Revenge Against Rove

I don't necessarily want to see a bunch of Republicans chosen for positions in a Democratic Administration, but I think there's value to choosing a select amount. Particularly in the case of US Attorneys who have shown their willingness to buck partisanship and follow the evidence. This is a great move by the President.

Today, President Obama nominated four individuals to serve as U.S. attorneys — most notably Daniel Bogden in Nevada [...] Bogden has actually already served as a U.S. attorney, but he was ousted in the Bush administration’s political purge. Even Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) said that the case had been “completely mishandled” by then-attorney general Alberto Gonzales.

Apparently Harry Reid played a big role in this.

David Iglesias would be a nice choice for US Attorney in New Mexico, too.

Immigration Reform This Year?

Not that Senate and House schedules aren't made to be broken, but that's certainly interesting.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) told reporters Thursday that he would like the Senate to pass comprehensive immigration reform this year, adding another huge project to Democrats' already packed schedule for 2009.

“As far as I’m concerned, we have three major issues we have to do this year, if at all possible: No. 1 is healthcare; No 2 is energy, global warming; No. 3 is immigration reform,” Reid said.

“It’s going to happen this session, but I want it this year, if at all possible.”

Reid met Thursday with leaders of Hispanic groups including the National Council of La Raza and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. He and those leaders promoted the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court at a press conference.

Reid stressed that he does not want to pass immigration “piecemeal” but, instead, as a comprehensive package.

We haven't heard a lot about this since the recession hit, but perhaps this recent poll has led Democrats to be bolder on the issue. It shows overwhelming support for immigration reform legislation, 64-21. And after comprehensive immigration reform is explained, it goes up to 86-14.

There are also political considerations. The Sotomayor nomination has turned off conservatives even more to the Republican Party. Getting immigration reform done under a Democratic Administration would put another nail in that coffin. Not to mention adding millions of new potential voters down the road. Plus, there's Harry Reid' re-election chances. Nevada Hispanics are 23% of the population. Perversely, that data point may move Reid toward the more progressive solution, so prove to the folks back home his sensitivity to the issue.

But aside from this, comprehensive immigration reform is the right thing to do. We should bring millions of residents out of the shadows and into the greater economy, where they can help produce and pay US taxes. Morally speaking, we should not keep people hidden in the underground economy. Practically, this is the only way to deal with the problem. We're not deporting 11 million people any time soon, and given how vital they are to the smooth functioning of the US economy, we would be cutting off our nose to spite our face.

Obviously this will be a long slog - conservatives would love to rile up their anti-immigrant base. But as we've seen with Sotomayor, they commit electoral suicide with every utterance. Let's get this done.

RIP Madelyn Dunham

Terrible news. The day before an historic election, Barack Obama's grandmother, the woman who raised him for a good portion of his youth, has passed away. He took time off the campaign trail in the final weeks to say his last goodbyes. Unfortunately she could not make it to Election Day.

This was a woman who went from the secretarial pool to the Vice President of a bank, a woman who worked on assembly lines during World War II. Here's the statement from Barack Obama and his sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng:

"It is with great sadness that we announce that our grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, has died peacefully after a battle with cancer. She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances. She was proud of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren and left this world with the knowledge that her impact on all of us was meaningful and enduring. Our debt to her is beyond measure.

"Our family wants to thank all of those who sent flowers, cards, well-wishes, and prayers during this difficult time. It brought our grandmother and us great comfort. Our grandmother was a private woman, and we will respect her wish for a small private ceremony to be held at a later date. In lieu of flowers, we ask that you make a donation to any worthy organization in search of a cure for cancer."

RIP.

...I should also note that the Nevada State Director of the Obama campaign died from a massive heart attack at the age of just 44. Much of my volunteer efforts for Obama supported Nevada. This is also a tragic loss.

Nevada

A Suffolk poll shows Obama up 10 in Nevada. I've been doing a lot of grasssroots work, mostly with Nevada, and the great thing about that state is that their early voting stations are plentiful (practically at every Albertson's) and Obama's people have made early voting a priority. Pretty much every Democrat you talk to out there says they're voting early. One estimate, based on 2004 numbers, is that 40% of Nevada has already voted. Now, that'll be less because I think turnout will eclipse 2004. But the point is that McCain will have LOTS of ground to make up on Election Day, probably too much.

And adding Nevada to Iowa, New Mexico and the Kerry states gives Obama 269 electoral votes, which would give him a tie in the Electoral College. Plus there's Virginia, Colorado, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Montana, North Dakota, that extra electoral vote in Nebraska....

Let me remind you, however, with an assist from the Obama campaign, not to get overconfident:

Follow The Bouncing Ball

One thing spending a lot of time on the blogs can do is make the connections between events much easier to recognize.

For example, this:

Palin may not have been able to smell it in the Reno-Sparks Convention Center or the beautiful Henderson Pavilion, but that scent in the Nevada air for the GOP is desperation. You can see it in the numbers, on the airwaves, in the mailboxes.

Perhaps the most telling sign of the Republican straw-grasping occurring came from one of the warm-up speakers for Palin, state Sen. Bob Beers, who can play more tricks with numbers than most magicians can with rabbits and hats. Beers urged the crowd to go out and vote because Democrats are beating Republicans in the early vote, but told them to take heart that fewer Democrats had voted each day and more Republicans were going to the polls each day.

Forget accuracy for a moment — more than 15,000 Democrats voted the first day, then about 12,000 the second and 13,000 the third. More important, for Beers and the GOP, everything is relative — 5,700 Republicans voted Saturday, a little more than 5,000 on Sunday and about 6,000 on Monday. If that pathetic pace continues — though it seems unlikely — by the end of the 14-day early voting period, Republicans will be far enough behind to make Nov. 4 an afterthought.

Begets this.

The GOP effort to suppress the vote has reared its head in Nevada.

Yesterday, Sue Lowden, the state Republican chair, sent a letter to Democratic Secretary of State Ross Miller, asking him to prevent some from voting, because their registrations are incomplete.

How may peope are we talking about? Jon Ralston of the Las Vegas Sun reports: "I understand that 2,300 forms have been identified in urban counties."

"Urban" counties. How droll.

And this:

It looks like one of the numerous tricks pulled by Republicans to make it harder for black people to vote isn't going to work.

A judge in Lake County, Indiana ruled today against a GOP effort to shut down early voting centers set up in predominantly low-income African-American areas of the county.

Begets this.

13 days before the election, the McCain campaign has decided to spend several hundred thousands dollars on a last-minute television buy in the state of Indiana.

This is the first time in a month that the campaign has spent its own money on television in the Hoosier state.

It happens quite a lot. The information is open enough that you can just follow along.

Delegitimization Project

The polls are surging, the fundamentals of the election are in the favor of the Democrats, and time is running out. That's why today, the Republicans kicked their ground game into high gear.

Nevada state authorities are raiding the Las Vegas headquarters of an organization that works to get low-income people to vote.

A Nevada secretary of state's office spokesman said Tuesday that investigators are looking for evidence of voter fraud at the office of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, also called ACORN.

No one was at the ACORN office when state agents arrived with a search warrant and began carting records and documents away.

ACORN, which is going to supplant the ACLU as the organization conservatives blame for all the world's ills, routinely flags suspicious voter registration applications for election officials generated by their registration drives. This does not sound like the work of an organization dedicated to stealing elections - the whole "we turn ourselves in" part works against that. This is from ACORN's statement today:

Election officials routinely ignored this information and failed to act. In early July, ACORN asked to meet with election officials to express our concerns that they were not acting on information ACORN had presented to them. ACORN met with Clark County elections officials and a representative of the Secretary of State on July 17th. ACORN pleaded with them to take our concerns about fraudulent applications seriously. One week later, elections officials asked us to provide them with a second copy of what we had previously provided to them. ACORN responded by giving election officials copies of 46 "problem application packages," which involved 33 former canvassers.

On September 23, ACORN had received a subpoena dated September 19^th requesting information on 15 employees, all of whom had been included in the packages we had previously submitted to election officials. ACORN provided our personnel records on these 15 employees on September 29.

Today's raid by the Secretary of State's Office is a stunt that serves no useful purpose other than discredit our work registering Nevadans and distracting us from the important work ahead of getting every eligible voter to the polls."

So you have 46 bad applications out of 80,000 new voters registered in Clark County. And of course the thing about bad voter registrations is that they are easily flagged and almost by definition cannot result in a fraudulent vote. If someone submits a registration form with the names of the Dallas Cowboys on them, that won't result in the Dallas Cowboys voting in Nevada. The same with duplicate voter registrations. It would be the most time-consuming and least likely to be successful vote stealing effort in history.

But that's hardly the point. The Bush Administration sought to make this a priority months ago by creating joint task forces to investigate voter fraud. The Attorney General of Wisconsin, in a bid to become the next Katherine Harris or Ken Blackwell, openly boasted about taking action - with the Justice Department - over this non-existent problem at the RNC (how nonpartisan of him):

"We are out there front and center everyday and you'll be hearing much more from the Department of Justice in the coming months about doing what we can to make sure that those people who have illegally and illegitimately registered to vote, don't have the opportunity on election day to show up and take away your vote by casting one that is not legal," he continued.

This isn't about stopping the scourge of voter fraud. It's about using that as a crutch to stop people from voting, to put up obstructions and increase the burden among Democratic communities. They put fliers in black neighborhoods warning of prosecution if black people vote, and they distribute false information designed to get students to be afraid to vote at their colleges. Voter fraud is the hook on which they hang this cloak of suppression.

Here's Cynthia Tucker of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

A recently unearthed e-mail from a Republican strategist in New Mexico shows the unbridled cynicism that underlies claims about fraudulent voting. Patrick Rogers, former lawyer for the New Mexico Republican Party, was among the party hacks pushing for criminal investigations into alleged voter fraud. He clearly was hoping that the threat of legal sanctions would intimidate Democrats and aid Republicans, including U.S. Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.), who was in a tight race for re-election. According to a new report from the U.S. Justice Department’s inspector general, Rogers wrote in September 2004:

“I believe the [voter] ID issue should be used at all levels — federal, state legislative races and Heather’s race. … You are not going to find a better wedge issue. … This is the single best wedge issue, ever in [New Mexico].”

The McCain campaign is doing the same thing with this perverse charge that Barack Obama's contributions are "shadowy" and "suspect." Because donors under $200 don't have to be itemized on FEC reports, they are essentially attacking the strength of Obama's small-donor base in much the same way that these bogus fraud allegations attack the strength of Democratic voter turnout.

This may not be enough to turn the tide of the election, but will certainly be enough of a seed of doubt for the right wing noise machine to cultivate for years, delegitimizing an Obama victory and setting the stage for another wave of backlash politics. If you thought the right had a persecution complex while in the majority, wait until you see it in the minority.

Ground Game Update

Sean at Five Thirty Eight has started his road reports with a couple on Nevada and they're really interesting. Seeing that my efforts with the Obama campaign thus far have focused on Nevada, it's great to see a report from the ground. The area around Carson City is experiencing a Democratic resurgence, and there are targeted voter registration efforts there. And I'm liking what I'm hearing about Reno:

During the summer, John McCain’s Reno office was struggling to attract volunteers. After he selected Sarah Palin as his running mate, there was a line of volunteers waiting outside the campaign office the following morning. Since then, they’ve gotten a solid 20 volunteers a night, though only four were there the night I stopped into the office. I was willing to believe the 20 figure, given the re-energized party since Palin entered the race.

By contrast, Barack Obama’s Reno office has been humming for months. Though John Kerry won the city of Reno in 2004, he lost neighboring Sparks and Washoe County as a whole by 4.21%, or 6,704 votes. That represents just over 31% of his total losing margin (21,500), despite the fact that Washoe contributes only about 19% of Nevada’s statewide voting total.

In just the last year, Washoe County’s R-D voter registration gap has dropped from R +16,000 to R +5,000. The several months on the ground leading up to the January 19 caucus helped. That shift represents a lot of grinding, day-by-day work by organizers and volunteers to canvass and recanvass neighborhoods that can't be crammed at the last minute.

Good stuff. Of course, the McCain ground game is starting to roll as well. They're preparing for problems at the polling places, you see. I don't know if that word should read "preparing" or "creating," but they're certainly on top of it. They even want to pick the judges who will make key voting decisions on Election Day.

McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers said there were a number of issues that required advance legwork, including the proper handling of absentee ballots by military personnel deployed overseas.

Another issue is the last-minute decisions for polling places to stay open later. Rogers said the committee will work with precincts to determine under which circumstances an extension should be granted as well as agree upon a judge to handle such claims.

“You could pre-approve some judges,” Rogers said, “so they’re not going to somebody who’s in somebody’s pocket.”

How helpful!

Obama's campaign is not having any of this. They are jumping all over any indications of voter suppression or disenfranchisement. Today, they announced an initiative to combat the potential for suppression in Michigan using foreclosure records.

The Obama Campaign and the Democratic National Committee are joining with three Michigan residents in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan to defend the lawful right of families facing foreclosure or who have lost their homes to vote in the November election.

"Senator McCain said last week that he was 'divorced from the day-to-day challenges people have,' and he certainly has proven that to Michigan families," said Obama Campaign Manager David Plouffe. "Senator McCain has no real plan to turn Michigan's economy around or help families faced with losing their homes - so his party has decided the only way to save his campaign is to deny the right to vote to families most affected by his disastrous economic policies."

The complaint filed today seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to challenge the "lose your home, lose your vote" vote-suppression program adopted by the Macomb County Republican Party, in concert with the Michigan Republican Party and the Republican National Committee, as well as unnamed Defendants who will implement the scheme at polling places in Macomb County and throughout the State. This "lose your home, lose your vote" program is part of a broader scheme - misnamed an "election integrity" program - to harass voters and suppress the vote throughout the State of Michigan in the upcoming election on November 4.

You can read the complaint here, and at the above link see a long rundown of the GOP's voter suppression history. Obama has actually worked on this issue in the United States Senate, so I think they'll be more than ready for the challenge. Still, the GOP knows this field well and will have all kinds of new maneuvers, I'm sure.

Wow... Two THOUSAND People Show Up For Obama Campaign HQ Opening In L.A.

The general election has begun. On a random Thursday night, when most political junkies were watching POW McCain's cottage cheese and lime Jello speech at the RNC convention, in a town notoriously hard to get anywhere in on time, 2,000 people showed up at the opening of Barack Obama's first campaign office in Southern California.

There were a couple speeches from locals (Eric Garcetti, Harb Wesson, Mark Ridley-Thomas, and a couple others) at the beginning, and they handed out a few yard signs and bumper stickers, but basically, this was an office opening. Just a walk-through of the building. And the campaign sent only one email out about it, with just 24 hours advance notice.

Two thousand people.

Wow.

Practically every local TV station in L.A. was out there, including a NEWS CHOPPER. It basically turned into a block party, with supporters waving signs at passersby on the street. But there was also some positive work being done. Most of the people who turned out to the event signed up to volunteer, whether by phone banking or traveling to Nevada. It's a large enough office to handle a lot of volunteers at once. And they are organized and ready.

I was able to talk with Mitchell Schwartz, who will be the California Field Director for the next two months. He said the goal of the office was to win California, and then help Nevada. So there will be legitimate actions taken here to increase turnout, which bodes well for the propositions and downticket races, even though the Obama campaign will strictly be trying to identify and turn out Obama voters. The CDP is running a coordinated campaign for downticket (they had their opening in Santa Monica on the same night, which kind of shows how the two entities aren't really working together).

What's more, Schwartz told me that there are going to be up to 10 field offices opening in California over the next week or two, including 3-4 more in the SoCal area (East LA and San Bernardino are likely to get one, among other locations). There will be places to work.

There was a genuine excitement last night. I think what we're seeing on the ground post-Palin is a real determination to get to work. There is a backlash to the conservative culture war backlash they are trying to ride to victory. The denigration of community organizing really hit a nerve, and I think now there's a common opponent, one that's bigger than McCain and more visceral. "We're going to show everyone what community organizing is about," said one attendee to me.

This is no joke. The Obama campaign raised $10 million in one day this week. People are energized and fired up. The spirit of 2004, as Van Jones called it to me at the DNC last week, is back.

Gun To A Gunfight

Count me in as down for Barack Obama's McCain is a celebrity ad (with special cameo from Steve Carell).



I've been saying that the Obama camp had 10-15 seconds of a negative ad down before turning to a laundry list, but this one gets it about right. I think the big takeaway for me is that Obama's team figured out that the media is so insipid, they would only get their ad covered if it was seen as a "response" to the McCain ad. So by framing it that way, it gives them the opportunity to shoehorn in a bunch of pictures with McCain and Bush and make the case against their failed conservative policies. The election needs to be less about Obama and more about the axis of Bush-McCain, and this is a way to turn that around. And there's nothing out of bounds here - McCain's campaign is indeed crawling with lobbyists, and he is indeed proclaiming his support for most of George Bush's policies. It also shows how ridiculous the "celebrity" tag is when applied to a well-known politician - of course you can turn that around on everyone, but on the facts, McCain represents the same wrong direction we've been headed in for seven years.

I'm also partial to this DNC ad using the DHL/Wilmington deal to paint McCain as a job killer:



And this Obama ad blasting McCain for his position on Yucca Mountain.



Obama didn't start down this road, but he can absolutely finish it. And what's more, as the election rolls around he'll be outspending McCain 2-1 to boot.

Puppet Show And Spinal Tap

The Republican Party is not what it used to be.

Citing a lack of interest, the Nevada Republican Party has called off its state convention and will instead pick its delegates to the national convention by private conference call.

The state party broke up its original convention in April when supporters of Ron Paul hijacked the proceedings and tried to elect delegates for their candidate to the national GOP convention in September. Party officials tried to reconvene on July 26, but they needed a quorum of 675 and received only 300 RSVPs, according to local reports.

"With so many people concerned about the economy, it simply wouldn't be fair for us to ask delegates from all over the state to spend money to attend a convention if we know that a quorum won't be present," state party Chairwoman Sue Lowden said in a release.

This is similar to the fact that they held a competitor conference to Netroots Nation in Austin to "confront" the progressive blogosphere, and yet nobody knew about it, the attendance was pathetic, and their keynote speaker (not the Republican nominee, but the Libertarian one) paid to come to NN and wander around.

What a pathetic political party that is right now. Of course, it's up to us to make sure they have many more years in the wilderness.

Go West

The announcement today that Barack Obama will deliver his convention acceptance speech to a cheering crowd of 75,000 in Denver's Invesco Field is a telegraph that the Democratic nominee will concentrate a great deal of resources toward winning the West. There are increasing signs that the Rocky Mountain states are more winnable for a Democrat this year than in the recent past.

Superior voter mobilization is playing a role. Nevada's latest registration numbers show a five percent increase among Democrats over Republicans, a difference of 55,000 voters out of 1,000,000. In 2004, Republicans led in voter registration by one percent, and George Bush won the state by a touch more than that.

So are issues particular to the West. One of them is land use. When the Bush Administration is making closed-door deals to hand over hundreds of thousands of acres of forest to developers in the middle of Montana, residents are going to be angry, and take out those frustrations on the Republican Party. This subdivisioning of America simply won't stand among those Westerners who value open spaces and support land conservation.

Another major issue in the West concerns its natural libertarian streak. The quintessential Western Democratic candidate is a civil libertarian and a conservationist, who wants the rights of his citizens protected. Anchorage, AK mayor Mark Begich, running for the US Senate against Ted "Series of Tubes" Stevens, is an example of this kind of Democrat, and his plan to protect citizens' rights looks like a political winner:

The Begich plan includes:

Standing Up Against Government Interference - including warrantless wiretapping, the assault on habeas corpus, the pursuit of Real ID cards, and retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies that illegally helped the federal government spy on Americans.

No Surveillance on Law-Abiding Americans – Begich opposes efforts since 9/11 to take advantage of public fears, bypassing the courts and Congress to eavesdrop on Americans.

Repeal the Patriot Act – Begich believes national security resources should be built on human intelligence and Special Forces that will identify and respond to real threats of terrorism, not monitoring what books Americans read.

Restore Habeas Corpus – Begich called the Military Commissions Act, passed in 2006, the lowest point in our country’s response to the threat of terrorism. The Act suspends habeas corpus for millions of Americans, and that right needs to be restored.

There are as many electoral votes in Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada as there are in Ohio. New Mexico is actually the ultimate swing state, having chosen the winner in 22 out of its 24 Presidential elections (and really 23, since it narrowly went for Gore). The opportunities in the West, including in places like Montana and Alaska, are very great, and Sen. Obama is showing a desire to press those advantages.

Nevada's Electoral Jackpot?

Todd Beeton looks at Barack Obama's Western state appeal, and while he agrees that Colorado and New Mexico look pretty good, Nevada may be out of reach.

Polling says otherwise. Rasmussen Reports found Barack Obama trailing John McCain by 6 points last month. Bush won Nevada in 2004 by just 3%. The poll represents a 1 point uptick for McCain in Nevada since April and is a full 11 points worse than Hillary Clinton polled against McCain in the state. Obama is performing this badly at a time when, thanks to the hotly contested caucuses in January, Democratic registration and involvement is up.

Of course, since that Rasmussen poll was there's also been an additional facet to the race: the all-important "the governor's a scumbag adulterer who won't be able to show his face in public and campaign for the ticket" effect.

Gibbons filed for divorce last month, saying he and Dawn were incompatible. Since then, the first couple has brawled over custody of the 23-room governor's mansion. (Dawn finally agreed to sleep in the guesthouse.) She has accused him of cheating. He says "absolutely not."

Gibbons, 63, lacks the looks and charm of a Gavin Newsom or Antonio Villaraigosa -- yet the governor is now trailed like a club-hopping starlet.

The Republican governor has been spotted with his alleged paramour, according to published reports, at a sushi bar and at her daughter's high school play. He escorted another woman to the movie "Sex and the City." A Las Vegas paper posted video of him chatting with a dark-haired woman whose face is mostly obscured. The headline: "Video of governor with 'other woman' surfaces." [...]

Conservative activist Chuck Muth says the governor needs to clean up the mess. "If they get divorced -- this is Nevada, for crying out loud -- it's not a big deal. But a messy divorce, that's trouble for everyone."

The governor won't face voters until 2010 -- a political eternity -- but GOP activists fret that his purported philandering could hurt the party in November. What if fed-up Republicans pare back campaign contributions -- or stay home on election day? That could flip control of the state Senate, where Republicans cling to a slender majority -- or even hand Nevada, which twice voted for President Bush, to Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

"You're going to have candidates begging the governor not to come into their district because he'll make things worse," Muth says.

This is alternatively known as the Robert Taft (Ohio Gov. caught up in Coingate) effect. Ohio went completely blue in 2006 because the Governor's troubles impacted every Republican. So too in Nevada, perhaps. Especially since John McCain loves him some nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain, which I'm sure Obama will spell out in ads.

Libertarian Nevada doesn't care about a high-profile politician getting divorced and fooling around on the side, but enough people might - social conservatives and Latinos in particular - to flip a very close state. And if Gibbons can't help the state GOP, they're robbed of a valuable asset.

UPDATE: Ooh, text messages.

You know that unidentified estranged wife of a Reno doctor that the governor of Nevada is not having an affair with?

Well, during one month last year he exchanged 850 text messages with her phone from his official state phone, at 15 cents per.

This is going to get worse and really damage the Nevada GOP.

Sometimes I Don't Get These People

Harry Reid just sent out an email to his list calling out Rep. Rob Andrews (D-NJ) for supporting the nuclear depository at Yucca Mountain. It's a fundraising email for Frank Lautenberg, the New Jersey Senator who is being challenged in a primary by Andrews (and hardly; Lautenberg is whipping him handily so far).

It's the type of news you need to spit out fast, so I won't sugarcoat it - United States Representative Robert Andrews has knowingly voted to store the most toxic substance known to man - nuclear waste - near American citizens, while at the same time vying to represent those citizens in our government.

How? By running for Senate and trying to oust my friend, esteemed colleague, and champion of progressive values, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey [...]

It's hard to believe that a representative of the American people, Rep. Andrews, actually voted to store nuclear waste in a highly earthquake-prone area above a large source of water, only 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas. But don't take my word for it, take his:

"I joined with my colleagues in the House of Representatives to approve President Bush's decision to store the country's nuclear waste beneath Yucca Mountain ... 90 miles northwest of Las Vegas."

And to top off his record of shame, Rep. Andrews was also one of the earliest and staunchest supporters of President Bush's plan to go to war in Iraq.

All of this is true. Lautenberg is indeed a very good Senator, and Andrews is a snake. But you know, considering this challenge is a fringe possibility at best, I can't get enthused that Harry Reid is wasting his time on it, when John McCain was an even earlier and stauncher supporter of the war in Iraq, and just today he signaled his support for Yucca Mountain.

RENO, Nev. – Calling it “a little straight talk,” Sen. John McCain told Nevada backers at a town hall meeting Wednesday he still supports the construction of a nuclear waste repository north of Las Vegas as long as it meets all the regulatory requirements.

But the Republican presidential hopeful from Arizona also said he wants to address nuclear waste by reprocessing spent fuel and trying to find a place for an international repository, which he said the day before may make it unnecessary to build the Yucca Mountain facility.

“I support Yucca Mountain once it goes through all the processes it needs to go through,” McCain said Wednesday. “But I also support reprocessing. A little straight talk, we have to do both." [...]

McCain, a longtime backer of the waste dump most Nevadans oppose, responded to a question at the town hall meeting about Yucca Mountain by saying he's not the kind of politician who tells voters only what they want to hear. He said he earlier told the people of Iowa he doesn't support ethanol subsidies and he still doesn't.

“I go to places and tell people what they don't want to hear,” he said.

Like "I don't care if you die from nuclear radioactivity."

I'm not convinced Yucca Mountain is all that big an issue in Nevada. McCain's going to play an identity-based game rather than an issue-based one, anyway, and if you see Mitt Romney on the ticket it's to win this state. But it's certainly a bigger issue in Nevada than in New Jersey, and it's certainly more newsworthy to Harry Reid's email list that McCain supports Yucca Mountain than some Democratic primary opponent who's not going to win.

Is he interested in winning the Presidency or helping out his buddies?

Hold On, Everybody

So there were two big charges coming from the Obama campaign out of Nevada: that there were numerous incidents of voter suppression and intimidation at the local precinct sites that swung the vote to Clinton; and, that they actually won Nevada (the front page of Obama's campaign website has a graphic showing the Nevada results with "Obama 13 delegates, Clinton 12 delegates"). Based on being there and talking to a lot of precinct captains and people in the know, I can speak to both of these issues.

First, the delegate count. When I spoke with Jill Derby in the immediate aftermath of the caucuses, she basically tried to dismiss the Obama campaign statement, by saying that no national delegates had been selected and that would be determined by an election at the state party convention in April. I pressed her further a little later, asking her essentially "All things being equal, assuming he remained in the race, would Obama wind up with more DNC delegates?" And she refused to give a straight answer. I later learned that Derby is pretty much known as a Clinton supporter, and she was pretty much trying to tell me "We'll make the delegate count reflect the will of the voters." But now, the NSDP has backtracked on that.

"No national convention delegates were awarded. That said, if the delegate preferences remain unchanged between now and April 2008, the calculations of national convention delegates being circulated by the Associated Press are correct. We look forward to our county and state conventions where we will choose the delegates for the nominee that Nevadans support."

On the face of this, many have made the argument that it invalidates the caucus process. I agree, but it's in the same way that the electoral college subverts the national election process. States weight their caucuses to get candidates out to the rural areas (in Nevada's case, it's really a rounding error that gives a little more importance to areas outside of Las Vegas and Clark County). In the aftermath of the election, they can't just renege on that. I agree with Chris Bowers that the media and the conventional wisdom can't just dismiss the real delegate count because they want to. Unfortunately, they are.

The other thing is that you have to understand the significance of the caucuses for party building. A primary is controlled (and paid for) by the state; a caucus is controlled (and paid for) by the parties. The Democrats had 115,800 Nevadans turn out; in 2004 they had 9,000. If you can get 116,000 people out to what amounts to a Democratic Party meeting, you can capture their information, excite them, and turn them out on Election Day. In states where the Democratic Party isn't very organized and politics is not part of the DNA (and believe me, that's Vegas to a T), caucuses actually play a very important role. They're HORRIBLE at picking a President, but they are great at strengthening the party.

The downside to this, especially in a state like Nevada with new caucuses and inexperienced caucus-goers, is that they're a disorganized mess. And this brings me to the charges of voting rights violations. Matt Stoller covers a fair bit of this today, and I was in the same caucus room as him and talked to a lot of the same people after the caucus, so our takes will track somewhat. The Nevada State Democratic Party, in setting up these caucuses, had to find over 1,700 precinct chairs to run them. There aren't 1,700 nonpartisan activists sitting around Nevada ready to run caucuses, so the chairs ended up being people who supported one candidate or another, and I would guess that a disproportionate amount supported Clinton. This is not to say that those precinct chairs cheated or anything, but the perception of bias was already ingrained before any votes were cast (a lot of those organizers ended up coming in from California and Colorado, too). In addition, the state put multiple precnicts on the same site (there were 1,700-some precincts and only 560 sites), NEVER TOLD THE VOTERS, and expected people who had never caucused before to show up and implicitly know where to go, leading to more chaos. Furthermore, the precinct CAPTAINS (those tasked with organizing voters for their respective candidates) weren't entirely knowledgeable about the process either. But they were told that they had to be assertive in working the rules. And many of them were.

There was a lot of hoopla surrounding the at-large caucuses on the Strip for the employees of the big hotels. Piecing together the evidence, it's clear that there were strong efforts by the labor leaders within the Culinary Workers union to get their folks to vote for Obama. It's also clear that invited a backlash. The picture at the top is from a sign, "I Support My Union, And I Support Hillary," that was paid for by the Clinton campaign, and handed out to Culinary Workers union members. AFSMCE organizers from Iowa and all over the country were organizing inside the union and getting people to caucus for Clinton. In addition, I heard that the rank and file of the union wasn't all that happy with their leadership to begin with, as dues have gone up without an accompanying increase in wages. The result of the Strip caucuses were that Hillary won 7 out of 9, when the projection was 2 to 1 for Obama.

But there WAS a real-world impact to the lawsuit brought by Clinton allies to shut down the Strip caucuses, and particularly Bill Clinton's comments that those employees' votes would "count five times as much" as regular Nevadans. This is a complete and utter falsehood, but coming from a former President, it had weight. Apparently that soundbite was played over and over on Las Vegas TV and radio. There were statements from the teacher's union that the lawsuit was designed to protect voter rights, when the impact would have only been to shut down the Strip caucuses and prevent people from participating. They were making wild claims about how all employees would get to vote at their workplace, which weren't true. And on the ground, people got that message, and the Culinary Workers union were absolutely painted as the caricature of "powerful union bosses" trying to steal the vote. So Hillary's success in Clark County must be attributed to that in part.

Like the rest of the media, I went to one of the casinos to observe a caucus (Hillary beat Barack at the Wynn, 189-187). It was fascinating and hilarious and I can't wait to write about it, and I don't regret it. But the media's obsession with those caucuses diverted attention from all of the other ones in the Vegas area. And this is where most of the alleged voter intimidation and voter suppression took place (See here, here, and here). With more transparency and a media spotlight, I think there would have been less opportunity.

But let's be clear about these charges. In many cases, the rules weren't properly explained. Here's Stoller:

The central claim of the Obama camp is that Clinton-affiliated chairs were telling their people to show up at 11:30 and then shutting doors to caucus-goers at 11:30 instead of 12. Aside from the fact that party rules conflict with each other on this point, many of the caucus goers really wanted the event to start and end quickly, because they were working. In the middle of the caucus I attended, about a third of the room emptied out because of a shift change (their votes had been counted). In other words, there were good reasons to shut the doors at 11:30.

I heard one report of an Obama precinct captain trying to get the doors shut at 11:30. In truth, the precinct chair had the discretion to keep them open. So it was very muddled.

There are other charges, like voter cards moved into the Hillary camp (it appears the party didn't expect the high turnout and didn't have enough cards or voter registration forms), Hillary caucus-goers attempting to be counted in different precincts on the same site, precinct captains telling caucus goers for non-viable candidates that they had to go home instead of their right to make a new choice, electioneering in places where it was forbidden, etc. My take on all of this is that there were a lot of sharp elbows thrown. Supporters of each candidate were very assertive and trying to do their best. The Hillary precinct captains may have been a little more prepared and a little more experienced for this kind of hardball politics. But that's not universally true. Here's my favorite on-the-ground story from desmoulins at MyDD, an Edwards precinct captain (who I talked a lot of this over with last night):

As the end of the first allignment approached, Clinton had 80, Obama 46, Edwards 13, Kucinic 2 and uncommitted 2. Each of the 3 campaigns made a short pitch for the 2 Kucinic supporters who then said they would come to Edwards if it would make us viable. The uncommitted voters also agreed to come if it would make us viable, as did one Obama voter and one Clinton voter. I was now only three voters short, but I could not let the 15 minutes expire without at least getting 3 more uncommitted (because members of viable groups cannot reallign under NV rules). So I went to the Clinton group and explained that if they helped me reach viability, they could deprive Obama of at least 2 delegates without hurting their own cause. I urged them to move at least 3 people to uncommitted, which would at least make it mathematically possible for us to reach the 22 we needed for viability.

To my surprise, the Clinton captain had no idea what I was talking about and could not understand either why they should move supporters to uncommitted, or why I would suggest that most of the Edwards supporters would go to Obama if we failed to be viable. I explained quickly and had more or less convinced her when time ran out. I pointed out she had to do it now and that if my math was wrong, she could get her voters back in the 2nd 15 minutes. She agreed but only one Clinton supporter volunteered to move. As I pleaded for her and one of the two others assisting her to move themselves, the Obama captain quite rightly began to point out that time was up. (I had told the Obama captain I would come to their group if I were not viable, but to her credit, she was not put off that I was trying to help Edwards at her expense.)

You had a lot of inexperienced caucus goers and inexperienced precinct captains and inexperienced precinct chairs, and there's no question that some people took advantage of that opportunity. The idea that it impacted the vote one way or the other is just not very realistic. Clinton's precinct organizers were more ORGANIZED, and they took advantage of a lot of opportunities. Is that suppression? I can't say that it is, really. I'd be more concerned by the Barack Hussein Obama robocall, if I were the Obama people.

What I do know is that the Obama campaign taking this up as a rallying cry has the potential to be very dangerous. If they are trying to leverage an idea that the Clinton campaign cheated into winning with black voters in South Carolina, that could get extremely ugly. I would hope they would step back from the brink. And the same with the Clinton campaign; Bill Clinton saying that he personally heard a union rep threaten an employee is just not credible. This plays into a growing racial gap that I saw on display a little bit at the Wynn casino caucus. It's a scorched-earth strategy for the Obama campaign to call up the ghosts of 2000 in Florida and 2004 in Ohio in the context of a Democratic primary where the allegations are murky. It will cause a severe rift in the party and could have implications into November. I don't think anybody comes out of Nevada looking good, sadly. The election has gotten very high school and petty, as issues have been pushed to the side. This has the feeling of a missed moment.

Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail In Las Vegas

I'm still actually trying to process what I saw today. I attended the at-large caucus at the Wynn Hotel and Casino. Suffice to say (for now) that it was the most surreal political event in American history, and I'm trying to be understated. Imagine a costume party with politics mixed in.

For the record, there are a lot of allegations flying around about voter intimidation and voter suppression and all of that, on the Clinton AND on the Obama side (the Edwards folks are saying they just didn't have the people and didn't have the money). To be clear, I saw none of that at the Wynn, though of course, there was so much media there nobody would have been able to get away with it.

I'll give a full report probably tomorrow.

P.S. The Nevada State Democratic Party is reporting that turnout is above 114,000 caucus attendees, with 88% of precincts reporting. That is a ridiculously high number. Something like 9,000 people voted in 2004. Another good day for Democrats.

P.S.S. The Obama campaign is claiming that they're going to end up with 13 delegates to Clinton's 12, because he outperformed Clinton in rural areas of the state. Indeed, in everything but Clark and Washoe Counties (Vegas and Reno), Obama won 55-45%. I have no idea if this is true, but considering the delegate count is what actually MATTERS, you'd think that this would be reported.

P.S.S.S. OK, I just spoke with Jill Derby, the head of the Nevada State Democratic Party. Regarding the Obama claim that he'll actually get more delegates out of this, essentially that's spin. Derby said that the caucuses are an "expression of the support of Nevadans today." Around 11,000 delegates were elected today. That will be winnowed down at county conventions and eventually at the state convention in May to the 25 that will go to Denver for the DNC. In 2004, Kerry didn't win every delegate on Election Day, but most of the delegates that eventually went to the DNC were his. Once there's a presumptive nominee, the delegate numbers are subject to change. It's non-binding.

If that makes your head spin, the short version is that this was a beauty contest, and you can't project delegate numbers at this time.

On the question of charges of voter suppression and intimidation, which the Obama campaign is officially alleging, Derby said this (paraphrase):

"We had strict standards in place for what went on in the caucus room. Outside of the room is not necessarily our purview. We did get a few calls over the course of the day, and we did eject some people from the caucus room for engaging in tactics that were not within the rules."

I asked her if she was going to initiate an investigation, and she demurred. She basically said that if Nevadans feel they have had their voting rights infringed upon, they should take it up with the "proper avenues," which specifically she said was the courts. She also basically said that there was a lot of passion on both sides, and these kind of charges get thrown around in those circumstances.

Trying to be hands-off here, just the facts, ma'am. I can tell you one thing - this will not go away, and it could end up being a very big part of the conversation heading into South Carolina.

The Trap

Having now covered the campaigns for a full day, I completely see why our political media is as dysfunctional as it is. You're shuffled from one event to another. You watch speeches and town hall meetings. You're in big rooms with these candidates and watching them react to thousands of people. And you have to write a column and your editor is probably demanding that you determine who has the momentum. Furthermore, you start to think that you're equipped to make that determination. If I were to do so, I would say that Hillary Clinton will win today's caucuses, because she had the bigger and more enthusiastic supporters last night, and she gave the better speech. But in reality, I don't have a fucking clue, and really I don't think anyone does.

Watching a speech is not data that can be used in a "horse-race" story. You're not seeing volunteer action, you're not seeing how many are at the phone banks, you're not seeing the number of precinct captains, and in a race like this, that's what's going to win, because there's very little to suggest that there's even an election tomorrow outside of the occasional channel 3 News billboard advertising "live caucus coverage," and really the Wayne Brady billboard is bigger. There have been very few polls, and while the most recent ones have shown a Clinton lead, the turnout is fairly impossible to predict. Iowa and New Hampshire's turnout was enormous on the side of the Democrats because the campaigns put resources and face time in there for months. This has been more of a ten-day sprint, and so I'm hearing anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000 caucus-goers, which makes the prediction process completely untenable. And the traditional media is gun shy of that type of environment, so they're not going there (although they're polling the heck out of South Carolina, having learned such a great lesson from New Hampshire).

Furthermore, I'm only seeing a piece of the state, albeit the piece with the largest population by far; Las Vegas may be the only city where you can credibly judge things that way. But my colleagues at Calitics are in the northern part of Nevada volunteering , and they were transferred by the campaign from Reno to Carson City because there were too MANY volunteers. That's at least a data point. So is Obama's campaign buying banner ads on Yahoo! and other search engines that say "caucus this morning at 11am," meaning they know that I'm connecting from Nevada. That's an under-the-radar data point.

As a pundit simply following the campaign from event to event, your data is verbal tics and reactions and other things that are actually indicative of nothing. It could be that David Axelrod flipping out is not the behavior of someone who's winning; it could also be that he's legitimately pissed off about the opponent's campaign making these claims and giving themselves an excuse to downplay the significance of any win by saying that it's Vegas and "the fix is in." Obama's speech was definitely lackluster, for his standards; the crowd appeared to be listening more than buying in to what he was saying, and he fumbled around in the middle. Clinton was really fired up and gave a speech that had emotional highs and lows to a packed high school gym with an overflow crowd in a separate room (which was where we were, as we arrived late; even the OVERFLOW room had a real sense of excitement and an investment in the speech). You actually can't do some sort of psychological analysis and arrive at a conclusion that Clinton knows she's winning and Obama knows he's losing. But that's the only data a lot of these people following the campaign have. And the pundits only typically have a televised feed of that. I'm not absolving them of blame at all, but they're doing the equivalent of gauging the score of a football game by watching the fans in the parking lot.

What you can glean from these events, in fact the only data, is what the two candidates are actually saying, and I wish that reporters would stick to that. So, that long wind-up complete, let me do so:

(oh, and by the way, let me say AGAIN that Edwards was long gone before we got to town, otherwise I'd include him in this story.)

Both Obama and Clinton gave somewhat partisan speeches. Both decried the influence of special interests, both discussed changing our foreign policy of unilateralism, both highlighted "predatory lending" in the mortgage and student loan industries, and both ended up with many of the same ideas (student loan forgiveness in exchange for national service, green energy and green jobs, and an end to the war with fairly vague definitions of what that end would be). Obama, who had international media covering him from Brazil, Korea and Japan just in our little section, talked about the tragedy of homeless veterans (sounds awfully like a certain Mr. Edwards), indexing the minimum wage to inflation (ditto), "healing our racial wounds," a fair criminal justice system, and admonished the crowd "not to demonize immigrants - this is a country built by immigrants." (I appreciated that). He peppered his speech with the usual jokes and stories, like the "fired up, ready to go" story of the lady in the small town in South Carolina, which seems to get more and more like a Paul Bunyan tall tale every time he tells it (I mean, Obama's day up until seeing the fired up lady sounds so progressively horrible, you'd think next time it'll include bad medical news or something). There's a section about that point in the debate where he gave his greatest weakness, and the other candidates gave theirs, and how their weaknesses were things like "I care too much about people" and "I'm frustrated we haven't changed the country", ending with "That's what happens when you're in Washington, you don't speak English. You speak Washington-speak." He talked about how change "comes from the bottom up, not the top-down," and how we have to organize to challenge those special interests that resist progress. But in the end, the message is pretty much this (from notes):

We need a politics based not on ideology, but common sense; not on spin, but straight talk... we're having a friendly battle in the Democratic Party about who we are... are we willing to find unity, to put aside point-scoring and summon the country to a higher purpose? That is why I want to be the President of the United States of America.

OK, I don't think the battle of the Party is to find unity. It's to find the best ways to push the Republicans and successfully set the agenda. We actually do need a politics based on ideology, unless the "common sense" that Obama suggests is actually ideological.

Before you think that this unity stuff is particular to Obama, let me talk to you about Clinton's rally. Her speech was definitely stronger, and more partisan, actually. She said things like "it is not rich people who made America great" and "health care is a right, not a privilege" and "Republicans are the party of ideas - of bad ideas," and she highlighted things like the balloon payment to the failed CEO of Countrywide ($115 million dollars to blow up a company, nice work if you can get it). There was talk about massive deficits under Bush, and stories of health insurers cancelling policies after the patients get sick, and talk of ending the unfunded mandate of No Child Left Behind, and a 21st century GI Bill, and more. But at the very end... well, let me give you over to Matt Stoller, who was there as well:

After a laundry list of items she's going to get done, she posed a rhetorical question of how all of that would be possible. Her answer? By reaching across the aisle, like she has done in the Senate. I hope she's checked with the Republicans on that one.

She says that all the time, actually, and so did Bill Clinton at his earlier event, highlighting her work with Lindsay Graham and JOHN MCCAIN. Um, don't you two know that you might actually have to RUN against John McCain, and the time for puffing him up to increase your own credibility should kind of be over?

Is there some super-secret polling showing that Americans what to "end the partisan bickering" in Washington and come together for the common purpose? I really don't see that. I see a country who has turned on George Bush and wants to go in a new direction. Yet two of our main candidates BOTH keep stressing this theme of unity, and the third candidate, who actually does reject this, doesn't get any love from the media and has been practically shunted aside. What is behind this?

Actually, I don't think it's so difficult. In a time tailor-made for progressive ideas, when the conservative brand is almost entirely trashed, we have two centrist candidates running to lead the party. They say this every day, and no matter what kind of onion-peeling and "no, what they actually mean is THIS" you try to do, that's pretty much the answer.

UPDATE: Let me revise and extend. The strategy Clinton and Obama appear to be employing is a perfectly normal general election strategy. “Bringing the country together” isn’t all that radical a political theme, and after 8 years of “my way or the highway” conservatism, I can see how it would have some limited appeal. But we’re in the middle of a Democratic primary. I think it was Stoller in a post about a month ago who wondered if we could be pandered to just a little bit before we were ditched for independents and swing voters. It could be that the first few primaries are open to independents. But yesterday I felt like I was watching the candidates for the nomination of the Independent Party of America, and it rankled me.

And I do believe that this stress tells you how a President Clinton or a President Obama will govern, as well as telling you how much influence progressives will actually have in their subsequent Administrations. Ultimately, as I have said, we the people are going to have to be the “agent of change” through political pressure, movement-building, and successfully using the primary process to take back the party piece by piece (the most important elections on Feb. 5 are for Mark Pera and John Laesch in Illinois, and the most important one a week later is for Donna Edwards in Maryland). Obama at least talks about how he can’t do it alone, and how change happens from the bottom up. And I’m not averse to talking about “working together” with Republicans. But Republicans ARE, and the conservative movement is not likely to give up so easily and watch as an agenda to which they are diametrically opposed gets installed.

Partisanship is a good thing. It gives people choices. There are legitimate differences about how to meet our challenges. The point in between those two differences is not necessarily the best; in fact it’s often the worst. When one side of the political aisle has leaders who believe in the value of that middle point, and the other side believes in the extreme, guess where we’re going to end up. “Screwed” would be the word I would use.

The Big Dog In North Las Vegas

So we're in the Obama press area awaiting his arrival (in about an hour, I'm told). We just got back from a Bill Clinton event in North Las Vegas at a local YMCA. There were about 150-200 people there. Bill came out and said he mostly wanted to take questions, and then proceeded to talk for about 45 minutes (hah!). It was a solid speech, completely extemporaneous, talking about the challenges we must face in the next four years and how his wife is best able to face them. Specifically he honed in on subprime mortgages and the trouble with Big Shitpile ("people who have never missed a mortgage payment will lose their homes" because the banks will need to refinance to recoup their losses from bad investments), America's stature in the world, and building a clean energy future ("Nevada is perfect for this - the wind blows and the sun shines, and we can capture all of that"). He highlighted Hillary Clinton's "consistent record in public life of making positive changes," including school reform in Arkansas, improving foster care and increasing adoptions as first lady, and the creation of SCHIP ("You need to know how the President responds to failure – with Hillary, it was SCHIP.") It was a substantive, reasoned, and worthy case for his candidate. Here's a paraphrase from my notes:

Obama says we need to turn over a whole new leaf, we must begin again. He has explicitly argued that prior service is a disability in picking the next President. Hillary wants to put the country in the solutions business. We must come together by doing. The purposes of politics is to live your hopes and dreams by making changes in people’s lives. Vision and inspiration is important, but so is perspiration and delivery. The ultimate test of our service is who’s delivered for the American people.

Which is an excellent case to make. He also said that he claimed he was in his hotel in Vegas last night, and a bunch of members of the Culinary Worker's union came up to him and said that they weren't going to listen to their union and they would caucus for Hillary. Which is fine. Then, he claimed, a shift supervisor or someone in a position of authority came up and said, "If you do that I'm going to change your schedule so you can't be there to caucus tomorrow." It's a pretty amazing allegation (a union boss is going to threaten and intimidate the voting rights of workers in front of a former President?), and Todd from MyDD and myself have some calls in to Hillary's press people to get some clarification. There's no way to really independently verify it, but it strains credibility to believe that it went down the way President Clinton said. And he said it TWICE, so it wasn't a slip of the tongue.

I do want to highlight this other moment. Among the mostly substantive questions that he eventually took from the audience, Clinton was asked where his favorite places were to travel. He took this softball, began a meandering audio travelogue of all these different places he's been, rambling like an old uncle telling a story with seemingly no end, and then he told this amazing story about this woman in Rwanda who met the man who killed her son and how she forgave him, and he wrapped it up by saying we can all learn some lessons from every place we visit, and he went back over every place he named and gave some vital lesson that came out of it. It was like watching Michael Jordan do some behind-the-back, double-reverse, doesn't-even-know-where-the-basket-is, eyes-closed and it goes in anyway bank shot. It was almost poetic. That's Clinton's real gift, to weave what he called "the story of America" and bring these arcane policy issues into some kind of immediacy for people, making it real to their lives.

On The Ground In Vegas

We just arrived on the Strip about 20 minutes ago. We'll be at campaign events for Obama and Clinton tonight, and out at the caucus sites tomorrow (Mittens Romney will be out at a caucus site at 7:30am, so that could be fun).

I find it instructive to watch the local news reports on caucus eve. Despite what you'd think, there's been about 3 minutes of coverage of the caucuses in the last half-hour. They've actually devoted more to the local women's roller derby team than the caucuses. (ah, local news). One station had an end-of-the-newscast story where the reporter showed a bunch of pictures of the candidates to people on the street and asked them to name them. It wasn't pretty.

When people say they don't know who'll show up to these caucuses, I believe it. It doesn't seem as central to the local scene as, say, the Danny Gans show.

One thing I did notice on the news: Nevada's unemployment rate is up to 5.8%, the highest rate since April of 2002. I've heard that it's been a bad winter in Las Vegas, which may impact the desire of people to caucus if it means missing their shift at the casinos. (By the way, the casinos made $25 billion last year, so they're not exactly hurting; but the employees aren't doing all that well.)

Obama and Clinton both have ads up; Clinton's has this old NFL Films music on it, and it's a little surprising that they went el cheapo on the score).

More later...

Your Intrepid Reporter

So I am headed to Las Vegas in the morning to drink in the sights, sounds and smells of the big city on the eve of the caucus. It's not quite Edward R. Murrow at Dunkirk, but what can you do. My bud Todd Beeton of MyDD fame and I will be out at the closing Obama and Clinton events Friday night (Edwards is in Vegas in the early morning and then moving on to Oklahoma, so sorry folk), and at selected caucuses Saturday morning (probably those at-large casino ones, just to see what the deal is). I'll be checking in when I can.

The Show Goes On At The Strip

The at-large caucuses will go on. Also, this idea that the Culinary Workers are bullying their members into supporting their endorsee is pretty much not true. There appears to be, far from coordination, a good deal of confusion about these caucuses among the Hispanic community (there's no word in Spanish for "caucus"), and it isn't even a slam dunk that many of these employees will be allowed to caucus by their employers even with the events at the hotel (which I believe is a violation of federal labor laws). The caucus system is far from perfect, but the point I was trying to make earlier was that inclusion over exclusion should be the general rule.