenging conventional wisdom. Now, you’ve heard it all before. You look at the economic policies when they’re being debated among the [GOP] presidential candidates, it’s all tax cuts. You know, we’ve done that. We’ve tried it. That’s not really going to solve our energy problems, for example.
Clinton’s insinuations that Obama may support those ideas now is clearly off base as Obama has said that we’ve tried the GOP’s ideas and they haven’t worked. That’s pretty easy to look at.
But Obama has a problem as well, and several of them, all of which may be worse than Clinton’s misrepresentation of what Obama said.
First off, this is another instance of Obama repeating a right wing frame (Social Security in crisis, anyone?).
The very phrase “the party of ideas” was developed by the GOP because the very phrase itself insinuated that the Democrats was the party that didn’t have ideas. Repeating this frame by itself does nothing good. If he had said “the GOP is supposedly the party of ideas” or “The GOP liked to call themselves the party of ideas” or some other way to qualify it to clearly show that he didn’t really believe the statement, then it would be different, but he didn’t.
Second, not only did he didn’t do anything to show that he disagreed with the statement but…he actually DID agree with it! He says they’re bad ideas, yes, but he basically is saying that the Democratic party’s ideas have been crap for the past decade and a half. Really? Did he sleep through the entire Clinton presidency? I’m not sure that basically calling Democratic ideas in the 90s crap is the best way to win over democratic voters.
Thirdly, Obama gives credence to the GOP’s ideas by referring to them as “the party of ideas,” whether he agrees with them or not. And in fact, he really only half-heartedly disagrees with them. It’s kinda like “well yeah, they had ideas, but unfortunately they didn’t work, so we should try something new now.”
In other words, he is arguing that they were bad ideas through the argument that, over time, they haven’t panned out, not because they are just flat out bad ideas.
My issue with Clinton’s attacks are that she’s using the right phrase but attacking in the wrong way. There were basically two ways to attack: the more correct attack, such as what I outlined and the shall we say the less than honest attack, but an attack which, if it worked, would probably do a lot more damage to Obama.
She choose to do the latter, and it’s effectiveness has yet to be seen. If she ends up rolling over Obama on February 5th, we can probably say that it did no worse than having no effect. The problem Clinton has is that if Obama effectively pushes back on her attack, she can’t easily go back and attack him using the same phrase using the other method because people will think it’s just the same attack.
Clinton definitely has a problem in this line of attack, but I think Obama supporters should listen to themselves before going too far in saying “Obama’s right! The GOP WAS the party of ideas!”
I’ve been trying to figure out if some of Senator Clinton’s most vocal supporters - including her own husband - are clueless, morons, or are subvert Hillary’s campaign.
Now, I don’t really believe the last one, but I can’t think of many reasons for the behavior of some of her supporter’s behavior and comments except for the other two reasons.
First, you have Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign co-chair Billy Shaheen saying that Obama would be difficult to elect because of his admitted previous drug use. He ended up having to resign because, frankly, most people who are ever going to vote for a democrat in the general election probably don’t give a flying flip over drug use someone might have engaged in 20 years ago.
You then have former Senator Bob Kerrey coming out and saying that Obama attended a secular madrasa in Indonesia. Now, to Kerrey’s credit, he is probably technically correct in the sense that a madrasa is the Arabic word for “school,” whether secular or religious.
The problem Kerrey has is two fold, though. First, the language most Indonesians speak is Indonesian (amazingly enough), not Arabic, so to call it a madrasa within Indonesia would imply that it was within the Islamic cultural community, thus almost certainly making it a religious school. Second, Obama has already been subjected to attacks that he attended a radical Islamic madrasa in Indonesia, and so people already have in their heads Obama + madrasa = bad.
I think this was more of an issue of Kerrey being uninformed than anything else, but it was still moronic, and doesn’t help him, or the candidate he supports, with those who are tired old, long debunked stories being dredged up again.
Next you have former President Clinton sticking his foot in his mouth for a 2nd time in a relatively short time by saying that Hillary planned to send him and former President George H. W. Bush on basically a “hey! we’re not really so bad now” tour. (the first time was his statement that he was against the war from the start. While Hillary may have the public statements to be able to claim that, Bill Clinton appeared not to).
I would have to think that this was still in the idea or planning stage since Senator Clinton herself didn’t mention it, and clearly former President Bush wasn’t on board yet. Either Bill Clinton thought it was close enough to a done deal that he thought he would let it out to make Hillary sound somewhat conciliatory, or, again, he was acting either unwisely or without full knowledge of what he was saying.
Even if all of these things are unauthorized from the Clinton campaign, and I seem to doubt that Clinton herself authorized any of this (though lower, more-disgruntled with the way things are going members of the campaign may be involved), it still doesn’t show well on the campaign.
Part of the problem is that a cross-section of Hillary’s campaign is much like a cross-section of the democratic party in general, with both liberals, moderates, and conservative democrats. This may sound like a pretty decent plan as you’re basically welcoming everyone in the party.
The problem is that when things started going to hell, the inherent mistrust between the liberals and the moderates and conservatives came out in full force. You can see this mistrust everywhere, really. You saw in the 2004 primary battle between Dean and everyone else. You see it in the everyone-but-Clinton movement this year. You see it on blogs, and now you’re seeing it within the Clinton campaign itself.
The reason for much of this mistrust is that the Democratic party is, at it’s core, a coalition party between people who have similar sympathies, but pretty different ideas of how intense and quickly new policies should be put in place, and how it is politically best to implement those policies (among other things, I’m sure).
This extends itself to liberals believing that moderates will sell out on principles, since moderates are often willing to “go half way” in compromising while liberals are far less likely to be open to compromising.
Meanwhile, moderates mistrust liberals because they fear that if the party drifts to the left, they’ll bleed more support from the middle than they’re gain from the left, and they don’t trust that liberals are going to keep voting for democrats, even if they do appease them.
And now portions of the Clinton campaign has become somewhat of a proxy war between these two groups, with the most conservative aspects of the democratic coalition breaking off first and assailing the liberal part of the party.
Clinton can’t like all of this because she was already facing a threat that some of the more liberal members of the party may sit home if they lose the “anyone but Clinton” campaign in the primary, and a lot of this party infighting that’s popping up form her supporters can’t do anything than increase the likelihood of something like that happening.
Clinton can still win the nomination, given her still-strong lead in national polls, but one merely has to look back at 2004 to see how Iowa can change the race.
Newsweek did a poll about 10 days before the Iowa caucuses in 2004 which showed Dean leading with 24%, and Clark and Kerry basically tied for 2nd, and 14% saying they didn’t know nationally, and Edwards at 3%.
After Kerry won, Edwards finished 2nd, and Dean finished 3rd, Kerry jumped from 11% support to 30% support nationally, Edwards jumped from 3% to 13%, while Dean dropped from 24% to 12%. After winning New Hampshire, Kerry again jumped up to 45%, and the rest is history.
While Clinton’s 40%+ national ratings clearly are much better, and thus give her a bit more room than Deans’ 24% in 2004, the trend is going down, which has to be a worrysome sign for her. All this infighting can’t be helping either.
There is just something seriously wrong and disturbing about measuring the size of your manly equipment by how many people you had killed:
Speaking to reporters Monday in Los Angeles, California, Huckabee disputed the ad, pointing to his record of carrying out the death penalty while governor as evidence that he was tough on crime. Massachusetts doesn’t have the death penalty.
“The difference between us is that I did something he never had to do. I carried out the death penalty 16 times, more than any other governor in my state’s history,” Huckabee said.
And this is supposed to be a good thing!
