It’s the Thought that Counts

I’ve been mulling over the proposal, from our friend Progressive Conservative, that we all take and publicize the Wendell Wilkie Pledge. He’s named it for the Republican presidential candidate who lost to Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. Wilkie’s “Loyal Opposition Speech” is a reminder that politics is about choosing the best policies rather than about personality clashes, and that one can continue to oppose a party’s or politician’s ideas while respecting the rule of law and authority of the office held. In his explanation of the pledge, he writes:

When we vote we are making a promise. A promise to honor the results. A promise to honor the office. A promise to claim the president as our own, even when we disagree with him most. That is the oath I ask you all to take. I urge you to accept the results of this election. Regardless of who you vote for in November, our country can only go forward if we give our new president our loyal support, though I am not asking anyone to blindly follow this President.

I like this idea very much, and I wish that I was writing this post to affirm my support for the pledge and call on others to join me. However, I think the circumstances of this election make that impossible for me to do. I personally support the Obama-Biden ticket, and I would of course honor the results even if the McCain-Palin ticket were to win instead, but I don’t think I could wholeheartedly refer to McCain as “my president” when he and his campaign have gone so far out of their way to specify that they are absolutely no such thing.

I confess: I’ve finished college, and I’m a graduate student. In physics. I don’t live in a tiny town in a landlocked state; I live in a big city, near a coast. (Horror of horrors — the one on the east!) I’m not a Christian. I don’t even believe in a god. Because I’m an educated, metropolitan, “East-coast liberal” atheist, John McCain and Sarah Palin are willing to demonize me and others like me in an attempt to win the votes of everyone else. Why should I pledge my loyal support to a ticket that charges me with the problems of our time?

This hateful rhetoric is not new to Palin, though she did recently refer explicitly to “real America” and “the pro-America parts” of the country. Her speech at the RNC was all about how small-town people are good people (and not-so-subtle implications that if you don’t meet the Mayberry R.F.D. stereotype, you don’t really love your country). I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the irony meter-breaking RNC speech delivered by Mitt Romney, who ripped on “Eastern elites” despite being one himself. Just recently, McCain campaign adviser Nancy Pfotenauer dismissed northern Virginia as not “real Virginia,” but merely infiltrated and contaminated by “Democrats [who] have just come in from the District of Columbia.” North Carolina representative Robin Hayes told a McCain rally that “liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.” Today, McCain explained to NBC’s Brian Williams that the “elitists” live “in our nation’s capital and New York City.” (In the same interview, Palin pointed out that an elitist is anyone “who [thinks] that they’re better than anyone else,” which puts an interesting new twist on the concept of a political campaign.)

Can you imagine what would happen if Obama and Biden were campaigning in the same way? What if they repeatedly warned of what “conservatives from fly-over states” would do to the government? What if they promised to rid Washington of “Texas bigotry,” or “backwater Mississippi racism,” or “evangelical Christian ignorance?” What if when Republicans derisively referred to Obama’s Ivy League education, Democrats countered by pointing out that McCain graduated 894th of 899 in his college class, and that the best of the four colleges Palin transferred around between was the University of Idaho? I’d love to see each use of the adjective “latte-drinking” as an insult followed by a reminder that the McCain-Palin ticket is instead targeting the alcoholic demographic. Imagine if they argued, as Adam Cadre did not too long ago, that “Republican political ads spew insults — or at least epithets that Republicans think are insults — while Democrats hold out their hands and coo that ‘There is no them — there is only us.’ There’s a reason the guy who said that moved to New York after his presidency instead of back to Arkansas: New York is better than Arkansas.”

Of course, this would be outrageous. The media wouldn’t let the Democrats get away with a presidential campaign with that kind of language in it, and neither would the voters. Even though many of us do believe, deep down, that there’s something seriously wrong with states where creationism is taught in science classes, or where racial segregation is still the norm, or where everything from terrorism to hurricanes gets blamed on “the gays,” we believe that it would be both rude and unproductive to accuse everyone in an entire region of being blindingly ignorant or racist or bigoted as part of a campaign. A candidate willing to make such sweeping and divisive generalizations would be difficult to vote for, even if there were some truth behind them.

It feels like many eons ago now, but there was this time back in April when Obama, at a closed fundraiser event in California, commented that some Pennsylvanians were “bitter” about the government and the economy and as a result “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” It’s a reasonable characterization of what’s going on, and while it’s not something anyone would be happy to hear said about themselves, it doesn’t seem particularly vicious. I could even see it as sympathetic. But when his comments got out, the only words anyone remembered were “cling to guns and religion” which was interpreted to mean that Obama wants to repeal the Second Amendment and ban God. Obama backtracked, calling his statement “boneheaded.”

So then, why is it acceptable, even encouraged, for Republicans to make much worse comments in the opposite direction? I’ll set aside the obvious fallacy of assuming that everyone in New England is a liberal or that everyone in the Deep South is conservative. While that is insulting to our intelligence, it’s at least statistically likely to be true. My bigger problem here is with the divide between the supposedly good Americans and supposedly bad Americans. Republicans seem to think that the good Americans live in the small towns, with limited education, limited exposure to other countries or cultures or ways of life, and limited sobriety. They all work in manufacturing or construction or farming, and this is good, honest work. They all live in “real America,” the states or districts that are colored red on electoral maps. On the other hand, there are the bad Americans, who live in cities big enough to have more traffic lights than you can count on your fingers, tend to go to college and occasionally travel abroad, and have a wide variety of ethnic background and religious traditions. As a result of their college education, they have bad jobs in fields like law, journalism, or scientific research, which means they live in an elite Ivory Tower where they scheme about ways to ruin the lives of good Americans. Naturally, they do not live in “real America,” because their states or districts get colored in blue.

I wish I was making all this up. I wish I could honestly say that we can all get along, but I didn’t make this divide — I usually speak out against it. But when the demonization has gone so far that we appear to have a new Joe McCarthy in Congress, I think it’s gone beyond what I can handle in personal conversations. Republicans need to stop talking about who’s “pro-America” or “anti-America,” who lives in “real America” and who doesn’t. We all love our country; we just have different ideas on how to keep it great and make it better. If Republicans continue to characterize any and all opposing viewpoints as “anti-American,” I don’t see why anyone should be willing to be their “loyal opposition” providing respectful and reasoned debate. Unless John McCain and Sarah Palin suddenly decide to vehemently denounce this kind of rhetoric and seriously apologize for the tone of their campaign and the direction in which they’ve led their party, I just can’t see being able to call McCain “my president.”

Tags: barack obama, intelligence, joe biden, john mccain, patriotism, politics, sarah palin

The presidential debate this evening was interesting, but dense. A lot of important points were raised, but I’m unsure about how much the average viewer could take away from it, especially if they haven’t been following the details of the campaign in depth for as long as I have.

Of course, the big question after all debates is who won. I don’t think there was a clear winner (especially if you emphasize clarity in addition to simply having better arguments). Both candidates gave many answers in which they seemed to be listing handfuls of different ideas they wanted to cram in somewhere, rather than directly and succinctly answering the questions posed. Obama definitely came out ahead in terms of appearance and mannerisms, using the format of the debate to directly challenge McCain, while McCain looked down or away from Obama more often and seemed less comfortable. (Also, that tie… stripes were maybe not the best for TV?) It was nice to see the whole event stay civil and focused on issues (even if maybe not on one specific issue at a time).

In the end, I doubt this debate will change many people’s minds. However, both candidates have shown themselves to be skillful at speaking extemporaneously and with expertise on their policies, so I’m definitely looking forward to the next one.

Tags: barack obama, debate, foreign policy, john mccain, politics

Electoral projection website FiveThirtyEight is showing McCain at 289.1 electoral votes to Obama’s 248.9. They have him at 56% odds to win the presidency. This is a big change from a couple weeks ago. Before both conventions, Obama had about 60% odds of winning, and at the height of his post-convention bounce was at 75% (though no one expected that to last). Now that a bit of time has passed since both conventions and the transient effects are starting to decay, McCain is ahead. It may still be effects from the Republican convention, or it may be that he’s gaining a solid toehold.

What changed? Two major things. Sarah Palin has been announced as the GOP VP candidate, and the McCain campaign has been airing many negative ads. I can see how both of those things would change a few marginal minds, but I’m surprised that they would have this large of an effect. Then again, all the people who voted to reelect Bush in 2004 are still around and registered, so I shouldn’t write off voter stupidity as a possible factor.

And it is about stupidity. Sarah Palin has repeated so many lies about herself so many times and so blatantly, even after it’s been reported everywhere that they are false, that it’s hard to imagine she’s successfully winning over “values voters.” (It just underscores exactly which values matter, and exactly which ones don’t matter the slightest bit.) The smear ads also contain blatant lies and misrepresentations which, as Paul Krugman points out, “anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute.” The message that’s really sent by all this, as David Ignatius and Steve Chapman both argue, is that McCain will stop at nothing to win even if it means sacrificing the ideals he once stood for. Thomas Friedman believes that this trend of misrepresenting and oversimplifying the facts in order to turn everything partisan is ultimately making America stupid, and I’m inclined to agree.

As someone who prefers rational decisions to purely emotional ones, it’s hard for me to figure out how to argue with people swayed by these clearly false appeals. It seems to me that seeing the facts should make anyone’s decision clear. However, FiveThirtyEight has some great suggestions for the Obama campaign regarding Palin enthusiasts: acknowledge that she’s likable, and then point out that not every likable person would make a good vice president. Maybe a similar approach can be followed for the smear ads — explicitly agreeing that it would be bad for someone to do or believe the things Obama is accused of doing or believing, then explaining the truth. The concern, of course, is that this gives too much air time to the rumors, and denying something often just helps people to remember the something instead of the denial. However, doing nothing doesn’t appear to be working.

Tags: barack obama, john mccain, politics, sarah palin

This is exactly the kind of attitude I was hoping to see from a former constitutional law professor.

Referring to Obama at the RNC, Sarah Palin said, “Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he’s worried that someone won’t read them their rights.” It gave me chills and made me have to step away from the TV, but Obama has responded like the educated and intelligent person he is.

Calling it “the foundation of Anglo-American law,” he said the principle “says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, ‘Why was I grabbed?’ And say, ‘Maybe you’ve got the wrong person.’”

The safeguard is essential, Obama continued, “because we don’t always have the right person.”

“We don’t always catch the right person,” he said. “We may think it’s Mohammed the terrorist, but it might be Mohammed the cab driver. You might think it’s Barack the bomb-thrower, but it might be Barack the guy running for president.”

It might defy our instincts. It might be a bit nuanced. It might require us to read something — and for a few of us, require the assistance of a dictionary. (Who would have expected a presidential candidate to throw around Latin phrases like habeas corpus as though he knows what they mean?!) But it’s exactly those qualities that make me proud of this speech. Rather than play to our fears and herd mentality, Obama is inviting us to think about why our laws say what they say, and why laws shouldn’t be disregarded whenever we feel hysterical. I think he deserves a lot of praise and attention for taking the intellectual stance in a time when “intellectual” is almost as dirty a word as “liberal.”

I like the dash of self-deprecating humor as well. It nicely underscores the ridiculousness of those smears.

Tags: barack obama, habeas corpus, law, politics, sarah palin

I’m not going to do a full post on the Obama speech because I largely agree with the conventional wisdom that everyone started spouting the minute it was done.  It was a very good speech, and it was excellent political theater.  I was particularly excited to see the counterattacks on McCain.  I say counterattacks rather than “attacks” or “defense,” and I think the distinction is important.  He defended himself against McCain, but he did so by attacking McCain for even making the attacks in the first place.  (Perfect example: attacking McCain for suggesting that Obama didn’t put his country first.)  Attacking the partisan attacks is a very good way to go on the offensive without totally ruining the bipartisan, new politics feel of the campaign.

Now, for the news of the day: McCain picks Sarah Palin for VP.  This is, as far as I’m concerned, a huge gamble in more ways than one.  There are some obvious upsides, though most of them are political/tactical rather than about good governance.  She has very good anti-corruption credentials.  That should definitely help get the McCain as reformer image back.  She’s also young, which helps, though it also might highlight McCain’s age.  Most importantly, of course, she’s female.  This is obviously an attempt to win over Hillary voters, and it’s one that has a meaningful chance of working.  It obviously won’t get nearly a majority (I mean, she’s vehemently pro-life, for starters) but getting a sizable minority would be plenty to do massive damage.  She also has a nice, conservative-friendly biography.

The downsides, though, are blatantly obvious.  The first one is her utter lack of any experience whatsoever.  She has two years as governor of Alaska, a state with fewer people living in it than most major cities.  She hasn’t touched a foreign policy decision in her life.  This is particularly noteworthy because of McCain’s attacks on Obama.  It’s not insane to claim Obama is short on experience.  At the very least, he has far less than McCain, but you can’t claim Obama is too inexperienced and then claim Palin is ready to jump into the presidency at a moment’s notice.  Being a prominent senator is clearly more experience than Palin has, even if it’s still your first term.  Moreover, Obama has all sorts of other resume items — community activism, a distinguished academic career, time in the state legislature.  Palin was mayor of a town of under 10,000 people.  That puts her somewhere in between high school principals and university chancellors in level of responsibility.  She definitely doesn’t have a distinguished early life either (second-place Miss Alaska followed by University of Idaho and no post-grad degree) or any other non-political credentials.  She doesn’t have anything like Obama’s early Iraq speech to show that despite not being in office she was making good policy decisions.  Choosing someone like Lieberman would have allowed McCain to continue the experience-based criticism.  Picking someone like Jindal or Pawlenty would have made it hard to criticize Obama.  You have to go pretty far into the land of the neophytes before Obama would feel comfortable going on the offensive on experience, but McCain has managed to do it.

Palin’s issue profile is also about as far the right as you could possibly fine.  She’s very fiscally conservative, which is something that, while I disagree with it, I can respect — there’s a legitimate argument to be made for it.  She is also, however, conservative in some ways that make no sense.  Reason has a good post about this.  There’s this great gem on global warming, for example:

Q. What is your take on global warming and how is it affecting our country?

A. A changing environment will affect Alaska more than any other state, because of our location. I’m not one though who would attribute it to being man-made.

You’d think that the governor of Alaska of all places would be clear on this one by now.  My favorite, though, is this one, where she comes out in favor of teaching creationism in public schools.  Now, as much as we like to point out that intelligent design and creationism are in fact the same thing, it’s a little comforting to me that most proponents of teaching creationism at least feel the need to pretend they’re not advocating teaching a religious belief in a public school, or at least have enough deference to the Supreme Court to try to work around it.  Here, though, she goes against decades of established law and practice and actually calls what she’s supporting creationism.  It’s nice that she’s honest, but I really thought that phase of the debate was over by now.

“Teach both. You know, don’t be afraid of information….Healthy debate is so important and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both. And you know, I say this too as the daughter of a science teacher. Growing up with being so privileged and blessed to be given a lot of information on, on both sides of the subject — creationism and evolution. It’s been a healthy foundation for me. But don’t be afraid of information and let kids debate both sides.”

She’s also, of course, massively pro-oil.  Anyone from Alaska has to be.  Lots of states have their own self-interested idiotic policies.  In Iowa it’s ethanol, and in Alaska it’s oil.  I’m not particularly extreme on environmental issues.  I can definitely see the argument for drilling offshore or in ANWR, though I still come down on the other side.  What I can’t stand, though, is the implication that those decisions, which are pretty low-impact, could possibly take the place of strong efforts on alternative energy sources and other kids of research (electric cars, actually clean coal, etc.).  Nevertheless, here she goes right off the deep end:

I beg to disagree with any candidate who would say we can’t drill our way out of our problem…

The outcome of this choice is going to be a wonderful experiment in the intelligence of the average voter.  If voters are rational, she should be loved by the Republican base, but hated by independents.  She should win over very few Hillary voters.  She’s massively opposite Clinton on the issues.  If people though Obama was too inexperienced (the only rational reason I’ve seen for voting for Clinton but then choosing McCain over Obama), then Palin should seem much worse, and should hurt.  The only reason left for the Clinton-to-McCain switch is to literally say you are such a feminist that you will vote for a female regardless of the issues.  That’s a bizarre form of feminism, choosing the affirmative-action type voting motivation over things like abortion rights and equal pay.  I would have respect for someone who was honest about that motivation, but I think it’s so obviously idiotic that no one consciously believes that it’s the reason for their vote.  In general, Palin should hurt McCain’s appeal to anyone other than the far right wing.

If, however, voters are irrational (and they probably are), the outcome of this decision is unclear.  The youth and vitality and reform will help the brand.  She might make McCain look old, and the inexperience will definitely get some traction.  She’ll get some female support, and in a way being female might make it harder to get the far-right policy stuff to really stick.  It’ll be interesting.  There’s definitely no way anyone can criticize McCain for making a boring choice, at least.

Tags: barack obama, john mccain, politics, sarah palin, vice president

I wish the political discourse accessible to the majority of the population came in chunks longer than 30 seconds. You can’t make or refute an argument in that short a span of time, and the result is that no one wins. We’ve stopped expecting political dialogue to involve arguments and answers in the first place - it’s all about the quick sell. I could point you to a dozen videos of campaign ads as proof of this, but if you know how to search on YouTube or really even turn on a television, I trust you can find plenty of examples for yourself.

There are lots of times when politicians should naturally want to explain themselves. Many of the sound bites and other tidbits easily turned into attack ads started out as decently reasonable things but were taken out of context. Not all started out as genuinely good things, but they’re usually not as bad as they’re made out to sound. You can tell because the voiceovers in the ads sound like they’re in a trailer for some dystopian sci-fi movie. In a world where nothing is quite like it seems… If they really had a thoroughly compelling case to make, they wouldn’t need to explain it in an ominous voice with scary sound effects. Surely there’s another side to the story… why aren’t politicians eager to refute these weak attacks?

The biggest example of this lately is all the hubbub about who said what about whom before the US Presidential nominations were secured. The Clintons and Joe Biden said Obama didn’t have enough experience, particularly in foreign policy. Romney criticized McCain on a million different things. McCain’s using clips of Hillary Clinton and Biden in ads now. How could McCain even consider Romney, commentators are saying, since he said such nasty things about McCain during the campaign?

This baffles me, especially after having watched both the Clintons’ and Biden’s speeches at the Democratic National Convention, in which they gave full support to Obama and his ability to lead the country. There’s such an easy response! Why isn’t it being made explicitly? It would work equally well for Romney, should the need arise. It goes like this: “Last year I thought [fill in name] had [fill in shortcoming]. but over the past months, as I’ve watched him campaign and heard his opinions on [cite a few key issues or events], I’ve come to realize the depth of his [strength in area of supposed shortcoming] and I’m now entirely sure that he is a well-qualified candidate.” There, was that so hard? We can admit that we changed our minds because we had actual reason to do so.

I could imagine acceptable explanations of lots of other seeming grounds for attack. Voted before some legislation before you voted against it? Explain how bills are usually hundreds and hundreds of pages long, and get amended at different times in complicated ways, so it’s possible to have the “same” bill with very different policy outcomes at two different times. Told a bunch of evangelical Christians that deciding when life begins is “above your pay grade”? Point out that the nature of life is a complex philosophical, theological, and scientific question, and that while any group of people might think it has the answer, it’s not the place of the president to decree that there’s one right perspective when there’s so much debate still going on. Unable to remember how many houses you own? Explain that they’re in your wife’s name, and she buys and sells them without really involving you at all. And maybe confess to the fact that almost all nationally well-known politicians are very wealthy, and seriously, we all knew that, it’s not a crime.

The thing about McCain’s houses really interests me. I just searched on JohnMcCain.com for anything about that mini-scandal, and couldn’t find anything except for a bunch of old articles about the subprime mortgage crisis. I can understand not making a big shiny featured link on your front page to your refutation of Obama’s attacks, but I can’t understand not taking the time to clear them up at all.

On the other hand, Barack Obama has a section of his web site called Fight the Smears. That’s a good start, but it doesn’t cover the more nuanced stuff, and even for what it does cover a lot of people aren’t looking there or don’t even realize the site exists.

I’d like to see the mainstream media stop reporting on what misconceptions the public might hold about incendiary campaign ads, and start reporting on the truth behind the accusations. I’d like to see politicians unafraid to admit they’ve changed their mind and happy to explain the reasons why. When they just let oversimplified, out-of-context attacks go unresponded to, they’re tacitly admitting that the attacks have merit. We should be trying to raise public discourse to a higher level by expecting that politicians explain their actions, and demanding that they criticize each other only when they have more evidence than a sound bite.

Tags: barack obama, john mccain, politics

The Biden pick is excellent in many ways.  In these situations, I always have two conflicting parts of my personality.  One is the voter who wants whomever will be best for the job.  The other is the strategist who, having already decided I prefer Obama to McCain, wants whomever will maximize Obama’s chances.

The voter side of me is thrilled.  I’ve liked Biden for years because he’s clearly smart and knows his stuff.  He’s known and respected in foreign capitals for a reason.  In addition to having plenty of legislative experience, he was also a constitutional law professor like Obama, and is clearly willing to say what he thinks.  Really, he’s the kind of guy who should have a lot more national name-recognition than he does.  Americans are, in general, pitifully bad at identifying members of their own legislature, and Biden ought to be as easily identified as anyone.  If name recognition really worked the way it should, Biden probably would have had a very good shot at getting the Democratic nomination himself.

The strategist side is also happy, but not totally without reservation.  My concern is largely what I’ve said before — that I think picking someone whose credentials are largely in foreign policy does more to highlight and tacitly admit to a shortcoming on the issue than it does to address it.  Nevertheless, it clearly does something to address it.  There is also the strategic concern of his earlier comments about Obama not being ready, but I think this is, despite being a clear downside, not going to be horrible.

Biden does have a lot of other strategic considerations going for him.  He has blue-collar appeal, though I don’t think he has so much blue collar support at this point. I’m sure within Delaware he does, and he has a lot of national potential, but I don’t think he has the name recognition to have much support already.  (I think I caught on CNN that he’s the least wealthy senator?)  Also, he’s clearly very good at the nonabrasive attack.  He’s so straightforward with all his thoughts that his attacks seem like he’s just more candid about his thoughts than others are.  I think he’s one of few that can add the aggressiveness the Obama campaign needs without undermining the positive image.  His son is going to Iraq, which will be a mild background help. He has Pennsylvania roots, though I doubt that’s a huge thing (I think that Pennsylvania is actually not that big a concern — if Obama is losing there, he’s already lost).  Overall, Biden’s a politically solid pick, and I’m not sure anyone else would clearly be better, but from this perspective he’s not as unambiguously good as my voter side would rate him.

This is a good choice and a strong ticket.  Any Democrat should be happy.  Now I get to go back to being conflicted about whether I want to see a good Republican VP who I wouldn’t mind in office versus seeing a stupid choice (i.e. Romney) that’d maximize Obama’s chances.

Tags: barack obama, joe biden, politics, vice president

I think the media has largely written Clinton off as a possible VP choice, but I think it’s actually been making a lot more sense recently than it did before.  I should be clear - I’m not saying it’s my preferred choice or that I expect it, but I think it makes a lot more sense than most people seem to realize.  I should also say that I’m not a bitter former Clinton supporter.  I was ambivalent and happy with both during the lead-up to the primary, started to lean towards Obama around Iowa and New Hampshire, supported him clearly after the crap Clinton pulled in South Carolina, and got increasingly annoyed at Clinton as she stayed in and went negative after she had no hope of winning.

A lot of the reasons for not picking her have disappeared.  Early on, it looked like if he had picked her he would have been caving to pressure from her supporters, but expectations of her being selected are now so low that I think Obama has clearly established his ability to pick someone else.  If he picks her, it’ll be seen as a proactive choice by most, I think.  I also think it will be much more surprising.  Most of the reasonable choices are widely suspected, and only a few (Richardson?) would come as much of a surprise.  Most of the ones that would be surprising would also be obscure.  Clinton seems like a unique way to generate a lot of excitement.  It was also help with her former supporters, most of which seem to have come around to Obama, but are less stable in their support and less enthusiastic.  (This boost can even be tied to specific states like Florida, where her supporters are greater in number.)

More importantly, Clinton has secured in the primary - deserved or not - the status of the experienced, well-qualified candidate.  She brings with her the image of someone with good national security credentials without generating the stories about how he picked her to fill in his national security gap.  She is also someone who could add these credentials without seeming to some to overshadow the nominee.  They’ve gone against each other and she lost, so no one will wonder about why it is that Obama was picked over Clinton.  Well, some will, but the answer is clear - his greater ability to inspire, his better campaign management skills, and so forth.

That’s not to say there won’t be downsides.  The biggest downside is named Bill Clinton, who will be difficult to control and very tricky to use, but could end up being a benefit if all goes optimally.  There will also definitely be some stories about satisfying disgruntled Clinton supporters, but it wouldn’t be assumed without question that this was the reason for picking her.

Biden or Bayh or whoever definitely might be better, but I think Clinton does deserve at least another quick look.

Tags: barack obama, hillary clinton, politics, vice president

There’s been substantial coverage lately of how the Obama campaign seems to be putting a lot of effort into states that have normally seemed utterly beyond reach for any Democrat.  You can’t really blame them for dreaming — there has been some impressively close polling out of states you wouldn’t expect (Alaska? Indiana?).  Nevertheless, these states have been so lopsided in the past that you can be “impressively close” without really having any chance of winning.  The other reason, of course, why they’re willing to spend a lot of money advertising and organizing in Georgia and Montana is that they have a lot more money to work with than McCain does (though really you need to include the RNC and DNC in these calculations, and that drastically shrinks the gap).  Their efforts in the reach states haven’t prevented them from matching (and usually outdoing) McCain in the traditional swing states.

Still, you’ve got to ask yourself whether this is really the best allocation of resources.  Sure, Obama has been out-organizing McCain in Ohio, even while organizing in Georgia, but wouldn’t it be better if the gap in Ohio was even wider?  The answer depends on what assumptions you make about how state results relate to each other.

One possible assumption is that states generally move in tandem with each other.  If Obama goes up or down nationally, that move is seen roughly equally reflected in each state.  Certain states are just more conservative/liberal than others.  Say Pennsylvania is slightly more liberal than Ohio.  They could both go the same way, or Obama could win Pennsylvania while losing Ohio, but it’d be nearly impossible for him to win Ohio but lose Pennsylvania.  Under this assumption, as Obama becomes less popular, Ohio always flips first.  Now, you could imagine that campaigns can push individual states through greater advertising/campaigning/organizing efforts, but these things being equal, states have a stable ordering in their general willingness to vote one way or the other.

If this assumption is true, there are only a handful of states where the campaigns should be focusing.  The efforts should go not to the place that is most borderline at any particular time, but to the states that are closest to the national average.  That’s because these are the states that will be casting the deciding electoral votes in the event that the election is very close.  There could be national trends that push Obama far ahead, making Georgia very competitive, but in that case he’s winning regardless, so it doesn’t matter if he put the organizing into Georgia that was necessary to push that state in particular over the edge.  Similarly, efforts in Connecticut could help Obama reduce the margin of defeat in some cases, but never change the outcome.  Only states where campaigning could make the difference in the event that the national popular vote is close to 50-50 are worth focusing on.

Under this assumption, Obama’s strategy is very much out of whack.  He should be putting more money and time into Ohio, Colorado, Virginia, and Michigan.  His time in Indiana, Georgia, and his other dream targets is wasted.  The only way it makes sense is if you believe that, given the huge investment already made in traditional swing states, the marginal benefit from additional resources is very low, and that the complete lack of opposition he’s seeing in traditionally Republican states makes them more vulnerable than the swing states.  I don’t think anyone really believes this.  Maybe Obama can win North Carolina, but even with McCain ignoring it, it’s just a tougher target for him than Colorado.

The opposite assumption is that states move greatly in ways that are totally independent of each other.  Because of local differences in media coverage, which issues are important, demographics, etc., it is possible for candidates to go up significantly in some states while going down significantly in others.  In this case, it’s very possible for some of the “stretch” states to go for Obama while the traditional swing states don’t.  If this is true, he should try to get lots of states within range of random variation flipping them.  He should take advantage of the fact that his efforts probably do the most good in states where he’s unopposed, and try to make those states competitive.  If a lot of states are very close, he’ll almost definitely win some of them.

Obviously the truth is in between the two extreme versions of reality, but I doubt it’s far enough towards the latter to really justify the level of attention Obama has been paying to some states that really just look out of reach.  There is, of course, another set of reasons to pay attention to these states, unrelated to the outcome of this presidential election.  One is that over the long term, making the Democratic argument in those states will slowly increase the acceptance of those arguments, and maybe make it so that in some future election these states really are winnable.  In the short term, he could at the very least make his presence on the top of the ticket less of a harm to down-ballot candidates.  These goals are incredibly important, and I’m all for them.  I just hope Obama isn’t biting off more than he can chew.  I’d really like to see him as president, and that is by no means sewn up yet.

Tags: barack obama, politics

Here’s a video that’s worth seeing. (Hat tip to Ben Smith at Politico.com.)

“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant,” Obama says. I’m thrilled whenever I hear politicians calling each other out on that tactic rather than trying to outdo each other with the old “I’m jest reg’lur folks like you, don’t need no fancypants edjumucation” act. If there’s an effective, logically sound idea out there, we should use it, even if it might sound silly to “reg’lur folks” who don’t want to take the time to think it through. Obama’s banking on the fact that the average voter is actually smarter than that. I hope he’s right.

Sending tire gauges tagged as “Obama’s energy plan” is a cheap trick. It would have been a politically useful cheap trick if it had actually made a legitimate point, but it’s a shameful and easily mocked trick since it deliberately ignores the context surrounding the original suggestion. A man in the audience had asked about what small, everyday thing he could do to contribute to a solution to our gas woes, and Obama suggested a small, everyday thing that has been demonstrated to make a big difference. There’s nothing about that that’s worth poking fun at.

Setting a new record in missing the point, the person who posted this particular clip on YouTube has titled it “Obama Insists Inflating Tires Better Than Oil Drilling.”

Tags: barack obama, energy, oil, politics