You Can Go Ahead And End The Superdelegate Process Any Time

Though in the final analysis, the chaotic and difficult Democratic primary race in 2008 did not impact the general election - and contra Big Tent Democrat, Obama took Florida and Michigan - the campaign, and the role of unelected "superdelegates" in deciding it, embarrassed the Democratic Party and offered little confidence that the will of the electorate in deciding the nominee was being honored. So proposals to do away with that part of the process and reform the primary system please me to no end. Superdelegates are not the only thing wrong with the system - front-loading primaries, the role of unrepresentative states like Iowa and New Hampshire, the unnecessarily limiting caucus system which disallows everyone from participating - but they are the most high-profile failing, and should be stricken as an artifact of a top-down structure designed to subvert the will of the people if their passions grew too out of line with the prevailing wisdom. As Elaine Karmack said at the DNC meeting studying the primary process, the superdelegates ended up ratifying the leader in popular votes in 2008 anyway, and so they probably don't need to exist. "Their deliberative role... has in fact been supplanted by a very very public process."

I was worried that, considering the unlikely event of an actual primary in 2012 against President Obama, that the DNC would shy away from fiddling with the primary process. But they appear to have learned the lessons of 2008. Good.

Speaking For Me Only

John Cole offers the definitive smackdown of Talk Left's Big Tent Democrat, to which in response BTD calls everyone who doesn't agree with him a cult member. I actually don't disagree with him that we need to push Obama on substantive issues, but his blanket condemnation of every liberal blog for shielding Obama from criticism is stupid and unnecessary, and his ego can hardly fit in the blogosphere so this is richly deserved.

More.

And also.

(This is hopefully the last time I ever read anything about "Obama can't win the big states Democrats need to win in November!" You know, like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida.)

Returning The Party To The People

I hate to get off the McCain house train (and really, I hate to), this is a great move by Team Obama.

Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign will call next week for the creation of a commission to revise the rules for selecting a presidential nominee in 2012, with a goal of reducing the power of superdelegates, whose role became a major point of contention during the long battle for the Democratic nomination between Obama and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.

The commission also will be urged to redraw the nominating calendar for 2012 to avoid starting the primaries and caucuses so early, and also to look specifically at ensuring more uniform rules and standards for those caucuses.

Up for grabs: no more Super Tuesdays, moving back the calendar to at least February, adding absentee voting to caucuses, and reducing superdelegate power.

Primary reform isn't a sexy topic, but given the clusterfuck that we endured this spring it's absolutely essential to rebuild the stature of the party. Obama is doing the right thing, and by the way the Clinton campaign is involved in this as well.

This shows Obama is listening to the rank and file. I'm as encouraged by that as almost anything he's done so far.

Also, Chris Dodd Is Considering Suspending His Preisdential Bid

Back when I was producing, I did an interview with Steve Grogan, formerly of the New England Patriots, and the talk turned to the 1986 Super Bowl, when Chicago crushed the Pats 46-10. He recounted a story about Raymond Berry, the deadpan coach of the Patriots. The last two points of the Super Bowl came on a safety, when Henry Waechter sacked Grogan in the end zone. Grogan came off the field and approached Berry, saying "If you want me to keep throwing the ball, Coach, I'll do it, just tell me the game plan."

"No," said Berry, "just run out the clock. I think that last safety clinched it."

Grogan stared at him for a second in a bit of disbelief, then noticed Berry cracking a knowing smile.

That's what I thought of when I read the story that Ron Paul has decided to end his Presidential campaign. I guess those last 45 primaries clinched it.

The Emotional Appeal

I keep seeing all of these "what Clinton did wrong" stories without acknowledging what Obama did right. Drew Westen takes the opposite tack.

Nothing went wrong. Hillary Clinton was emotionally outgunned, just as Bill Clinton outgunned his rivals in 1992.

The pundits and pollsters had it backwards. People didn't vote for Obama because they preferred his message of change to Hillary's message of experience. They preferred his message of change because in their gut they preferred Obama. When all the other candidates scrambled to be the agents of change after Iowa, it didn't matter where they put their spare change because they weren't Obama.

As the first woman to have a serious shot at the presidency in our nation's history, who would have reversed virtually every decision George W. Bush made over the last eight years, Hillary Clinton could legitimately argue, as she tried to do after Iowa, that she offered the best of both worlds: change and experience. What she, her pollsters, and the chattering class mistakenly believed, however, was that Obama had somehow found the right one-word magical amulet, and that they just had to own a piece of the amulet. But that view neglects the fact that virtually every challenger in the last century -- including Bill Clinton ("change vs. more of the same") -- had used the mantra of change, and some won with it while others hadn't. John Edwards frequently spoke of "change -- big change," but he didn't win the nomination in 2008.

He's missing the vote for authorizing war in Iraq, which was enough to eliminate any possibility of Clinton as a change agent for enough of the Democratic base to open up an opportunity to her left. But really this is about the emotional appeal of Obama. Yes, he put together an incredible delegate strategy designed to keep Clinton leads close in large states and overwhelm with superior organization in small states. He built on the Howard Dean model of Internet-fueled activism and fundraising to give himself the volunteers and the money to compete. In doing so he changed the playing field forever for how politicians get elected and use donor money, and nobody will ever put the genie back in the bottle, which makes this whining from dinosaurs who have no intention of adapting amusing:

Sen. Barack Obama’s ban on contributions from lobbyists and PACs has irritated Democratic lobbyists and fundraisers, who say that Democratic congressional candidates can’t — and won’t — turn their backs on such a steady stream of campaign cash.

“Quite honestly, we’re taking what we can get,” said a top aide to a House Democratic candidate facing a competitive race in November. “The amount of money needed for a campaign today is just so huge that you really have to look under every rock.” [...]

Democratic lobbyists complain that Obama’s ban has failed to account for the realities confronting candidates who lack the fundraising appeal of an electrifying presidential candidate.

“I’m curious how much [the Obama campaign] thought about this decision,” said one Democratic lobbyist. “I take Obama at his word that he’s serious about changing the culture of Washington. But he’s also got to realize that right now, he’s the Babe Ruth of politics. You’ve got a lot of other people out there who are AAA ballplayers; they don’t have the ability to do what he’s doing in terms of raising money and wowing crowds.”

Another Democratic lobbyist said Obama’s ban effectively tars everyone who can’t live up to it.
“Now you’re implying that the House and Senate Democrats — and Republicans — are scumbags that take lobbyist money,” the lobbyist fumed.

Well, tough. Adapt. If you can't figure out a compelling message out of wresting back control of the country from the failed policies of the GOP you don't deserve to be in government and you don't deserve to raise a cent online.

But the truth lies in that emotional appeal. Obama's message of hope is not all that new, but it was perfectly pitched to the historical moment. In a time with a rogue President and a feckless opposition party, someone had to come along to offer a new direction and get people to believe again. This appeal drove everything else - the ability to raise money, the organizing advantage, the bottomless well of volunteers and activists. They were looking for somebody in which to instill their dreams of a better nation. Hillary Clinton ended up being able to do that in the second half of the campaign by looking to the recent past, but by then it was too late. Obama had nailed the historical moment - and that's why he won.

Well That Wrapped Up Cleanly

I don't know why she didn't wait for the all-important second round of primaries (it was going to be a round-robin, and the loser would have to leave the island!), but Hillary Clinton has decided to hang him up, which must be terribly depressing to the armchair psychologists who knew, just KNEW, that she was taking it to Denver because "that's who she is."

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will endorse Senator Barack Obama on Saturday, bringing a close to her 17-month campaign for the White House, aides said. Her decision came after Democrats urged her on Wednesday to leave the race and allow the party to coalesce around Mr. Obama.

Howard Wolfson, one of Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategists, and other aides said she would express support for Mr. Obama and party unity at an event in Washington that day. One adviser said that Mrs. Clinton would concede defeat, congratulate Mr. Obama and proclaim him the party’s nominee, while pledging to do what was needed to assure his victory.

I think the enormity of the whole moment has been lost in the drawn-out process, but I was at the first one-on-one debate in Los Angeles in late January, and it was electric. There's really something pretty great about Democrats recognizing their own diversity. Neither of these two were my first choice, but I'll be happy to support the nominee - and then hold him to the same standard I would any leader (see putting the brakes on the FISA bill for an example). Barack Obama may be cool in the moment, but he's really accomplished something remarkable. Never mind the strategy, based on winning delegates instead of states, brilliant in its simplicity (and I think he knows the general election is winner-take-all and he'll set off with the proper strategy to win that) - this is something really different, both generational and racial and tonal, actually. The "wine track" candidate, the idealist, won without completely compromising his principles and keeping to his core message throughout.

It's a big moment and a hopeful time - but now it's time to work, and to never lose sight of what's at stake, and that not one man will be able to do it alone (nor should anyone presume that all he wants to do is sweetness and light, either).

She's Leaving Home

I've avoided the Clinton speech because I found it kind of hard to believe last night. However, it appears to be more of a hiccup than a statement of campaign strategy between now and the convention. Today, Hillary told her staff that it's over, and the official announcement is just a matter of time. As much as the campaign created a bubble around her, perpetuating these narratives of how she was actually winning and how the superdelegates would recognize her victory, in the end she isn't deluded whatsoever, and we're at the negotiation phase where an agreement between her and Senator Obama will be reached.

She ran a really unbelievable race, and while I didn't agree with a lot of the tactics in the second half of it, she was clearly the superior candidate during that time. The fact that she had to reinvent herself and come around to being that candidate after she essentially already lost showed the initial weakness of the Mark Penn inevitability approach. In the end, she could have overcome even that were she not up against such a formidable opponent.

UPDATE: Yes, I'm aware that she's flogging this Dream ticket stuff, and doing it in such a way that will ensure that there will not be anything approaching a Dream ticket (I think the circus atmosphere would be extremely detrimental). And I question whether the ticket is all that Dreamy, anyway. A politician plays every angle, is the only answer I can think of for this behavior.

The Obama Moment

This is a pretty hopeful time in American politics. Barack Obama's victory in the Democratic nomination for President is a stunning turn of events, something that would have been unthinkable if you said it out loud a year or even 6 months ago. It just didn't look to be possible to defeat the Clinton machine (I say that in a good way - she had locked up all the important early support), and he did it through cultivating activist support, using technology like no other candidate in history, and flat-out running the best campaign given the rules of the Democratic Party.

Obama's opposition to the Iraq War was clearly the entire reason he had any chance to begin with. But that only got him a foot in the door - he had to pry it open, and even when the subject turned away from Iraq he managed to be successful with his message of changing Washington from the outside. It's not that Clinton ran a bad campaign - she did early on but more than made up for it in the end - it's that Obama ran a superlative one. And he did it with a new coalition of black voters, young people, and white liberals unique to the party in the primary era.

Now, while I like our chances in November this isn't over. Though the delivery was horrible, the content of John McCain's speech was actualy pretty good, and reminiscent of the 2006 gubernatorial election in California. Phil Angelides and the CDP tried for months to tag Arnold Schwarzenegger with the "George W. Bush" label. He laughed it off. And the media gave him a pass even though he did share some traits with Bush. McCain is trying the same gambit:

You will hear from my opponent's campaign in every speech, every interview, every press release that I'm running for President Bush's third term. You will hear every policy of the President described as the Bush-McCain policy. Why does Senator Obama believe it's so important to repeat that idea over and over again? Because he knows it's very difficult to get Americans to believe something they know is false. So he tries to drum it into your minds by constantly repeating it rather than debate honestly the very different directions he and I would take the country. But the American people didn't get to know me yesterday, as they are just getting to know Senator Obama. They know I have a long record of bipartisan problem solving. They've seen me put our country before any President -- before any party -- before any special interest -- before my own interest. They might think me an imperfect servant of our country, which I surely am. But I am her servant first, last and always.

McCain is, of course, running on virtually the same platform as Bush, while Schwarzenegger had legislative accomplishments on global warming and the minimum wage to point to. But this can be effective if the media makes the decision that their buddy the Maverick simply is not Bush and they won't hear another word about it. Obama needs to tie McCain not just to Bush but the failed Republican policies of the past. And in his speech last night (which was excellent), that's just what he did.

So I'll say this -- there are many words to describe John McCain's attempt to pass off his embrace of George Bush's policies as bipartisan and new. But change is not one of them.

Change is a foreign policy that doesn't begin and end with a war that should've never been authorized and never been waged. I won't stand here and pretend that there are many good options left in Iraq, but what's not an option is leaving our troops in that country for the next hundred years -- especially at a time when our military is overstretched, our nation is isolated, and nearly every other threat to America is being ignored.

We must be as careful getting out of Iraq as we were careless getting in - but start leaving we must. It's time for Iraqis to take responsibility for their future. It's time to rebuild our military and give our veterans the care they need and the benefits they deserve when they come home. It's time to refocus our efforts on al Qaeda's leadership and Afghanistan, and rally the world against the common threats of the 21st century -- terrorism and nuclear weapons; climate change and poverty; genocide and disease. That's what change is.

Change is realizing that meeting today's threats requires not just our firepower, but the power of our diplomacy -- tough, direct diplomacy where the President of the United States isn't afraid to let any petty dictator know where America stands and what we stand for. We must once again have the courage and conviction to lead the free world. That is the legacy of Roosevelt, and Truman, and Kennedy. That's what the American people want. That's what change is.

Change is building an economy that rewards not just wealth, but the work and workers who created it. It's understanding that the struggles facing working families can't be solved by spending billions of dollars on more tax breaks for big corporations and wealthy CEOs, but by giving a the middle-class a tax break, and investing in our crumbling infrastructure, and transforming how we use energy, and improving our schools, and renewing our commitment to science and innovation. It's understanding that fiscal responsibility and shared prosperity can go hand-in-hand, as they did when Bill Clinton was President.

John McCain has spent a lot of time talking about trips to Iraq in the last few weeks, but maybe if he spent some time taking trips to the cities and towns that have been hardest hit by this economy -- cities in Michigan, and Ohio, and right here in Minnesota -- he'd understand the kind of change that people are looking for.

The "he should take trips to places in America and not Baghdad" part is particularly brilliant.

The best thing about Obama is that he won this race without sitting in a defensive crouch, without pooh-poohing the idea of what is and isn't possible, without a point of view that this is a center-right country and we have to sneak our way into the White House. Obama isn't a fire-breathing progressive but he's a good vessel for progressive policy, and he has a knack for making mainstream Democratic ideas sound like common sense. As Matt Yglesias says:

Relative to McCain, Obama thinks it's possible to accomplish things in the world. He thinks the United States faces a lot of serious international challenges, but doesn't see them as primarily driven by menacing and implacable foes. Obama thinks that a combination of visionary leadership and shrewd bargaining can greatly improve our ability to tackle key priorities without any great expenditure of our resources.

All in all, the pessimist in me sees it as an approach to politics designed to set us up for a hard fall when it fails. But in a deeper sense I find it incredibly appealing. To me, it's incredibly frustrating to hear that ideas "can't be done" not because they won't work, but because people know -- just know -- that they're not politically possible, even though they're things that have never been tried. I think almost every worthwhile accomplishment of progressive governance -- from the UN and NATO and the NPT to Medicare and Medicaid and Title I school aid to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act to the ongoing feminist revolution that's completely transformed American society in a generation and a half with no sign of slowing down -- is the kind of thing that before it happened, a lot of people would have said that it couldn't happen. And of course sometimes the pessimists are right, but unless you sometimes assume they're wrong then nothing's ever going to happen.

I'm going to dare to hope that Obama can make a difference in this country. I'm on board from now until November. Let's mobilize!

The Flood

Everyone's trying to jump on the Obama bandwagon before he clinches. Maxine Waters is the latest.

In a further sign that that party is uniting around Barack Obama in order to prevent Hillary Clinton from taking the fight past tonight, Hillary has just lost a high-profile liberal member of Congress who supported her: Maxine Waters of California, who has just re-endorsed for Barack Obama.

"As an outspoken advocate on issues critical to women and children, I have great admiration for Senator Clinton and know first-hand her commitment to our country," Waters said in a statement released by the Obama campaign.

"However, our nation is at crossroads. Now is the time for us to unite so that real change is possible in November."

It was obvious from the moment everybody started whining about how "superdelegates will overturn the will of the people!!1!" that there was no way that would happen. Politicians are pretty nervous, self-interested creatures who flock to power, and it was clear that when a candidate was seen as inevitable all the supers would jump to him or her. It was never going to be any other way. So the whole "Superdelegate Transparency Project" and all of that was nice, but completely unnecessary. If anything the supers decided for Obama.

I do have to say that having the first African-American nominee of a major party is a uniquely strange and terribly gratifying. It feels like a new day. I wish we had a primary process that was worthy of crowning such a nominee instead of letting superdelegates do it, and hopefully that will change.

Clinched?

The AP is reporting that Barack Obama has clinched the Democratic nomination, based on projections of tonight's numbers (the bare minimum delegates he'd be expected to pick up in Montana and South Dakota) and the superdelegates who are about to commit.

It does look to be over, at long last. And Democrats got to compete in virtually every state, and while the hurt feelings will linger (and it's of paramount importance to acknowledge that and empathize, IMO), Obama now must face the test of unifying, a core rationale for his candidacy, starting with unifying the Democratic Party. Let's see what he comes up with. If he can manage it, then this has been an enormously beneficial process for the party.

Now the next challenge, in my view, is reforming this disastrous primary system entirely, reviewing it from top to bottom and ditching the most undemocratic elements. I would move to a rotating regional set of primaries (decided by lottery on January 1 of the primary year so nobody can park in any one place prior to that), superdelegates with no vote until after the first ballot, which is reserved for delegates picked directly by the voters (so they get to go to the party but not have an undue influence on the process), and all delegates selected proportionately based on their state's popular vote. I would remind those who think caucuses should be thrown out that they are tremendous party-building tools, and many of the states with caucuses this year are swing states (Iowa, Colorado, Nevada, even Texas perhaps), and those state parties captured priceless voter contact information on hundreds of thousands of voters who could be turned into volunteers.

Later in June, the California Democratic Party picks their DNC members to save after the convention for the next four years, and these are the officials who will be tasked with making those rules. They ought to be challenged to come up with the best plans for reform, not just in CA but all over the country. Activists can actually have a role in that process if they push hard enough.

Endgame?

It does appear to me that the May 31 decision by the Rules and Bylaws Committee has pretty much ended this process, and it does no Democrat much good to continue rehashing the back-and-forth of whose metric sounds better, and that there's going to be something close to closure tomorrow night or by the end of the week. Some staffers are being laid off, the Tuesday night festivities will be in her home state of New York, and this is perhaps the most telling sign, from the Big Dog himself:

"I want to say that this may be the last day I'm ever involved in a campaign of this kind. I thought I was out of politics, till Hillary decided to run. But it has been one of the greatest honors of my life to go around and campaign for her for president."

There's the possibility, put forward by some, that Hillary will simply suspend her campaign, decline to endorse Sen. Obama, and leave the whole thing in limbo, waiting for a shoe to drop between now and the convention. I actually don't find that likely. By the standards of the Senate, Clinton is still fairly young, and she has the potential of a long career as a Democratic leader ahead of her should she choose that path. I know that she mentioned that superdelegates could change their minds but a two-month bullying campaign would basically end whatever strength she has within the party and would not be looked upon favorably by anyone. Politicians are programmed to strategize any opportunity to create an opening, but it doesn't necessary mean they'll use it. There's a cost-benefit analysis to all of this and Clinton is surely making that, and when that process concludes, I believe she will come to the decision of doing what's best for the country.

This doesn't mean that everything gets smoothed over and people make nice again. Far from it. When an election gets as personal and identity-based as this one has, I don't think there's anything measurable that either side can do to heal the rift outside of time, and there's not a lot of time left. And believe it or not, I agree with Taylor Marsh to an extent - the 69-59 Michigan split at the RBC meeting was unnecessary and only inflamed Clinton supporters. Now, I'm not certain what Obama had to do with that result - the entire Michigan delegation agreed on it, Clinton supporters included - but from a mathematical standpoint those numbers could have been 73-55 without a problem, and I can see how it would appear needlessly antagonistic.

"Healing" sounds nice but I challenge anyone to offer some concrete steps to get there that are more constructive than "shut up, your candidate lost."

Anger

The most prominent emotion coming from yesterday's proceedings at the Rules and Bylaws Committee is anger. Eve Fairbanks wrote up some scenes from the Hillary protest outside the Marriott, and then there's this lady.



This is really disturbing. There's a great deal of anger within the Democratic Party, and I'm trying to figure out whether it's coming from former non-aligned Americans who were attracted by the promise of a woman President or core Democrats. Either way, it's sad. Once we got down to two candidates four months ago things got very personal and identity-based, and this kind of searing anger was inevitable. To an extent, on the outer edges, this is not fixable. There's nothing you can do outside of installing Hillary Clinton as President to satisfy the likes of Harriet Christian. Apparently the crowd at the protests yesterday was somewhat small, but you can't tell me that the thoughts of Harriet Christian represent a piece of the electorate. I don't know how big, but it's a piece.

The crusade for women's rights has merged with electoral politics here and a lot of people feel hurt and slighted. They've poured themselves into the vessel of Hillary as the first woman President and they feel it has been stolen from them. The DNC rules are too meager and thin to hold back the mountains of bullshit on both sides, the moral arguments both can make that they deserved the victory. So there is this sense of betrayal. I honestly don't know how you unify after betrayal.

I think Obama can win the election by increasing participation, and handing an election to Republicans just doesn't seem possible at this point in history, but it would be folly to ignore the very real pain and hurt being felt by Clinton supporters right now, particularly older women.

Halved

Looks like the DNC and the Obama campaign will probably give Michigan and Florida half of the delegates and seat them at the convention. That's as fair as any compromise, I suppose, retaining the rules of the party while recognizing the votes that took place.

But it's important to note that NOTHING about the DNC's process is exactly fair, and it alternately benefits the Clinton campaign and the Obama campaign. I seem to have a cyber-stalker yelling at me about some article I wrote hitting the Clinton campaign for trying to shut down at-large caucuses at the casinos in Vegas (caucuses she WON, by the way), so I want to make this clear. The delegate process is inherently unfair and disproportional. Did you know that later states were rewarded for staying put with extra delegates? Did you know Puerto Rico offers more delegates than 15 or 20 states even though its residents can't vote in the general election? Do you understand how that benefits the Clinton campaign?

The problem is the system itself. The difference is that I've always argued in deference to the rules as they exist now, with an eye toward changing them immediately afterwards. That's because all Democratic campaigns signed on to the process knowing full well about the rules. So it's only their fault if they decide later that the rules are conspiring against them. Every Clinton supporter on the Rules and Bylaws Committee voted to strip Michigan and Florida of delegates. The problem I have with Clinton is that she wants to play Calvinball and change the rules in the middle of the game.

And Clinton Wins West Virginia

Exit polls show a projection of 2-1, so about a 35-point victory. It's about a 10-delegate pickup for Clinton in a race where she's down by 175. If there are 450,000 voters, it'd be a win of about 300,000-150,000, so a 150,000-vote pickup.

Good win for Senator Clinton, now I can get on with my day.

Not to be flip, but the race is essentially over from a mathematical standpoint, so a small state victory that was destined by the demographics isn't thrilling me. I'm glad she's bringing the Democrats back in West Virginia, I'm glad that the turnout was good in the state. When she endorses Sen. Obama, I'm hoping that she'll continue to press those West Virginians about the importance of electing a Democratic President this year.

Post-Mortem, Primary 2008

Crystal Strait, the political director for the California Democratic Party, Young Democrats of America board member and superdelegate (and, a friend), endorsed Barack Obama today, and by most accounts Obama pulled ahead this weekend in the superdelegate battle. There was very little chance superdelegates would start to move en masse back to Clinton absent some disqualifying information - she had the lead among those party leaders because she locked up as many as she could to begin with. It was part of the inevitability strategy. And so everyone who didn't already sign on with her was very unlikely to do so. And that's what we're seeing play out.

Obama has moved on to the general election, begun using hard-hitting attacks and has focused in on how he'll beat John McCain, and frankly, we all should do the same. Clinton can continue to look to dig up dirt on Obama (I don't know if I trust Carl Bernstein's reporting on this) or whatever it is she feels she has to do, but none of it is too relevant. With both Obama and Clinton defeating McCain in early polls despite being entirely focused on one another, with the structural advantages for Democrats among young people, independents and Hispanics (McCain is already running Spanish-language ads to try and overcome this gap), and with Obama seeking to capitalize on this new energy in the party with a massive voter registration and mobilization campaign, there's no need to worry about electability. The party has chosen, and they've chosen Barack Obama.

And it's worth looking back at the enormity of that moment. He will be the first African-American nominee of a major party in history, only 44 years after the Civil Rights Act, only 40 years after the shooting death of Martin Luther King, only 16 years after the Rodney King riots. As Chris Bowers notes, just a couple years ago Democrats made Nancy Pelosi the first female Speaker of the House. We are the party of women, of minorities, of gays and lesbians, of non-Christians, of Asian-Americans, of Hispanic Americans, of the "other" in American life (and yes we also have a few white guys like me).

A shift of electoral power toward the Democratic Party actually means a broad shift toward more pluralistic control of our government. The minorities, the downtrodden, and the freaks and geeks are taking over. While I have little doubt that I will continue to be something of a party gadfly, and that I will continue to hold an oppositional, progressive stance toward the leadership on fairly regular occasions, sometimes it is good to remember that the Democratic Party is, in some very important ways, actually pretty good. Today, I am very happy to be a part of it.

Me too, and more so because, despite the freak show of the past few months, we got to this point because of the Iraq issue. I said that the first time I saw Obama; if Iraq is the big issue, he wins. And it actually was the issue, even if it didn't seem like it from exit polls. Hillary Clinton, who would have also been a historic nominee, came into this race with enormous structural advantages, but her refusal to even try to justify her vote on Iraq, to remain true to her hawkish character, created space on the left for an alternative candidate. Barack Obama isn't even necessarily on the left, but on Iraq he took the position more favorable to the progressive movement and the grassroots, and he milked their anger and frustration for all it was worth. Despite being in the Congress when it failed to move us in a new direction in Iraq, he used the failure, whether deliberately or not, as an example of how Washington is broken and how we have to move beyond the left-right calculus (this is where Obama detractors always leave it, but Obama's answer to this is to move beyond by registering and involving so many Democrats that a partisan game is a game for losers on the Republican side). Clinton was more interested in running a general election right from the start, complete with a generally hawkish foreign policy that was a real difference between her and her major rivals, and a real reason why this unity ticket is not going to happen.

Clinton's "street cred" on national security consists, of course, of being massively wrong on the most important national security issue of her career. Paradoxically, a lot of folks find her massive wrongness on this hugely important issue reassuring because they and their friends were also wrong and they view having made the right call to be a suspicious quality. After all, the Iraq War may have led to thousands of U.S. deaths, tens of thousands of U.S. casualties, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, and millions of Iraqi refugees all at a cost of over $1 trillion and in ways that's damaged the strategic position of the United States, but war opponents were all a bunch of hippies.

I say good riddance to that. I got the war wrong, and I think that gives me less "cred" than I would have had had I gotten the war right and I think that, politically speaking, it makes sense to put people forward who aren't tainted by the war. But most of all we need to ditch the mindset that says "cred" on national security is composed of being hawkish even when that means being wrong.

Then there's also, of course, those symbols of everything that went wrong in the 90s, everything that led to the Democratic brand getting trashed and demonized and sunk into the ground through triangulation and sacrifice of liberals in favor of the Clintonian Third Way, the Lanny Davises of the world, the Clintonites, which are far less appealing than Hillary Clinton the candidate. The combination of these things led to the opportunity for Obama to fill a space, and he ran a fabulous campaign to take advantage of it.

So, on to the fall. I think that the prospect of unmoderated debates throughout the summer might be really interesting. McCain's probably licking his chops at the prospect of showing off his experience, but that didn't exactly work for Clinton. In truth, McCain is a bad general election candidate, and his stumbles will be well-chronicled. He wants to be seen as a moderate, and thus the revelation that he didn't vote for Bush in 2000 probably helps him. But because he can't win without bitter-enders, he had to push back strongly on that statement this week, proving that he is constrained by far-right conservative ideology that is actually the best way to understand his career. He's been fighting for radically conservative judges ever since he supported Robert Bork for the Supreme Court in the 1980s, and his current views on executive power mirror George Bush's, believing that judicial review "shows little regard for the authority of the President," which is code for the most radical of Federalist Society agendas. Indeed, when the chips are down and the Republicans need a vote, they can count on McCain.

The presumptive Republican nominee arguably cast the decisive vote 14 times since 1999 to ensure Republicans got their way, and he had five other close cases where his vote may have made a difference, Senate records show. By comparison, McCain effectively handed Democrats a win on roll-call votes four times in the same period. On one of those occasions, Republicans could still have won if Vice President Dick Cheney had cast a tie-breaking vote.

The numbers are based on a review of Senate roll-call votes since 1999 that ended in a tie or were settled by one vote. The closest votes in that period included momentous, partisan-charged legislation, such as President Bush's tax cuts. More often, they were procedural votes on deal-breaking amendments to bills that would otherwise pass.

They partly reflect how rarely Senate votes come down to a single person, even though the chamber has been narrowly divided on party lines most of the past decade. But the votes also suggest that when McCain broke from Republicans, others often joined him, keeping the votes from being so close [...]

The voting pattern seems at odds with the popular narrative that McCain's maverick tendencies make him an unreliable conservative.

"He is a conservative who votes conservative on most issues," said Keith Poole, a political scientist at the University of California-San Diego. "By no means is he a liberal or even a moderate."

He's also never met a lobbyist he wouldn't do a favor for.

So I'm looking forward to whacking the heck out of him for the next six months. I can't wait for politics to be fun again and to see all my allies on the same side. And I can't wait for this election to be a referendum on conservatism in the Age of Bush.

End Of The Line?

Hillary Clinton loaned her campaign $6.4 million dollars last month to compete in Pennsylvania. To finish out the string she'd probably have to loan herself just as much. The outcome last night will make it very hard to raise money.

Before Clinton sycophants claim that she's being pushed out of the race for financial reasons, that's how pretty much every Presidential race ends. And 50 states NEVER get their say. Under these new rules everyone has to get a chance to vote and everything, but that's not actually how Presidential nomination fights work. When you're broke, you have to get out. And that's the most likely scenario.

Mrs. Clinton’s advisers acknowledged that the results of the primaries were far less than they had hoped, and said they were likely to face new pleas even from some of their own supporters for her to quit the race. They said they expected fund-raising to become even harder now; one adviser said the campaign was essentially broke, and several others refused to say whether Mrs. Clinton had lent the campaign money from her personal account to keep it afloat.

The advisers said they were dispirited over the loss in North Carolina, after her campaign — working off a shoestring budget as spending outpaces fund-raising — decided to allocate millions of dollars, some key operatives and full days of the candidate and her husband there.

It does look like Clinton is keeping the pretense of a continued campaign going, adding a campaign event in West Virginia today. She ought to - she's going to win West Virginia big next week, and then Kentucky in two weeks, while losing Oregon - but her campaign will take on elements in the media narrative of the Huckabee campaign circa Texas and Ohio - playing out the string, no negative ads or negative words, just a dance with destiny.

UPDATE: Wes Clark is urging Hillary to drop out.

UPDATE II: Let's also note, loudly, that the gas tax holiday pander didn't work. Americans are smarter than politicians and the media think, particularly now when there are so many more options for information available to them.

Gary Indiana, Gary Indiana, Gary Indiana

We're waiting on absentee ballots:

Rudy Clay, the chairman of the Lake County Democratic Party, said the counting of 11,000 absentee ballots is delaying the announcement of vote totals here. Although U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton holds a slim lead over U.S. Sen. Barack Obama in Indiana, most networks are waiting for Lake County's vote to call the state.

"I'm just as anxious as everybody else," Clay said.

This is still pretty much too close to call. Russert just said there are 220,000 votes outstanding and they're all from Obama strongholds. If he wins them 130,000-90,000, it's a tie. That's not at all out of the question.

Regardless of the "win," we're going to see what amounts to a tie in Indiana, particularly on the delegate counts. So Obama won the night, with a 200,000+ vote win in North Carolina. And this does change the game in a serious way. I think we're in endgame territory now.

UPDATE: Looks like Obama will pick up around 9-11 delegates on the night. And maybe 210,000 votes net. This basically wipes out her Pennsylvania win.

UPDATE II: Gary is coming in and coming in strong for Obama. 75-25 so far. The Mayor of Gary has predicted a shocker. It actually kind of looks suspicious, like they were waiting to see how many votes they'd need to win. Expect that to be the Limbaugh spin tomorrow when he recognizes that his Operation Chaos failed miserably.

UPDATE III: It's important to note, as Chris Bowers has, that none of this matters:

Does It Matter If Clinton Loses Indiana?

The answer to this question is obviously yes, since it will be a crushing media narrative against Clinton that will effectively end the nomination campaign tonight. However, the real answer to the question is no, since a 1% Clinton victory and a 1% Obama victory in Indiana swings only one PLEO delegate, and maybe one or two district-level delegates (or, maybe no district level delegates) [...]

Here is the bottom line: no matter the final popular vote outcome of Indiana, very few delegates will change hands and Obama will remain the overwhelming delegate favorite no matter what happens. This was as true entering tonight as it is right now. That the news media covering the campaign isn't bothering to point this out demonstrates just how detached their coverage, and their metrics, have always been from the actual campaign. In this case, following the idiotic, arbitrary, unrealistic media rules benefits Obama, but overall it means we are still playing by their stupid rules.

Yep.

UPDATE IV: Obama's going to come up just short. It's a 17,000 vote margin with 95% in. Lake County is now 56% in, and it's running 65-35 for Obama now. Apparently what's left in Lake is in more Clinton-friendly areas. I think this could get to 10,000 votes, but no closer.

UPDATE V: I guess the talking heads are finally figuring out that this is over. It has been over for a while, but now it's sinking in. Let's re-unify and work to defeat McCain.

UPDATE VI: It's pretty much over. Hillary's up to a 22,000-vote lead with 98% of the vote in. The networks could call this. However, it's a two-point victory, basically a tie, and so the narrative is all to Obama.

UPDATE VII: No public events for Hillary Clinton tomorrow. Lot of soul-searching going on, I'd bet.

Indiana and North Carolina

Well, Indiana's polls closed and it's "too early to call," which means they're waiting to see some early results in NW Indiana (supposedly Obama country) before making a projection. That gasbag Terry McAuliffe is on my teevee right now crowing about Indiana with a very minor mention of North Carolina. He's flopping like a fish on the question of whether or not Hillary will gain delegates tonight (answer - probably not).

I'm just too worn out by this process to dig into the exit polls, but it looks like a split, the economy has become the overriding issue, turnout is huge, and the party is polarized. However, that's a SNAPSHOT. We're six months out until the Presidential election, so no need to hand-wring just yet.

UPDATE: Chris Bowers sez that the quick snapshot of the exit polls show a 4-point Clinton win in Indiana. Right now with 12% in she's up 16. So it's probably somewhere in there, but closer to the exits.

UPDATE II: Barack Obama has won the North Carolina primary, NBC News immediately reported upon the close of the polls. So it looks like a big win in NC, and a smaller win for Clinton in IN. That favors Obama. Right now the margin is 14 points in IN with 17% in (I'm guessing some of the big African-American areas aren't in yet).

UPDATE III: Monroe County, the home of the University of Indiana, isn't in at all yet, so that's probably why we're still waiting on a call in the state (South Bend, home of Notre Dame, also isn't in yet. That could be very interesting, it's young but white Catholic). North Carolina looks like a big victory. This is pretty much as advertised, though perhaps a late swing overall to Obama, however slight. He's likely to win the delegate race tonight.

I don't think Hillary will quit this week unless every uncommitted superdelegate comes out en masse or something, and that's not likely to happen.

UPDATE IV: Chuck Todd is talking about an advantage of 9-15 delegates for Obama in North Carolina, and if the numbers get as high as 57% for Obama he'd wipe out Clinton's popular vote win in Pennsylvania entirely. By the way, North Carolina is a big state and a swing state in November.

I cannot believe that CNN did not poll the gas tax issue. It was the only policy talked about for a week or two. How do you poll Rev. Wright and not the gas tax?

UPDATE V: Obama is actually closing the gap in Indiana a touch. The spread is now 55,000 votes. Still no sign of Gary, South Bend, Bloomington or most of Indianapolis. Actually a lot of the NW Indiana/Chicago media market is out. I don't think he can pull it off, but it could get interesting.... never underestimate a person's regional base. Obama voters are going to come out of the woodwork in NW Indiana.

UPDATE VI: Interestingly enough, CBS called Indiana for Clinton while nobody else has. The spread is 56,000 votes with half of the vote in. This will be mid-single digits for Clinton at best.

UPDATE VII: The spread in Indiana is down to 54,000 votes, and Gary, South Bend and Bloomington continue to not be in. The percentage spread is down to 8 points, back to single digits.

UPDATE VIII: Well, South Bend wasn't much of a haul for Obama, 53-47, but Elkhart County was a huge win, 59-41. There's a possibility Obama still takes this. It's still about 50,000 votes, however, and at some point he's got to start catching up.

UPDATE IX: I gotta tell ya, this is reminiscent of Missouri, with all the African-American precincts coming in late. We're at 53-47 in Indiana and Gary is not yet in, and big turnout was expected there.

By the way, Harold Ickes is super classy.

This is what Harold Ickes, a longtime advisory to both Bill and Hillary Clinton, told Mark Halperin of Time's The Page tonight:

“We don’t know enough about Senator Obama yet. We don’t need an October Surprise. And (the chance of) an October Surprise with Hillary is remote.”

Thanks a million, Harold. You're really the heart and soul of the Democratic Party.

Down to 49,000 votes in Indiana now.

UPDATE X: MSNBC just changed Indiana to "Too Close To Call." That's very significant. Obama just started speaking in North Carolina. Hold on to your hats.

...very weird, Obama kind of conceded Indiana at a time when the gap is narrowing (now 47,000 votes).

UPDATE XI: Obama is sounding a unity theme, but about united Democrats. This is an excellent message for this speech. And he's all over McCain.

UPDATE XII: Down to 38,000 votes, and Gary REMAINS out. Wow. And Obama's delivering his usual good speech. And I love the line "The question is not what kind of campaign they will run, it's what kind of campaign we will run." Damn it feels good to hear a Democrat say that.

UPDATE XIII: 35,000 vote 31,000 vote spread now. Clinton is clearly waiting until the vote is called by all the networks until she speaks. And Gary remains out. Meanwhile, North Carolina is a 16-point lead for Obama and will probably come in more like 12-15.

UPDATE XIV: Usually presidential nomination fights end because of money. Clinton has basically been living primary to primary, and I can't imagine her being able to raise the cash to continue unless she loans herself more money. And she certainly can do that, but the question is "to what end"? I think Clinton will eventually win Indiana by a couple points, but will she be unable to win the money war and be forced to drop out for that reason?

UPDATE XV: We're back up to 39,000 votes with 82% reporting, and Lake County (Gary) isn't expected until 11:00pm ET. So I'm taking a little break.

Apparently I Missed A Lot This Morning

Al Giordano explains.

The day begins with the Clinton campaign “leaking” something to the Drudge Report to set expectations for the day. That then gets repeated on political blogs and cable news, where Clinton surrogate Terry McAuliffe elaborates. Today’s “expectation”: That the Clinton campaign expects a “15 point” defeat in North Carolina. Clinton’s yapping puppies in the news media repeat the manufactured expectation all day long, in which the bar is supposedly now that if Clinton comes within 15 points in that state that she has somehow “won” with a 14 point (or 6 point) defeat.

Around 4 p.m. rumors of exit polls begin circulating on the Internet. Around 5:30 p.m. AP and other news organizations leak minor data from the exit polls that explains almost nothing of value. Sometime after 6 p.m. Drudge posts raw numbers from exit polls that - if past is prologue - show Obama doing an average of seven percentage points better than he actually does.

Obama supporters then get prematurely jubilant and after polls close (tonight at 7 p.m. ET in Indiana and 7:30 p.m. ET in North Carolina) the real results start to come in and reveal Clinton then doing “better than expected” (at least better than the new expectations promoted during the day).

I liked what I did this morning instead - grocery shopping.

UPDATE: Yeah, I missed Barackula too - but you could find that without me.

Wash

So we've got primaries in North Carolina and Indiana tomorrow. I think the best rule of thumb in this primary is to assume that the scenario which is most inconclusive politically will happen, even though that same scenario will improve Obama's position but while everybody in the media acknowledges this immutable fact nothing will be done about it. So it is with tomorrow. Obama will win North Carolina, Clinton will probably win Indiana, half of the remaining pledged delegates will be split almost evenly, Obama will have all but clinched his lead on that score, but the race will continue because a certain someone refuses to accept reality. The superdelegates are actually coming out of the woodwork, and the fact that more of them are swinging to Obama means that Clinton really, really, can't win. But "the fight goes on."