When the Window Closed
As you've heard, today was the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination. Two worthwhile reminiscences: E.J. Dionne, on the King murder as the death knell for 1960s liberalism, and Kai Wright--a man with whom I shared an office wall for a year or so--on King's forgotten radicalism.

i have just one thing to add. In the incredibly consequential and ultimately horrific year of 1968, there was a period of not quite four days that I believe stands as the high-water mark for progressive politics in America: between March 31, when Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not stand for re-election, and April 4, when King was gunned down in Memphis. For those 90-odd hours, I imagine it was possible to believe that a proud liberal, probably Robert F. Kennedy, would win the White House, end the Vietnam War, begin to bring healing to the divisions of the period, and fulfill the promise of Johnson's Great Society. The killing didn't foreclose those possibilities, but it--or rather the riots that ensued--exacerbated the white backlash that ultimately helped elect Richard Nixon, and it began the demoralization and (to Dionne's point) self-doubt on the left that greatly deepened when Kennedy himself was murdered. The Chicago convention, at which the orphaned constituents of Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy first lost the nomination, then got their brains bashed in, was in some sense insult to injury.

Likely the promise of those four days was never realistic. Had there been no assassinations that year, had RFK won the presidency, things still might have come apart. Disengagement from Vietnam was never going to be easy, in a political or strategic sense. The Cold War was still on a low simmer, and we hadn't yet engaged China. (Indeed, with Kennedy instead of Nixon, who knows if that would have happened at all.) The Great Society was already stalled by 1968, and the racial backlash was going to continue anyway.

Even so, James Earl Ray's second victim was the hope that had bubbled up through the first few months of that year.

April: Baseball's Cruelest Month
Every year I get intensely excited for Opening Day. Springtime, the assured presence of my favorite sport, maybe my favorite thing in the world, on TV somewhere more or less 24/7, the return of the Phillies.

And every year, within no more than 72 hours after that first pitch is thrown, they find some way to kick me in the figurative balls.

Monday's season-opening loss was at least characteristic of the team's pattern of play over the last few years: they fell behind, came back to tie it on some huge hits, then shat the game away in the 9th with cover-your-eyes, hide-the-children caliber relief pitching to lose 11-6. Tonight, though, just felt like the sort of metaphysical screw-you one only experiences through sport. (My strongest memory ever in this line was the 2006 game the Eagles lost to a last-place Tampa Bay Buccaneers squad, when a waiver-bait kicker beat them with a 62-yard field goal as time expired. I swear I could almost see some ghostly hand floating behind the uprights, all fingers folded in but the middle one.) Cole Hamels, Phillies ace and hero of the internets, pitched eight innings of one-run ball; the run was a wind-blown bullshit OFJOAB ("Our Fucking Joke of a Ballpark") special homer. The Phillies offense, meanwhile, was that special combination of inept (one hit all night) and unlucky (at least three rockets hit right at defenders in the final three innings).

So the team is 0-2 with the two good pitchers having taken their turns without any wins to show for it, and The Crap due the next three games. Usually I don't make this AIS post--it is a yearly tradition--until they hit 1-6 or so, but this year I figured why wait.

Worlds Collide
edit, 3/31: Okay, he was booed pretty good. That makes me feel a little better.

The unofficial but real start of the 2008 baseball season (not counting those novelty games in Japan last week) came tonight when the Washington Nationals broke in their brand-new ballpark with a thrilling 3-2 walkoff win over the evil Atlanta Braves. I didn't watch the whole game, but flipped back and forth all evening and got to see four of the five runs scored: two for Washington on two-out hits in the first inning, the Braves' equalizer in the top of the 9th against substitute Nats closer Jon Rauch, and the game-winner in the bottom of the inning when Ryan Zimmerman sent the fans home on Cloud 9 with a solo home run off Peter Moylan. The new park looks great, the game was a taut pitchers duel (Tim Hudson retired 19 in a row after those initial two runs), and the end was a thriller.

Yet in the middle of all this good feeling, there was President George W. Bush yukking it up on screen like a turd in the middle of your birthday cake. He'd thrown out the first ball--which I managed to skip when I saw it was coming--then came back for what felt like a fucking hour to talk with announcers Jon Miller and Joe Morgan. I kept flipping back, saw that he was still sitting there in his little sweater under a blazer, smirking away.

As time goes on, the outrageous comes to seem mundane just because one gets used to it. I suppose Bush's presidency is like that. Conceived in dishonesty and corruption, it's come to full, rank, tragicomic flower. How this inane and repellent and small person managed to do so much damage will be a source of dismay to millions of us for as long as we live. Every day, we grumble at his arrogance and belligerence, and gasp at how far short he falls in facing up to severe problems. That's bad enough. But to see him getting to join in the celebration of baseball's renewal, as if he wasn't the most colossal fuckup in American history, just turns the stomach. He has been and remains a walking, talking middle finger in the face of meritocracy.

(This isn't really a partisan thing. I don't think I could ever vote for John McCain, but I'd be perfectly happy, even a little psyched, to see him throwing out the first ball. This must have been how the hardcore righties felt seeing Clinton in such circumstances; it honestly sucks. Maybe the answer is just to take the president out of this equation and let everyone enjoy the game without intrusion from the miserable world of politics.)

The irony, as I've probably noted here before, is that Bush could have had a much more central (and positive) role in major league baseball. Former Commissioner Fay Vincent wrote that the former Texas Rangers owner wanted to become the game's commissioner, but then-interim boss Bud Selig kept putting him off and putting him off, and finally Bush decided to enter politics. He picked the Republican landslide year of 1994 to make a run for the Texas governorship, and the rest is tragedian farce. With his fan's sensibility, it's almost certain that he would have been orders of magnitude better as a commissioner than he's been in his actual job. Then again, it might have been worth it to divert him even if he'd been as atrocious in that job as he is in this one.)

Just another reason to hope Selig roasts in hell. Still way second to the Strike, though.

Stasis
Every day for awhile now, I've gone online looking for one of two things: some indication that the Phillies have made a move to complete a pitching staff that currently has just ten guys on it (12 is the norm, and there's no way they'll have fewer than 11), and Hillary Clinton bowing to reality and dropping out of the Democratic presidential race. The calendar suggests that the first thing will happen soon--the Phils' season starts on Monday--but we'll probably have to wait at least four more weeks, and more likely six, for the second.

Clinton can't win. She's managed to damage Barack Obama somewhat--he now trails John McCain head-to-head among independents, after leading the Republican through the first two months of this year--but not help herself. Even if Obama were to fall short, his enraged supporters--and the Democrats' terror of losing African-Americans--would ensure it went to Al Gore or someone else not currently in the race. This CQ Politics article--titled "Clinton Struggling With Her Likability Problem"--would be funny if it weren't so painful:

[O]ne race Obama is winning by the numbers is the favorability race whether the measure is positive/negative reactions to the two, or traits that voters like or dislike about each.

Here’s a collection of findings on this score from a range of polls:

• Obama bests Clinton among Democratic voters by margins of 15 percent to 20 percent on the traits of being “down to earth,” “inspiring” and “honest,” according to Pew. More Democrats think Clinton is “phony” and “hard to like” than they do about Obama.

• Pew said the things Democrats most dislike about Clinton are her personality, the idea that she has “too much baggage,” and that she is too ambitious.
...
• The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll said 48 percent of Democrats in its survey viewed Clinton as somewhat or very negative versus 37 percent who had very or somewhat positive perceptions of her. Two weeks ago, 45 percent viewed her positively, and 43 percent viewed her negatively. Obama is viewed positively by 49 percent of voters and negatively by 32 percent.

• In a USA Today/Gallup poll conducted March 14-16, forty-four percent of those surveyed said they considered Clinton honest and trustworthy while 53 percent did not. By contrast, McCain was considered honest and trustworthy by a 67 percent to 27 percent margin, and Obama was close at 63 percent to 29 percent.

• A Quinnipiac University poll of Connecticut voters found that 47 percent of all voters viewed her unfavorably to 46 percent who viewed her favorably. Obama’s favorability rating was 59 to 24 percent and McCain’s was 52 percent to 31 percent. A quarter of Clinton detractors in the poll said she was dishonest.

In a widely cited article earlier this week, David Brooks (admittedly not the best or most objective source when it comes to the Democrats) suggested that Clinton has perhaps a five percent chance to win the nomination. I think he overstates the mark. Clinton's "likability" problem has gotten worse as she's thrown the kitchen sink, the hallway closet, the bathroom toilet, the cellar door and whatever else isn't nailed down at Obama: to really maul this metaphor, she's destroyed her own house in the process.

Still, the Democrats can't just shove her off the stage, even if (as is starting to seem evident) they really want to. Why? Consider this comment, left last night on The Carpetbagger Report:

I will vote in the primary for Hillary. I will vote in the election for Hillary. Even if the party picks Obama I will write in a vote for Hillary. I will not vote for a man who has the nerve to say that he has never heard his minister talk that way when he’s been attending for around 20. Poppy cock. He’s lying period.

Look around the liberal blogosphere--and I'm not even talking about the fanatical Clinton sites--and you'll see a lot more of the same. There's some number of dead-ender Clintonites out there--probably not the 25 to 28 percent suggested by some polls, but between a few hundred thousand and a few million--who are deeply, deeply invested in this candidacy. These hardest of the hard-core, almost all of whom seem to be women, evidently see their own life struggles reflected in Sen. Clinton’s campaign... and see in Barack Obama every man who’s put one over on them and gotten away with it because of the sexism that still is a force in our society.

It’s at least somewhat irrational, and certainly subjective--I can't see how one considers Obama's unwillingness to repudiate his pastor as more offensive than Clinton lying about her Mission to Bosnia. And I think Hillary Clinton is about the worst imaginable champion for the legitimate grievances of American women… but she’s the one in this race, so that doesn’t matter either. Much as I wish we had Laura Roslin running for president, we don’t.

Now, if Clinton were a responsible leader who put party and principle ahead of personal ambition, she’d see the writing on the wall and conclude that her historical reputation and future clout in the Senate–-which is what she’s playing for now; it’s a near-certainty that she’ll never be president, however much some think she's trying to kneecap Obama for 2012–-would benefit by graciously withdrawing and offering wholehearted support for the party’s nominee.

But for the moment at least, she seems willing, if not eager, to lead her supporters right over the cliff–-and take the party with her. The painful irony is that the Democrats need those supporters sufficiently badly that they can't yet cauterize the wounds the Clintons continue to inflict. They'll need to feel that she had her full opportunity and lost fair and square, so to speak, rather than getting shoved aside as another victim of institutional sexism. The problem is that she might never make that graceful concession--and that until she does, she'll continue to attack Obama, driving up his negatives and costing the Democrats a precious opportunity to start making their case against John McCain and a continuation of the Bush/Cheney reign of error.

Hillary Clinton, Lying Liar
Per my point in a post last week about Barack Obama as a departure from the recent norm of national politicians who lie with a straight face even when we know they're lying and they know we know, consider Hillary Clinton's Excellent Bosnian Adventure.

Sen. Clinton's longtime claims of a "danger assignment" in the Balkans in 1996, which she uses to bolster her (rather thin) foreign policy "experience" credentials, got a little attention recently when Sinbad, the comedian who was also on the trip, essentially said she was full of shit:

Sinbad, along with singer Sheryl Crow, was on that 1996 trip to Bosnia that Clinton has described as a harrowing international experience that makes her tested and ready to answer a 3 a.m. phone call at the White House on day one, a claim for which she's taking much grief on the campaign trail.
...
In an interview with the Sleuth Monday, he said the "scariest" part of the trip was wondering where he'd eat next. "I think the only 'red-phone' moment was: 'Do we eat here or at the next place.'"

Clinton, during a late December campaign appearance in Iowa, described a hair-raising corkscrew landing in war-torn Bosnia, a trip she took with her then-teenage daughter, Chelsea. "They said there might be sniper fire," Clinton said.

Threat of bullets? Sinbad doesn't remember that, either.

"I never felt that I was in a dangerous position. I never felt being in a sense of peril, or 'Oh, God, I hope I'm going to be OK when I get out of this helicopter or when I get out of his tank.'"

In her Iowa stump speech, Clinton also said, "We used to say in the White House that if a place is too dangerous, too small or too poor, send the First Lady."

Say what? As Sinbad put it: "What kind of president would say, 'Hey, man, I can't go 'cause I might get shot so I'm going to send my wife...oh, and take a guitar player and a comedian with you.'"

The Clintons, as they tend to do, subsequently doubled down, adding the detail that the First Lady's transport came under sniper fire as it landed in Bosnia and a planned ceremony at the airport had to be called off as the party ran for their lives. Unfortunately for them, the press was on hand as well, and now the Washington Post offers this full-on fact check and awards her "Four Pinocchios," their highest honor for stretching facts well beyond recognition.

According to Pomfret, the Tuzla airport was "one of the safest places in Bosnia" in March 1996, and "firmly under the control" of the 1st Armored Division.

Far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling U.S. and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Moslem girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony, above, shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss.

"There is peace now," Emina told Clinton, according to Pomfret's report in the Washington Post the following day, "because Mr. Clinton signed it. All this peace. I love it."

The First Lady's schedule, released on Wednesday and available here, confirms that she arrived in Tuzla at 8.45 a.m. and was greeted by various dignitaries, including Emina Bicakcic, (whose name has mysteriously been redacted from the document.)

You can see CBS News footage of the arrival ceremony here. The footage shows Clinton walking calmly out of the back of the C-17 military transport plane that brought her from Ramstein Air Force Base in Germany.

Is this the issue on which the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination should be decided? Of course not. Has Barack Obama ever stretched an anecdote or altered a story to make himself look better? I'm guessing yes. (Though it's probably worth noting that the Republicans did pretty well by demonizing the last two Democratic presidential nominees as incorrigible liars, and none of their alleged whoppers were as blatant or easily disproved as this Clinton fabrication.) But this is so typical of the Clintons: not only the truth-stretching, but the brazenness of the dishonesty and the ease with which it can be exposed. Nobody has ever called them stupid, so I'm assuming what went on here was that someone made a calculation that the story would generate political value before it was exposed for the untruth it was. But is this really what progressives want? And can the country really afford another president or would-be president with such transparent contempt for the truth?

An Experiment in Disconnection
I'm out of here again until Sunday, heading to Florida for some sun and March baseball. Not bringing my laptop, no plans to visit Internet Cafes, nuthin. Can't remember the last time I went four days without tapping on a keyboard... should be interesting.

Obama Passes Test; Will We?
By now you've heard about or read about or actually read Barack Obama's speech, given this morning in Philadelphia. Reaction around the blogosphere and, far as I can tell, within the mainstream media, breaks down into two categories: he either gave a brilliant speech that reaffirmed why his campaign has so far exceeded expectations from, say, six months ago, or he gave a good speech that didn't address his immediate political problem, which is winning (or winning back) white working-class voters who might have been open to Obama's appeal but were likely turned off by what they heard about Jeremiah Wright.

(Myself, I thought it was brilliant and easily cleared the bar Sullivan set for him--but if he can't get me with a simultaneously erudite and heartfelt speech about an issue that gets to the core of his candidacy, he probably should just pack it up. So we'll put my response off to the side here.)

Both these analyses are correct, but they both miss a larger point. The speech was, among other things, a challenge to get past the sound bites and out-of-context attacks that have come to characterize our politics and grapple with real, difficult, complex issues. He rejects the demonization of Jeremiah Wright, but doesn’t make him a martyr either; he presents him, I think accurately, as a man who's done admirable things but seen and suffered a great deal from our national legacy of discrimination. Obama essentially condemns Wright's speech--not the man himself, a point that seems to track with what I understand of Christianity--for telling just one side of the story:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old -- is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know -- what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope - the audacity to hope - for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

I'm not sure that we are ready for this kind of complexity--for a public person like Wright who's neither a hatemonger nor a righteously enraged saint, but someone trying to serve his community and in some sense speak truth to power whose own experience has twisted him beyond the capacity for objective consideration. Maybe we are; our popular entertainments, at least, are starting to get past two-dimensional heroes and villains (think about The Sopranos). But not in our politics. The right wing in particular has always thrived on caricatures—Democrats are either waffling wimps, lecherous monsters, or serial liars--and the Politics of Extreme Simplification worked to win Bush a second term in 2004. But the left has gone too far in that direction by demonizing Bush—who isn’t evil so much as painfully out of his depth. (His policies might be evil in consequence, but it's absurd to think of him, or even Cheney, sitting there stroking a cat and laughing maniacally like Mike Myers.)

And this brings us back to Obama. He doesn’t present himself as perfect, even if some voices in the media have characterized him as doing so. Rather, he's a guy who seems almost to be thinking out loud, trying to reason through some very complicated problems. That's essentially the story he tells in his first book, and it's watching him go through that process on the page, grappling with fundamental questions of identity, that convinced me he has the capacity to lead in the presidency.

This is a little different from what we've become accustomed to: an image of power and leadership that admits of no mistakes, that lies with ease and even grace when we know they’re lying and they know we know. Obama isn’t a saint and his judgment, though good, isn’t perfect: the Rezko association and the failure to realize that Wright would be a political problem are more than ample proof of that.

So the question might not be so much whether or not we’re ready for a black president, as for one who is recognizably human, with the inevitably flawed nature that implies.

My Torah
I don't remember much from my early exposure to the Jewish religion, but one of the practices I do recall is that devout Jews read the Torah all the way through each year, breaking it up into regular increments that typically fall around the same time every year. (The vagaries of the lunar calendar--which had my brother thinking Passover is this weekend, because Easter is--leave me unsure that each selection comes at the exact same time every year.)

When I was a kid, I thought this was a little weird--essentially like watching the same TV shows over and over again.

As an adult, I watch the same TV shows over and over again.

The Simpsons has been in syndication for well over ten years now; I remember when I worked at NBC in 1996-97, we'd put on the big TVs in the bullpen/office whenever we were still there when it came on at 6 or whenever it was. The Fox affiliate here still airs The Simpsons twice a day, and at this point I must have seen many of the episodes, even those from seasons I don't have on DVD, a good dozen times. Tonight I watched the classic "Beer Baron" episode, which I do have on DVD, while working out at the gym. This one I can actually remember watching on at least four occasions: when it first aired in 1997, at a bar over the head of a girl I was out on a (terrible) blind date with a year or two after that, once on the DVD, and this evening. But I can give you that episode almost line-for-line, so I have to believe the number of actual viewings has to be closer to 15.

That isn't the worst of it. The Simpsons is among the longest-running shows in TV history; they've made something like 450 of them. The Fox station tonight went out of order to show the Beer Baron episode, which begins on St. Patrick's Day; otherwise, they've been airing them sequentially since late last year, from the very first "Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire"--aired in the 1980s!!!--to, presumably, the most recent one they'll be allowed to show when they hit the end of the road in early 2009 or thereabouts. The show that I seem to watch almost as compulsively is "Futurama"... of which only about 70 episodes were made, not including the new ones that will debut on Comedy Central this Sunday. (Yes, I'm deeply excited.) Comedy Central airs about five hours of "Futurama" every week, and I probably watch a bit less than half of them; previously, the series played on Cartoon Network as part of its Adult Swim block, and I watched that at least a couple times a week.

Why? I still enjoy the shows, but there's got to be a few thousand better uses of my time. All I can come up with, other than Occam's answer of inertia (and what fun is that?), is that I get some kind of comfort, spiritual sustenance even, from doing it. It's not exactly Maimonides reading the Exodus, but I gotta go with what I have...

Wright's Righteous Rage
The Washington Post offers this selection of "greatest hits" from Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's longtime pastor at his Chicago church.

(At this point, upon reading the link, you're supposed to swoon, faint, and be revived with smelling salts. I'll wait. Ready? OK.)

Obama is taking all kinds of fire for this guy and his "inflammatory" statements, even after responding in print yesterday. I hadn't watched any video of Wright until seeing this earlier this afternoon, and a colleague of mine at the office yesterday, whom I asked about this, said that you really had to see the clips to appreciate why people are getting bent out of shape. Fair enough--though now that I have seen Wright in full boil, I still absolutely don't get what the big deal is. I'd submit that any intelligent and educated African-American man of a certain age, in a position of responsibility within his community, is likely to feel the anger that Wright expresses over the question of race in America--and justifiably so! Is he over the top? Perhaps. But he isn't wrong.

I also watched this lengthy clip of Obama talking with Keith Olbermann last night about the Wright (and Tony Rezko) controversies. I think he sounded the proper note:

Reverend Wright represents a generation that came of age in the ‘60s. He is an African-American man who, because of his life experience, he continues to have a lot of anger and frustration and will express that in ways that are very different from me and my generation. … Part of what we’re seeing is a transition from the past to the future. I hope that our politics represents that future.”

Obama admits that he'll see Wright's sermon clips again, most likely in ads produced and paid for by independent 527 groups, if he wins the nomination. He repudiates the sentiments, but not Wright (who is retiring) himself. And he adds that he hopes to use Wright's statements as a way to talk about race. What I'm guessing he means by this is to make the point that Wright has cause for anger. The aftereffects of de jure discrimination, its structural legacy, continues to harm black America almost a half-century after the triumphs of the civil rights movement: schools remain unequal, housing remains largely segregated by race, and some cultural pathologies of the black community--which Obama has admirably, if not heroically, addressed throughout his career--remain tragically intact. Obama is probably the one person in the country, though, who can tell this entire story, which is a lot more complex than Wright presents it: enduring bigotry and progress side by side, a new world of possibilities (embodied, not least, by Obama himself) and the same old dead ends and traps, pride and shame.

I think it was the United Negro College Fund that launched a campaign several years ago with this brilliant slogan: "Much has changed. Much has not." That's the story of black America in the 21st century, as this white boy sees it. Obama is the man to tell that story, and to move the country to more fully acknowledge the history of discrimination--but not be ruled by it, and not allow it as an excuse for failure to make progress or confront the problems within the black community itself.

But we only get to have that desperately needed conversation if Obama wins. Meanwhile, the circus is in full swing. That right-wing radio people are comparing Wright to the Nazis or KKK, or that Rush Limbaugh—Rush fuckin’ Limbaugh!—is calling him a race-baiter and hate-monger, is beyond silly. But there’s no primary for five and a half more weeks, and the media must clutch its pearls. This story will linger for another week, his poll numbers will dip, and then the circus will move on to another issue that might or might not have anything to do with our crippling financial and economic problems, the desperate need to reform our health care and education systems, the quagmire in Iraq, or any of the myriad other problems that are really at issue in this election. I’m guessing not.

The Power of Shamelessness
About ten years ago, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal was threatening to engulf the Clinton administration and capsize his presidency, I remember thinking with admiration that Bill Clinton had no shame. How else, I asked myself, could this guy go out every day, in the highest of high-profile positions, and continue to do his job? In his place, I thought at the time, not only wouldn't I be able to go in front of cameras and talk about intervention in the Balkans or instability in the Russian economy or whatever was on the table at that time; I wouldn't have been able to breathe. The embarrassment, and the pain caused to those betrayed, might or might not be survivable.

The Clintons' shamelessness served them well then, in a cause I supported. Now they're displaying the same trait in one I deplore--but it might serve them well again. Sending out Geraldine Ferraro as a sort of Archie Bunker with estrogen might drive away some of their already-meager support among People Like Me and You: the over-educated, upper middle classish, online types who demographically if not temperamentally speaking are already inclined to favor Barack Obama. But will it hurt Hillary Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary where the former president now has declared she needs a "big win"? I'm inclined to believe not. Racial resentment is still a powerful motivating force at the polls: just ask whatever's left of Jesse Helms, or his opponent Harvey Gantt. An effort to paint Obama as an affirmative-action candidate could play well in the part of the state that James Carville famously described as "Alabama."

We who oppose this Clinton candidacy and decry the former First Couple as supreme narcissists can wring our hands and threaten to sit out the fall election, though they don't necessarily need us anyway. I do wonder if this sort of soft-racism-by-proxy would hurt Sen. Clinton in November; if African-Americans sit home in large numbers, she'd be sunk. But maybe they wouldn't; part of the Clintons' sick genius is that they frame the world in such a way that we all must be partisans, typically on their behalf. That they resemble nobody so much as the Bushes, who also see the world as two camps With Us or Against Us, doesn't strike me as a coincidence.

The Downfall of "Client 9"
I said late last year that no official I've politically supported had been a bigger disappointment to me than New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, elected in a landslide win two years ago with a mandate to finally clean up our corrupt and dysfunctional state politics. Turns out that Spitzer's disastrous 2007 might prove to be a high point, given new revelations that he's been consorting with ho's:

Just last week, federal prosecutors arrested four people in connection with an expensive prostitution operation. Administration officials would not say that this was the ring with which the governor had become involved.

But a person with knowledge of the governor’s role said that the person believes the governor is one of the men identified as clients in court papers.

The governor’s travel records show that he was in Washington in mid-February. One of the clients described in court papers arranged to meet with a prostitute who was part of the ring, the Emperors Club VIP on the night of Feb. 13.

Mr. Spitzer appeared on a CNBC television show at 7 a.m. the next morning. Later in the morning, he testified before a Congressional committee.

An affidavit filed in federal court in Manhattan in connection with that case lists six conversations between the man, identified as Client 9, and a booking agent for the Emperors Club.

To me, this is about equal parts really funny and deeply sad. My father, however, is not so torn: as a former insurance agent, he's not very fond of Gov. Spitzer, and his reaction when I called him a little while ago made this all a little better.

GET OUT! GET OUT! (laughing hysterically) THAT HOLIER THAN THOU PIECE OF SHIT!

He later calmed down enough to wonder "how they caught that motherfucker," and made in somewhat more colorful prose the point that Josh Marshall just raised on his blog:

We don't know the precise details yet of this 'prostitution ring involvement' on the part of the Gov. Spitzer. But how exactly is it that someone who makes it his business to bust the chops of big wall street titans uses prostitutes? TPM HQ is in Chelsea. And I'm expecting the streets to deluged at any moment now by joyously rioting stock brokers coming up from Wall Street. We do know that this financial industry honchos all have big 'security' offices and have tons of PIs who work for them. I'm frankly shocked they didn't smoke him out before this.

I guess the upside of this is that it makes it somewhat more likely that Mayor Bloomberg will make a run for the statehouse in two years' time, if Spitzer resigns. (I doubt he will, given what we now know, but we'll see; the knives were out for him before, and this won't help.) And as a Clinton supporter, his embarrassment might cause a little discomfort for Team Restoration.

Still, as someone who enthusiastically voted for Spitzer, and still thinks the guy has a great combination of idealism and toughness, I'm more than a little bummed.

Reagan vs. Nixon
At the office the other day we were trying to come up with a Republican parallel to the Obama/Clinton contest, reinvigorated after the Clintons' victories last week in three primaries and likely to be sustained by the shamelessness of the former First Family as well as the media's interest in a horserace. Putting aside the remote possibility of the Republicans, always deferential to authority and ready to fall in line, engaging in a nomination battle that not resolved early in favor of the front-runner, it can be done. You just need an inspirational, potentially transformational candidate on one side, and a very well-known, highly polarizing political institution on the other.

The analogy is Ronald Reagan versus Richard Nixon. It actually could have happened in 1968, if Reagan's first fledgling presidential run had been somewhat more in earnest. The parallels to the battle between Obama and Clinton are almost spooky.

Reagan, like Obama, had come to national attention with a widely seen speech in praise of another presidential candidate; his "A Time for Choosing" was a sensation, and impelled not a few Republicans to wish it was the former actor, rather than the rhetorically impaired Senator Barry Goldwater, on the ballot in 1964. Similarly, Obama's "Audacity of Hope" keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention provided a stunning contrast with John Kerry's overly mannered acceptance speech. And while many view Obama with skepticism for his short resume in elected office--half a term in the U.S. Senate, eight years as an Illinois State Senator--he looks like Henry Clay compared to Reagan in 1968, when he entered the presidential lists a year after winning his first political office as California's governor. None of this even gets into the similarity between the critique of Obama today and Reagan in 1980, noted by the right-wing writer Stephen Hayes (who warns his fellow Republicans not to repeat the Democrats' '80 mistake of underestimating the guy with the sunny rhetoric) among many others.

The Nixon/Clinton comparison is a bit more of a stretch, though Matt Taibbi at least thinks it works. Certainly both were hated by half the country, but supported by a large chunk of their party establishments. Both had eight years in someone else's White House which they somewhat dubiously claimed as experience, though Bill Clinton certainly has been more amenable to his wife's taking credit for Clinton administration accomplishments than President Eisenhower had been for his #2. Both are certainly open to charges of secrecy and dishonesty. (Okay, Nixon's actually open-and-shut; but Hillary more than holds her own here.) Both tried to secure the nomination by calling in chits from the party establishment and leveraging name recognition and brand loyalty from lower-information voters. Both were willing, if not absolutely eager, to kneecap rivals within the party. (What Clinton has done to Obama lines up pretty well with the doubts Nixon sowed in 1964 about Goldwater and four years later about both Reagan and Nelson Rockefeller.) Both offer a platform of "knowing how to get things done" on behalf of a constituency overlooked by the press and elites.

And both seem fueled by paranoia and resentment--at the press (ironically enough, in this respect; had it been Obama who'd lost 11 straight contests, or failed to release his tax returns, the frenzy would have been decisive) and other enemies--more than anything else. Here's Taibbi on Clinton's stump speech:

At one event I attended in Iowa, she railed against the Republicans who tried to crush her over health care, the Chinese who tried to stifle her over her "women's rights are human rights" speech, a pharmaceutical industry that bucked when she passed a law requiring that drugs be tested for use on children, and a press that tells lies about her. The speech conveniently ignored the fact that Hillary (a) takes more money from Big Pharma than any candidate in the race and (b) voted to keep most-favored-nation trading status with China despite her human-rights concerns, and that she and her husband were bogged down in a scandal involving campaign contributions from the Chinese.

Hillary's campaign is and always has been presented as a pitched battle for political survival against bitter enemies, and no reporter who has watched the way she stage-manages every last utterance and generally treats the press like a gang of rattlesnakes (which they are, of course) can possibly fail to appreciate the similarity to Nixon's own troubled, hypervigilant relationship with the fourth estate.

In a much lower-profile contest than either this year's Democratic nomination battle or the tragic debacle that was the Democratic race that year, Nixon beat Reagan, and a host of others, for the 1968 nomination because Reagan wasn't quite ready for prime time and because Nixon didn't face as much grass-roots or institutional opposition within his party as Clinton has in hers. And their contest, such as it was, didn't do any lasting damage to the Republicans for the fall campaign or beyond. From where we sit today, neither outcome seems likely this time around: Obama's pledged-delegate lead and strong campaign still make him the favorite, but the Clintons' desperate scorched-earth tactics are likely to leave deep wounds, to the Democrats' ultimate disadvantage in a year they should be poised for easy victory. The willingness to tear apart others for personal tactical gain could be the signature Nixonian trait.

"Classic 120 Minutes"
Around midnight this past Sunday night I was flipping through the channels and saw a mind-boggler: VH1 Classic: 120 Minutes. This is the refitted version of a show that was, when I was growing up, MTV's nod to what's now mis-labeled "alternative rock," which in those pre-Internet and pre-Nirvana days really was mostly confined to the margins of popular culture. 120 Minutes played videos by bands who otherwise had virtually no national exposure: few made top-40 or Album-Oriented Rock radio, and at best they might get to play one song for a late-night TV audience with Letterman or whoever was filling in for Johnny Carson.

The bands made it, such as they did, through airplay on college stations, touring, little blurbs in big magazines like Rolling Stone or SPIN or big writeups in tiny 'zines now lost to history, at least as far as I know. Between the stresses and difficulties of the music business at the time, and the generally contrarian nature of angry young men (and a few women) in all times, most of those groups soon broke up; interestingly, more than a few of them have reunited in this decade, seizing upon the new abundance of distribution channels for their work as well as, I guess, the middle-aged realization that nothing is really cooler or more satisfying than playing great music with people you love. Oh, and the money: the Pixies, for instance, probably didn't get rich while they were making albums, but they sure as hell did on the reunion tours.

But that's all wide-world stuff. For me at age 13 through 15 or so, 120 Minutes was almost a lifeline, the place I first heard many of the bands that still rank among my all-time favorites today--Camper van Beethoven, the Church, Robyn Hitchcock, Sonic Youth--as well as lesser favorites They Might Be Giants and the Jesus and Mary Chain, and mostly-forgotten acts like Cactus World News, the Dream Syndicate, Game Theory (I probably could still sing you "Erica's Word"), Screaming Blue Messiahs and Scruffy the Cat. Perhaps more to the point, it was a window into the world beyond the 'burbs, my family with its standard-order but still painful dysfunction, where maybe I wouldn't feel quite as out of place. When I was off school or couldn't sleep, I'd stay up to watch; other times I'd set the VCR and look forward to coming home from a miserable day at middle school and watching the tape. (This was also good because you could fast-forward through the crap, which was usually plentiful.)

That said, watching the current version is a little bit like visiting a theme park based on a place where you once lived. The sense of newness, obviously, is gone: all the videos are at least 15 years old. There's no chance of hearing a little gem like Scruffy the Cat or the Cavedogs (a Boston band I once saw play live during college; I've never comprised a larger share of an audience); it's all big-name groups like R.E.M. and The Cure, whom I imagine get at least one play just about every week. Still, there are worse ways to spend a couple late-night hours, and it's a trip to ponder that all these bands that represented the future are now sufficiently back in the rearview to merit the label of "classic."

Easy, Kev
Just hours after New York City Mayor (and AIS hero) Mike Bloomberg made his definitive announcement that he wouldn't be seeking the presidency as an independent candidate in 2008, top Bloomberg political aide Kevin Sheekey put the mayor's political plans and ambitions back in the news with public speculation that Bloomberg could be a strong running mate for Barack Obama. Sheekey says, "I think the mayor is the ultimate swing voter. He is someone who the country is looking at to find out where they will go. He is one of the true independents in the country.”

I guess that in some sense, anyone with a net work of $12 billion or so who hasn't publicly committed to supporting any candidate could be fairly described as "the ultimate swing voter." And some already have tried to parse Bloomberg's Times op-ed for clues as to who he might ultimately endorse. Michael Tomasky, who's usually pretty smart, screws up this exercise IMO by giving all his considerations--free trade, immigration reform, education reform and global warming--equal weight, while leaving out altogether the most important substance graf in Bloomberg's piece:

In every city I have visited — from Baltimore to New Orleans to Seattle — the message of an independent approach has resonated strongly, and so has the need for a new urban agenda. More than 65 percent of Americans now live in urban areas — our nation’s economic engines. But you would never know that listening to the presidential candidates. At a time when our national economy is sputtering, to say the least, what are we doing to fuel job growth in our cities, and to revive cities that have never fully recovered from the manufacturing losses of recent decades?

So let's see: you've got John McCain, a member of Congress for a quarter-century whose signature issue at this point is foreign policy, and whose past admirable steps toward political process reform (which indirectly benefits cities by weakening the power of special interests to divert public resources for everything else) he's now mostly trying to push under the rug in hopes of winning over right-wingers. Then you've got Barack Obama, whose formative political experiences were as a community organizer in an impoverished section of Chicago and a state senator representing a wealthier part of Chicago. Seems one of the two is more attuned toward the concerns and hopes of those championing an urban agenda than others, no?

(And yes, I know Hillary Clinton is still in the race, and that in some sense she represents New York City. But while their relationship is said to be cordial, I find it unimaginable that Bloomberg would support the woman who embodies the Democratic political establishment, if not the Beltway mindset itself. Perhaps more to the point, Hillary leadership on urban issues other than trying to get more Homeland Security funding for NYC has been non-existent.)

Still, I'd be pretty comfortable betting money I don't really have that Bloomberg won't be Obama's running mate. The reasons why are both political and stylistic: if Bloomberg, a big-time social liberal whom even his admirers (like me) readily concede doesn't exactly have the Common Touch, really can appeal to swing voters and independents, I haven't seen it. What states, other than perhaps Florida (which would be a big deal if proven), could he swing for Obama? And what would be his policy portfolio within an Obama administration? Much as it might cause me to drop dead in bliss to hear Bloomberg named as an urban policy tsar, it's not gonna happen--and even if it did, I'm not sure it would tilt cities all that much more into the Democratic camp than they already are. That leaves his money, and while Obama might or might not ultimately agree to accept public financing for the general election, even if he didn't I doubt the inevitable accusation that the billionaire plutocrat running mate (I could add "Jew" in there) was funding his run would sit well with the outsider, reformist mantle he wants to claim.

Maybe an even bigger issue is that I doubt Bloomberg has been anyone's Number Two in thirty years if not more. As a CEO and as a mayor, he's known as an almost archetypical enlightened despot: smart, communicative, extremely supportive of his deputies--but absolutely the man. At this point, he simply couldn't play second fiddle. Perhaps for a president as insecure in his abilities and uninterested in detail as George W. Bush, Bloomberg could play the non-evil Cheney role. But that's not Barack Obama, thank goodness.

Ultimately it wouldn't shock me if Bloomberg did endorse Obama and even agreed to serve in some role, formal or otherwise, in an Obama administration. (It's easier for me to see Bloomberg as Treasury Secretary, or even Education Secretary, than VP; in a federal cabinet agency, enlightened despotism kind of works, and you can be semi-autonomous.) I think he likes McCain, but realizes that the septuagenarian Senator is too tied to a party that fundamentally opposes everything Bloomberg stands for. And the mayor's mix of liberal ends with pragmatic and market-oriented means matches up very well with Obama's own public persona. But he would add a lot more at arm's length than in the full and somewhat involuntary embrace that second standing on the ticket requires.

War: Still "Fan-tastic"?
I've written before on this site about how I think America's political establishment has a structural bias toward the aggressive use of force. The reasons for this include the volunteer nature of the military--the Princeling of Wales aside, few sons and daughters of the rich and powerful find themselves in harm's way--the political adrenaline shot of state-sanctioned violence, and the ongoing fear on the part of Democrats to be labeled weak on defense or anti-military. These factors all pushed the Clinton wing of the Democratic Party in particular to support every potential war that's come down the pike, most notoriously Iraq. And it informs a fear-mongering mindset that the Hillary Clinton campaign evidently has seized upon as its last, best chance to wrest the nomination away from Barack Obama.

Putting aside the dubious merits of the argument (and the quick, and to my biased eye effective, response of the Obama campaign), I'm most interested in seeing whether or not this works and what it means for the general election race. John McCain, whatever his other merits and demerits, has an approach toward war that makes Hillary Clinton look like Dennis Kucinich. He's already starting to advance an argument that, boiled down, Obama is a wimp. Coming from McCain, famously a prisoner of war in Vietnam and the father of an active combat veteran, this attack has an obvious emotional resonance--as do the appeals to "honor" that I think he will start advancing.

But both logic and recent history much favor Obama's side of the argument. Considering Iraq through the realist's prism--national interest and opportunity costs--the engagement there ties us down in the region and around the world, it doesn't allow us to get past the severe damage done to our international prestige by Abu Ghraib, it strengthens Ahmadinnerjacket in Iran, and it cripples our leverage to solve Israel/Palestine--which remains the pivot point of security issues and politics in that part of the world. (Take Israel off the table and suddenly it's a lot harder for the repressive Arab regimes to justify or divert attention from their internal governance practices.) Of course, our occupation of Iraq also remains the best recruiting tool for Al Qaeda--while, in terms of those opportunity costs, keeping bin Laden off the hook for what he did to us. And in human terms, it's brutal on the too-small military and their families--perhaps explaining why they've given more money to the neo-isolationist Ron Paul and to Obama than any other candidates.

I'm fairly confident that Obama has the independence of mind (and the rational advisers) to resist the institutional pull toward a more pro-war stance, and the communication skills to cut through the media's pro-war bias and make these points to the electorate. But we won't know until he does it, and if nothing else this late attack from the Clinton campaign should give a hint as to how this will play out.

Erasing Myths
On the all-too-short vacation, I read David Halberstam's "The Coldest Winter," a superb history of the Korean War. As he generally did, Halberstam tells a hell of a story in this one, blending in gripping anecdotes of nightmarish combat with full and balanced consideration of the geopolitical context and sharp character sketches of the key military and political personalities. But beyond the powerful narrative, the book was terrifically enlightening for me as a reminder that the general sense we have today of "the postwar period"--that policy differences were mostly small and politics were relatively civil, that the "vital center" held--is far, far off the mark from how things were perceived at the time.

Halberstam details a vicious and irrational political climate in which many, probably most, Republicans assailed the Democrats for "losing" China and the conduct of the Korean conflict yet simultaneously called for a return to pre-World War II isolationism, and supported the mad and ultimately disastrous tactics of Douglas MacArthur but refused to see that his vision of wider conflict against communist China would likely lead to a third world war. These were the Taft-McCarthy Republicans who hated Dwight Eisenhower almost as much as Harry Truman, and who nursed their resentments at having the 1952 nomination stolen from Robert Taft through Ike's two terms and backed Barry Goldwater twelve years later. But it wasn't just those on the right; as Halberstam tells it, most of the country--and no small number within the government--was very unhappy with the burdens of the Cold War. The public outpouring of support for MacArthur after Truman fired him might have reflected this; certainly Eisenhower's easy presidential win in 1952 did. It's not that they embraced isolationism or were soft on the Communists; far from it. But the national view of the Cold War that I remember from my childhood--stoic acceptance and resolute commitment, more or less--did not immediately take.

In an odd way, I find this very reassuring. I think like a lot of people, I worry that the country no longer has the stomach to take on the great challenges of our time--not the Communist Menace anymore, obviously, but global warming and violent religious extremism abroad, and the shift to an information economy and really creating equality of opportunity at home. But "The Coldest Winter," among its many other virtues, reminds us that our predecessors didn't immediately embrace their historical task either. Under the mostly solid, if not always applauded, leadership of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, they came to it gradually. Terrible mistakes were made (and worse ones narrowly avoided) and moral lines were blurred if not erased, but ultimately the efforts met with success: the Cold War never erupted into global conflict, and the better side won.

From an initial moment of uncertainty, resentment, anger and division, great things eventually resulted. Maybe it can happen again.

Bullets and Links
I'm out of town on vacation for a few days starting tomorrow and probably won't add anything while gone, but here's some reading material I've come across the last few days and found worthwhile:

• The internal incoherence of John McCain's "economic team" (be warned: this is a Weekly Standard piece. It's also damn good, so shut your yap.)


• Two views of inequality in the U.S. economy and what to do about them: from the left, Harold Meyerson, in recent testimony to a House committee; and from the right, a software CEO named Jim Manzi, writing in the National Review. (Scared yet?) Meyerson nails the diagnosis, and I basically agree with his prescriptions, but the "hollowing out" hypothesis is significantly overstated, as this recent study of labor market projections by labor market analysts Harry Holzer and Robert Lerman details. The Manzi piece is totally fascinating: he tells the best story I've heard about Reagan-era supply-side economics and how they exacerbated inequality as a negative externality of economic growth, but then shoehorns weird right-wing "solutions" (destroy public education?) that would do nothing to solve the problem he's ostensibly addressing. Still, an A for effort.


• New York magazine's John Heileman offers one explanation for what went wrong in the Clinton campaign: through a combination of bad fortune and bad strategy, she is losing--or already has lost--a war of narratives. Here's another "pre-post-mortem," focusing more on tactics.


• And the Obama campaign, meanwhile, is closing in on their millionth donor. They really should give the lucky guy/girl a prize--shots with Michelle Obama or something like that. I think Obama is both symptom and cause here: he's clearly an inspiring guy and has run a tactically superb campaign, but the Democrats also just have an edge at this sort of thing. And it doesn't necessarily mean much for November success: Barry Goldwater broke all kinds of ground in terms of grass-roots activity and donations in 1964, but still got crushed.


• Finally, I remembered something on the way home tonight that had bugged and mystified me: during the Super Bowl, a Fox bumper into commercial featured the Arcade Fire song "No Cars Go." It's a dramatic piece of music and was well suited for the occasion... but Arcade Fire is famously unwilling to license their music for any commercial purpose. A Google search revealed that Fox didn't get permission--which strikes me as a pretty big freakin' deal. To my surprise, though, it seems they have little shot to make Fox pay big-time. Hey, at least the Giants won.

The Kitchen Sink
Sometimes style can tell you a lot. A day before the Wisconsin primary. the Clinton campaign evidently has decided to empty out the fecal arsenal: today's charges against Barack Obama include that he plagiarized a speech from Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, a friend and supporter, and that Obama is a hypocrite for his indecision on whether or not to take public financing for the general election, should he win the nomination. (Clinton also probably would opt out of public financing... but then, nobody expects her to do the "right" thing.) This follows on the heels of last week's Clinton attack--that Obama was ducking his opponent because he didn't want to debate in Wisconsin, even though the candidates are slated to face off Thursday in Texas and next Tuesday in Ohio.

Obama responded to the debate attack with an ad of his own, blasting the charge as "the same old politics." Of course it is; that's how the game is played, and that's certainly how the Clintons play. At best, one can sympathize with their frustration that Sen. Clinton's previous line of attack--that her health care plan is universal, while Obama's isn't, necessarily--didn't take. Then again, their internal polling might have yielded the finding that people don't take well to mandates that would include having their wages garnisheed; maybe Obama's more incremental and consensual approach, a nod to the "politics of the possible," is preferable on PR if not policy grounds. So it's back to the distortion and slander game.

It might work. Clinton is still well ahead in Ohio, Texas and Pennsylvania, all states where down-market Democrats continue to favor brand loyalty. But the swing-state polls, one of which I mentioned the other day in Colorado, keep coming--and the evidence continues to mount that, surprise, nominating the most hated woman in American politics seriously hurts Democrats' chances of victory in November:

WI-Pres Feb 18 SurveyUSA: McCain (R) 49%, Clinton (D) 42%
WI-Pres Feb 18 SurveyUSA: Obama (D) 52%, McCain (R) 42%
...
OR-Pres Feb 17 Rasmussen: McCain (R) 45%, Clinton (D) 42%
OR-Pres Feb 17 Rasmussen: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 40%
...
PA-Pres Feb 17 Rasmussen: McCain (R) 44%, Clinton (D) 42%
PA-Pres Feb 17 Rasmussen: Obama (D) 49%, McCain (R) 39%

But it's not like the Democrats need to hang on to Wisconsin, Oregon, or Pennsylvania, right?

Whether they were being serious or just typically disingenuous, the Clinton campaign stated last year that they figured it would be more difficult to win the Democratic nomination than the general election. From the vantage point of mid-2007, when Iraq was still the single biggest issue, there's a logic behind that statement: they probably assumed the senator's war vote would be a bigger obstacle amongst Democratic primary voters than the entire electorate. Mark Penn's "inevitability" approach was supposed to render resistance futile within the party, and Clinton would be able to bring recalcitrant liberals in line by wrapping up the nomination with wins in Iowa and New Hampshire and then spending six months becoming more "likable." The Republicans, meanwhile, would nominate some slavish Bush disciple or an easily caricatured buffoon like Giuliani; given the choice between a third Bush term or an unbalanced sociopath on the one hand, and steady Hillary Clinton on the other, the Clintons would leverage their tactical expertise into a fairly easy victory.

Like so many plans, though, this one didn't survive contact with reality. In fact, every facet of it failed to come true. Obama planted the Not-HIllary flag early, and his tactical moves--organizing on the ground, raising money online, peeling off just enough institutional support early to avoid getting frozen out, emphasizing caucus wins in smaller states to poach delegates--proved much better than hers. And now, far from working to smooth out her rough edges, Clinton is trying to tear down Obama and climb over his political corpse to the nomination. Meanwhile, it's John McCain, perhaps the one Republican of national stature who's somewhat inoculated from Bush's miserable political legacy, who is looking ahead to November.

Any Clinton victory now--and she still could win it--would be entirely pyrrhic. Millions of Obama supporters would back her reluctantly or not at all; independent voters who'd pull the lever for virtually any other Democrat, particularly a charismatic figure like Obama, would back McCain by overwhelming margins against Clinton. It's almost impossible to see how she gets from where she is today to a general election victory in November.

Yet she continues to fight, because that's what the Clintons do: it's always and forever about them, with the party--and certainly its principles--somewhere way back in the mists. They'd rather lose with Hillary, and leave the country to whatever consequences result, than win with anyone else. The latest attacks on Obama--this collection of irrelevant minutiae far from the "solutions" Senator Clinton claims to present--is just more of the same.

Two Strikes
As the Democratic campaign shifts into its possible endgame, some numbers to ponder from a swing state:

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey shows that Barack Obama (D) currently holds a seven-point advantage over John McCain (R), 46% to 39%. However, if the Democrats nominate Hillary Clinton, McCain will begin the race with a fourteen point advantage, 49% to 35%. National polling, updated daily, currently shows the same general trend with Obama currently performing better than Clinton in match-ups with McCain.

Sixty percent (60%) of Colorado voters currently have a favorable opinion of Obama while just 36% hold an unfavorable view.

McCain earns favorable reviews from 55% and less flattering assessments from 42%

Clinton is viewed favorably by 44% and unfavorably by 54%.

Emphasis mine. Think about this a minute: not only is that a mammoth 21 point swing for the Democrats--in a blue-trending swing state where they're holding the convention this summer--but the last set of numbers, Clinton's favorables and unfavorables, are probably impossible to move. This is an individual who's been on the national stage for the better part of two decades. That majority of Coloradans who dislike her, know exactly who it is they dislike and why.

It's certainly possible, perhaps likely, that Obama's favorables will come down; what's unlikely in the extreme is that Clinton's favorables would go up. Nominate her, and you write off the state, seriously imperil Democrats down the ballot (including a candidate for an open Senate seat), and allow Republicans to take money they'd otherwise have to spend trying to buck the tide in that state and redirect it to places like Wisconsin and Minnesota. And I find it very hard to believe that Colorado is the only state that fits this description.

Then there's the disturbing facts that have come to light about the one endeavor where Senator Clinton's claims of strength, experience, managerial acumen and judgment can be said with certainty to have been tested: her presidential campaign. As the backstory behind the firing of former campaign manager Patty Solis Doyle shows, the signs aren't particularly favorable:

Concerns about Solis Doyle have preoccupied many in the campaign for several years. Clinton insiders say that her campaign chairman, Terry McAuliffe, launched an unsuccessful bid to remove Solis Doyle while on vacation with the Clintons two years ago. Two top campaign officials told me that Maggie Williams, Hillary’s former chief of staff (and, as of Sunday, her campaign manager), also sought and failed to have Solis Doyle removed two years ago. Last year, some of Bill Clinton’s former advisers, known as the “White Boys,” lobbied to oust her, too.

But because of Solis Doyle’s proximity to Hillary Clinton, because she demonstrated the loyalty and discretion Clinton so prized, and because no one appeared capable of challenging Clinton’s presumed status as the Democratic nominee-in-waiting, nothing was done. “What Patti has that is real power is the unquestioned trust and confidence of the candidate,” Paul Begala, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s campaigns, explained in an on-the-record interview last year. “That makes her bulletproof.”
...
Rather than punish Solis Doyle or raise questions about her fitness to lead, Clinton chose her to manage the presidential campaign for reasons that should now be obvious: above all, Clinton prizes loyalty and discipline, and Solis Doyle demonstrated both traits, if little else. This suggests to me that for all the emphasis Clinton has placed on executive leadership in this campaign, her own approach is a lot closer to the current president’s than her supporters might like to admit.

Comparing any Democrat to George W. Bush isn't entirely fair. Whatever her flaws as a manager, I'm pretty certain Patty Solis Doyle has a lot more on the ball than, say, Alberto Gonzalez; if she didn't, I can't imagine anyone as smart as Hillary Clinton would have brought her into the inner circle to start with. But while loyalty in the abstract can be a plus, loyalty that blinds is not. (I might add that this kind of loyalty is probably seen more in dynastic groupings like the Clintons and Bushes--if for no other reason than that they persist over time, and sub-networks form within them--than fully merit-based political circles.) If Sen. Clinton truly were the cool-eyed, ready-on-Day-One manager she's presented herself as, I have trouble believing she could be in as much political trouble as she is today.

So the Democrats have an increasingly clear choice between a candidate who expands their electoral reach and has run a brilliant campaign, and another who alienates half the electorate--more, in key states like Colorado--from the jump, and has squandered what just a few months ago seemed like insurmountable advantages. All the Clintons have left, ironically enough, is faith in the loyalty of Democrats to a brand they remember with fondness. Here's hoping it isn't enough to save them this time.

Obama's Coalition
When I used to read book after book about Democratic politics in the late 1960s (at first for my senior honors thesis in college, subsequently solely because I'm a big nerd), contemporary supporters of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy and writers looking back with hindsight both would cite the dream of a transformational liberal coalition comprised of students, non-whites, and union voters--groups notable variously for their enthusiasm and their loyalty. But in the 40 years since an assassin's bullet took RFK, it's never quite come together: culturally moderate-to-conservative unionists first were drawn away by Richard Nixon and (to a much greater extent) Ronald Reagan, and then their numbers began to shrink. Students saw Hubert Humphrey as part of the problem, and I don't think Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale did a whole lot for them. Non-whites remained loyal to the Democrats, though in the last two presidential elections Hispanics began to drift back to the Republicans (both Al Gore and John Kerry drew about 10 percent fewer Hispanic voters than the Democrat did in the previous cycle). Eventually I think observers began to believe that these groups were to some extent mutually exclusive: union voters looked warily at non-whites, students and intellectuals disdained the culturally retrograde hard-hats, non-whites didn't trust anyone.

Only Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 really managed to come close to putting this dream coalition together--and even he needed Ross Perot's help to win. As white men and middle-income voters drifted away from the Democrats, Republicans won again and again; even the Democrats' growing success among college-educated voters and professionals, which continued through 2004, generally wasn't enough to win the White House.

But for Democrats who believe in the adage of "better late than never," Barack Obama's coalition through the Democratic primary season--the young, African-Americans, professionals and upper-middle class and wealthier Democrats--could represent good news indeed. Obama is expected to win today's "Potomac Primary" by virtue of his overwhelming support from black voters and his robust draw among the "knowledge workers" and college graduates who dot the communities surrounding Washington, DC. The same groups should help him in Wisconsin next week.

Now the question is whether he can unite what's left of organized labor, and start drawing the lower-income, less-educated white Democrats and Latino voters who have backed John Edwards and Hillary Clinton through the campaign. Some are skeptical, to say the least.

And here's where the Clintons, should they fail to reverse Obama's momentum in the next handful of contests and see their March 4 firewall eroded or even breached, will have a legacy-impacting choice to make. If they keep fighting to the convention, they could dig in the antipathy of these supporters for Obama and create an opening for John McCain in the same states--New Hampshire, Ohio, even New Jersey--where Clinton has staked her nomination hopes. But if they concede, and were Bill Clinton in particular to make a strong effort to sell these less well-heeled constituencies on Obama as an authentic champion for their economic interests, he'd have a chance to score the realigning November victory we all hope for.

Hillary Clinton, "Goldwater Girl"
I'll admit at the outset that I'm not sure what I'm doing in this post. It's of interest to me mainly because, one, I'm currently reading Rick Perlstein's Before the Storm, a history of Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign and American conservatism's subsequent rise to political dominance, and two, because it simply doesn't make sense to me.

Here are the facts as I understand them:

• Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, and grew up in suburban Chicago as the daughter of a Republican dad, Hugh Rodham, and a (much more low-key) Democratic mom, Dorothy Rodham. She experienced a fairly typical middle-class upbringing for the time, and from her early years demonstrated both exceptional intelligence and unusual interest in politics and public affairs.


• Hillary initially self-identified as a Republican. In 1960 as a 13 year-old, she volunteered going door-to-door for Richard Nixon in Chicago. In 1964 as a senior in high school, she and her best friend became "Goldwater Girls."


• In her freshman year at Wellesley College, Hillary was an active Young Republican, but by 1968 had left the Republican Party and was involved in Gene McCarthy's presidential campaign.

I'm not writing about this as any kind of "gotcha" exercise, as Robert Novak evidently did last March. Novak noted the seeming contradiction between Sen. Clinton's claim that she was deeply influenced by seeing Martin Luther King, Jr. speak in 1963 and her Goldwaterite leanings the following year, and implied that she had made up the King story. It's unknowable for sure, but I think it's almost certain that she was there and that it moved her. Media Matters notes that she included the story in her 2003 memoir, and enough other people must have been there as she describes it in the excerpt that someone would have come forward if she hadn't been.

The same Media Matters link has another excerpt from Sen. Clinton's memoir in which she recounts the thought process that drew her to Goldwater:

I liked Senator Goldwater because he was a rugged individualist who swam against the political tide. Years later, I admired his outspoken support of individual rights, which he considered consistent with his old-fashioned conservative principles: "Don't raise hell about the gays, the blacks and the Mexicans. Free people have a right to do as they damn well please."

But this is contradicted by something else Senator Clinton has said about why she supported Goldwater in 1964. Maybe this is presented out of context--in fact I think it must be, because the highly intelligent and well-informed 17 year-old she was wouldn't have so badly mischaracterized Goldwater's position:

"My best friend and I became quote 'Goldwater Girls,' Clinton said. "We got to wear cowboy hats. We had a sash that said, you know, I voted AUH2O. I mean, it was really a lot of fun."

But it was more than fun that drove Clinton to the Republican camp.

"Medicare and Medicaid was a big part of [Goldwater's] platform, or the civil rights law -- maybe it's not such a bad idea, to kind of require that people treat each other in a civil way," Clinton said of her thinking and political leanings as a teenager.

This makes absolutely no sense. Goldwater deplored the "socialism" of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs and, while Goldwater himself wasn't a bigot, the entire rationale of his conservatism was that it was both unfeasible and immoral for government to "require that people treat each other in a civil way."

Even stranger is that young Hillary's conservative-leaning libertarianism is about 180 degrees from her mature politics of liberal statism. As she evidently describes how her politics evolved, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were the crucial factors.

I found one more statement of the senator's about her early political evolution, from a 2003 interview with Katie Couric after the release of her memoir. Unfortunately, this doesn't help all that much either, since if I have the chronology right it happened before she went to college--where she was still a Republican.

Couric: “Well, you were a Goldwater girl…”

Clinton: “That’s right. ”

Couric: “…all the way down to the cowgirl outfit. ”

Clinton: “That’s right. I was a Goldwater girl. ”

Couric: “And you were elected president of the Young Republicans. But then found yourself leaning in another direction. I guess, as a result of your participation in the mock election debate. ”

Clinton: “That’s right. Well, in the 1964 election, I, certainly, was a Goldwater girl. That was, you know, my father’s candidate. That’s what I believed. And I had a very smart senior high school government teacher who took me aside and said, ‘I want you to play the role of Lyndon Johnson in the mock election debate.’ And he went to about the only girl who considered herself a Democrat in our school and said, ‘And I want you to play the role of Senator Goldwater.’

I was really upset at first because I was such a Goldwater fan. But it forced to me to have to look at and rethink that which would not have otherwise come my way. So, that by the time I got to college I really had to start thinking about what I believed, you know, not my father’s or my mother’s or my teacher’s or anyone else’s beliefs. And as a result, I concluded that I was more independent than I had originally thought I was. And I began to look more closely at political ideas and evolved my own convictions and values.

Again, I'm not implying anything sinister here--I just don't understand, one, how the well-informed Hillary Rodham could have misunderstood or overlooked what Barry Goldwater stood for in 1964, and two, what happened to turn her politics around so substantially by the end of the 1960s, and so completely by the mid-'70s when she was calling for some fairly radical state interventions on behalf of at-risk children as a young lawyer. It's purely academic interest; I already cast my vote in the primary, and if Clinton's the Democratic nominee, it won't affect whether or not I cast my meaningless vote for her in November.

But I'd like to know.

The Monitor vs. the Merrimack
If you're following the Democratic presidential nomination contest, it might be time to make yourself comfortable:

[I]t is now basically mathematically impossible for either Clinton or Obama to win the nomination through the regular voting process (meaning the super-delegates decide this one, baby!).

Here's the math. There are 3,253 pledged delegates, those doled out based on actual voting in primaries and caucuses. And you need 2,025 to win the nomination.

To date, about 55% of those 3,253 delegates have been pledged in the voting process -- with Clinton and Obamb roughly splitting them at about 900 delegates a piece.

That means there are now only about 1,400 delegates left up for grabs in the remaining states and territories voting.

So, do the math. If they both have about 900 pledged delegates so far, they need to win more than 1,100 of the remaining 1,400 delegates to win the nomination through actual voting.

Ain't gonna happen, barring a stunning scandal or some new crazy revelation. So, they'll keep fighting this thing out, each accumulating their chunk of delegates, one of them holding a slight edge and bothing finishing the voting process with 1,600 or so delegates.

And then the super delegates decide this thing.

A couple questions suggest themselves. First of all, why exactly is this so tough to describe? This guy, a Washington Post political reporter, explained it just fine. My cynical side wonders if the issue is that declaring the next three-plus months of contests "meaningless" would depress newspaper sales--which of course is the point of their business. (My inner hosanna guy says that if this is what it takes to spur democratic participation, that's fine.)

But we've already seen the usually hyperbolic press be relatively ho-hum about some fairly big news: Clinton's win in California wasn't played up nearly as much as I thought it would be. Maybe this is because everyone realized John Zogby was characteristically full of shit; maybe it was yet another application of the anti-Clinton bias in the press--though, while I recognize that bias, I also think the only story they love even more than her falling short is her as "comeback kid"... so I'm forced to conclude that the media actually is telling the story right, e.g. on the Democratic side, it's been about the delegate count rather than who "wins" states.

So the second question is, what's at stake if a knockout blow is all but out of the question? I guess it's possible that if either candidate tears off a bunch of wins in a row--which hasn't happened at all in the cycle yet--the public and private pressure will mount for the other one to withdraw "for the good of the party." Maybe the most likely scenario here is that Obama wins most or all the contests between now and early March, Clinton starts running out of money again--though she's evidently reaped a windfall since Tuesday--and with that in mind, she bows out.

I don't think this will happen; whether you see it as an admirable quality or a character flaw, she's a stubborn lady. And the Clintons, in their usual spin-addled way, likely would hang in at least through Texas and Ohio on March 5 out of the usual mixture of ostensible principle and actual self-interest. (Listen closely and you can almost hear one of their spokesweasels: "Don't Buckeyes and Lone Star Staters deserve a choice, and a voice?") But I think it's even tougher for the "movement candidate," Obama, to pull out because so many of us are literally invested in him. To raise $8 million in 48 hours, basically without lifting a finger, and then walk away even a month later, would represent really bad form and hurt him for years to come.

So this is probably going on for awhile. There's some risk, though not I think huge risk, that it hurts the Democrats later on; hopefully this can be avoided by back-channel injunctions from Howard Dean and others to keep the blows above the belt. The Monitor and the Merrimack blasted away at each other for a long time too, ultimately to no outcome.

Push-Button Politics
Interesting news today in the aftermath of the Democratic draw on Ginormous Tuesday. Hillary Clinton loaned her campaign $5 million dollars late last month, an investment that might have helped her stave off potential disaster in the big coastal states where she scored big victories.

Meanwhile, Obama raised more than that much today, and is on pace to have his second straight month of more than $30 million in campaign contributions.

There are a couple ways to think about this. One, the preferred spin of the Obama forces, is that their man has a much broader donor pool to draw upon, and almost all of them have yet to "max out" the term for those who have already sent $2,300 for the primary campaign. This is true. Another is that a lot of them--and here I have to admit "us" is a better term--are more willing to part with money than time.

I've gone through one of those navel-gazing extravaganzas on this: am I a bad American or a moral cretin because I'm much more willing to key in some numbers and hit "send" than phone-bank, leaflet or otherwise volunteer? I'm pretty busy these days, but I could find the time. Frankly, though, I don't think I'd be much help. If I could write something for them, or advise on policy (as if that would sway many primary voters at this point), I'd happily do so. But they just need either time or money, and of those two commodities, I'd rather part with (a little bit of) money.

At any rate, I guess for the campaign it's a nice problem for me to be faced with.

Meanwhile, some recommended reading:

-->Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Clintons' Shadiest Donors

Think John McCain, of sainted campaign-finance reform fame, won't bash the Clintons over the head with these fine folks in a general election where he'll have precious few other substance appeals to independents? Yeah, he's come a long way--in the wrong direction--from the days of McCain/Feingold. But his media worshippers will happily put that aside to root around yet again in the voluminous Clinton garbage.

-->The Democrats' Choice: Manager or Visionary

A very well argued summary of how Clinton and Obama would likely differ in their approaches to policymaking... an important comparison for voters, given that the policies themselves are pretty similar between the two.

Super Tuesday Eve (a/k/a Monday)
New York is in some sense--a political sense, I guess--Hillary Clinton's home state, and all the polls agree she's going to win here. But in the subways, on the street corners, and even on TV, all the energy and momentum seems to be with Obama. I've gotten recorded message calls from our moronic Congresswoman, Yvette Clarke (herself a scion of a local corrupt political dynasty, so it makes sense), and Hillary Clinton Herself. But that's about the only pro-Clinton activity I've seen, less a bumper sticker here and there.

The polls are all over the map. Zogby seems to have the most favorable numbers for Obama; my recollection is that as pollsters go, Zogby su-hucks. Yet he also seems to have the momentum nationally. A win in California tomorrow night potentially could be decisive, as it would drive the narrative and hurl Obama into a rest-of-the-month schedule that would seem to favor him, with primaries in states with large numbers of African-American voters like Maryland and Virginia, and solid red states like Nebraska where the local Democratic establishment dreads running with (or rather, from) Clinton in the fall. On the other hand, if Clinton wins California by ten points or more, she's in great shape to take the large bulk of delegate and minimize the damage that can be done through the rest of February, with the reasonable expectation that she'll essentially lock things up in a month's time with big wins in Ohio and Texas.

This horse race stuff isn't really what's on my mind tonight, though. At last week's Democratic debate, and in the weekend blab fest coverage, the biggest applause line and most compelling notion was of a combined Clinton/Obama or Obama/Clinton "dream ticket." Both candidates seemed to indulge the notion, though most expert opinion (and mine, for whatever that's worth) is that it'll never happen. If Clinton wins, she probably wouldn't want to bring in Obama who might upstage her, though she'd have to consider making the offer just in hopes of retaining his enthusiastic Democratic-leaning new voters. For his part, though, I doubt he'd take it; Obama either will return to the Senate or run for governor of Illinois, and in any event I doubt he'd want to risk being marginalized by both Clintons in a surely ceremonial vice-presidential role. Were Obama to win, I don't think he'd gain anything by asking Clinton; she wouldn't help win any states, and while her "experience" impresses some, were Obama to go that route he'd be better served tapping someone like Joe Biden or Tom Daschle. Even if he wants to go for the "double history" of a female running mate, Arizona Governor Napolitano, Kansas Governor Sebelius or Missouri Senator McCaskill (all supporters of his) offer more political value than Clinton.

I think the excitement over the "dream ticket" comes from something else, though: a realization on the part of supporters in both camps that each leading Democrat offers something the other lacks. The concerns with Obama, of course, have to do with his alleged lack of experience and policy substance. I don't think either is valid, and Clinton's experience has been vastly overstated in any event. But nobody can deny that she's a policy wonk, and a grind in the best sense of the word--she works hard at governing. For her part, what she sorely lacks is inspirational power and capacity to unify the country--the great strengths of Obama's campaign. The notion seems to be that pairing the two of them up would address the shortcomings of each. Psychologically for supporters, it makes sense, but unless we've very quietly perfected mind-meld technology, the solution doesn't really match the problem.

At last, at last, at last...
Every year, I wonder why the TV rights-holders don't broadcast the movie "Groundhog Day" on Groundhog Day. In keeping with the story, I really think they should broadcast it continuously for 24 hours, as they do with that Christmas movie from the early '80s showing that little blond kid... but any showing would be fine.

Today they did it. TBS showed "Groundhog Day" late last night, a second airing is about finished now, and I think it's on again in a few hours. They classify it as a "Romance," which seems like an almost-complete miscategorization: "Groundhog Day" is a bloodless horror film and the pitch-blackest of comedies.

Of course it's also a self-improvement fable, and as such has been embraced by some relatively relaxed religious leaders. I guess that's nice, even though my personal identification with the movie tends to end around when Bill Murray reluctantly accepts that he can neither kill himself nor otherwise "escape" from the repeating day. "Heartwarming" generally gets dull after around the eighth viewing; the darker stuff (and the comedy--Murray punching out, then later coming on to, Stephen Tobolowsky is an indelible classic) stays fresh for me, for whatever reason.