Why did Obama win the Democratic nomination intead of Hillary? Here's Joe Trippi.

Joe Trippi presents his list of the things that went wrong for the Hillary Clinton nomination campaign.

In politics the number of things you can wonder “if only” about are legion in a losing campaign, and Hillary Clinton’s campaign has hundreds of them.

If only they had actually contested the caucus states, Hillary Clinton would have been the nominee.

If only they had known the campaign was going to last past February 5th, and planned accordingly, Hillary Clinton would have been the nominee.

If only they hadn’t spent all that money prior to Iowa, Hillary Clinton would have been the nominee.

If only they had figured out just a little earlier that change was more important than experience, Hillary Clinton would have been the Democratic nominee.

If only they had run a more bottom-up campaign that empowered people, Hillary Clinton would have been the nominee.

If only they had let Hillary be authentic, Hillary Clinton would have been the nominee.

And of course, if only Barack Obama had not run for President, Hillary Clinton would be the nominee.

I think Trippi's list can be summarized.

• If Hillary has not voted to let Bush invade Iraq or had adequately dealt with her mistaken vote early in the campaign she might have won.
• If Hillary had campaigned as an agent of change against Bush early on, she might have won. And
• If Obama had not run such a really well-managed campaign, taking every possible advantage and offering few weaknesses, Hillary might have won.

But it is clear that none of those things happened, and Obama won the campaign for the Democratic nomination for President in 2008.

A lot of Hillary's weaknesses came from trying to run on the strengths her husband had displayed in the late 90's together with her early fund raising advantage. But conditions had changed, and Obama was the new kid on the block, aware of the newer conditions early on. He also had to work harder to find Hillary's weaknesses, and he found them when they ran a campaign based on winning states and Obama ran a campaign based on winning delegates.

Trippi is right. John Edwards did not cause Hillary to lose the Democratic nomination. Her own weaknesses as a candidate and Obama's ability to take advantage of those weaknesses allowed Obama to win the nomination.

Hillary is toast - the recriminations have begun; the media weighs in.

If there was any doubt that the Clinton campaign is over, then The New Republic is working hard to spike those doubts. Michelle Cottle has published an article today filled with anonymous insider quotes that list as many of the Clinton campaign errors as Cottle could find.

While it is filled with a lot of score-settling statements by some people blaming others, a great deal of it sounds accurate. Everyone who writes a book about their experience in the Clinton campaign is going to have to read this article do see who to get back at. That said, there are several themes that appear quite reasonable.

First - someone reports that Hillary did not seem to really want to go all out to win the election at first, and only after she began to lose did she throw herself into the campaign fully. [Maybe. And maybe she wasn't sure what direction the campaign was going to take and was just being tentative.]

Second - it is reported that there was no real central top management and no real strategy. Hillary had no one at the top who could knock heads together and get everyone working for Hillary instead of their own pet projects. (*cough* - Mark Penn - *couch*) [This one would explain a great deal about the inflexibility of the campaign when it hit rough spots and the apparent awkwardness that at times seemed apparent.] Which leads to:

Third - the campaign is described as being staffed by Clinton loyalists rather then people experienced in running a nation-wide primary. Then, since it was run out of Washington, D.C. they were not aware of a lot of things that were going on in the various states and were not especially open to criticism from people out there. With the absence of primary campaign experienced leaders at the top controlling the Intelligence gathering, message and strategy, the entire campaign just never came together. [This one also seems reasonable. My impression is that the campaign and its top managers had a "tin ear" which this confirms.]

As I say, a lot of it seems pretty accurate. What's missing is is the dynamic and the personal stories that would make it a decent case study for education. Without the story over time and the personalities involved, it is difficult to discern which of the various quotes are score-settling and which are really core to the problems the Clinton campaign has had. I'd guess a lot of the quotes are accurate, but some are attempts at blame-shifting [Not MY fault.] while others really do describe core problem in the organization.

As for core problems - all organizations have them. Good organizations identify the critical problems that are impeding them and resolve them. Less good organizations do not. But there is one other element that is not addressed in this compendium of complaints - the Obama campaign has been run extremely well and Obama is both a highly gifted politician and is clearly a better public speaker than Hillary is. (Although Hillary is a better debater.) Had the Clinton campaign not come up against a gifted politician like Obama, the problems aired in this article would not be being presented at this time, possibly never.

Still, it's early yet. Clinton's campaign is not even dead and buried, as West Virginia proved. For the moment, this is an interesting set of (tentative) insights. But the article also says as much about the media as about the Clinton campaign. It says the media has gotten tired of the Democratic primary and is ready to declare it O*V*E*R!

Compare this article to the sweetness and light with which Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas of Newsweek describe Obama's campaign management style, and you can see each of the media organizations announcing the end of the nomination process and their choice of the winner.

Not that the media are wrong, but can we trust them? We certainly can't trust their objectivity. It's clear that both Time and The New Republic expect to have to deal with Obama extensively in the future and don't want to offend him, while they see no real danger in piling on Hillary Clinton. The difference in tone of the two articles shows that. Time and The New Republic have publicly chosen sides.

Go read The New Republic article. It'll give you some perspective with which to deal with the wave of similar articles we will see appearing in the near future.

Is Clinton's defeat for the nomination something that requires her follower to demand vengeance?

Allsburg at TPM Café suggests that the repeated statements by both strong Clinton and Obama supporters that they will refuse to vote for the other candidate if he or she wins may not be merely statements made in the heat of the moment. Based on an anthropological article published by Jered Diamond, Allsburg suggests that such statements reflect a strong human need for vengeance. According to Diamond, such a need often makes it seem reasonable for the person demanding vengeance to do things that are extreme to the point of self-destructive in order to gain satisfaction.

Allsburg also also suggests actions that traditionally can resolve the issue for individuals who feel the need for such vengeance.

It's an interesting article. Go read it.

Even if this is true, it may be something that good leadership in the Democratic Party can deal with effectively. If so, it will require the greatest cooperation from Hillary Clinton and great tact by Obama. I firmly expect both.

Does Obama have a "white working class" problem?

For a data-based response to this question, go read White Voters, Obama and Appalachia by DHinMI at daily Kos. It's an interesting discussion.

Then go look at Kevin Drum's take on this discussion. The comments are illuminating.

Does Obama have a white working class problem? It doesn't look like it.

Here's why Hillary lost the race for the nomination

Karen Tumulty of Time describes how Hillary lost the Democratic nomination. She describes five major problems.

1. In a cycle that has been all about change, Clinton chose an incumbent's strategy, running on experience, preparedness, inevitability — and the power of the strongest brand name in Democratic politics.
   
2. Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game.
   
3. Clinton based her strategy on the big contests, [and] she seemed to virtually overlook states like Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas, which choose their delegates through caucuses.
   
4. For a decade or more, the Clintons set the standard for political fund raising in the Democratic Party, and nearly all Bill's old donors had re-upped for Hillary's bid. ... But something had happened to fund raising that Team Clinton didn't fully grasp: the Internet.
   
5. Clinton's strategy had been premised on delivering a knockout blow early. ... She fought him to a tie in the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday contests but didn't have any troops in place for the states that followed.

This may not be the only major mistakes Clinton made, but they were enough to allow Obama to win the nomination.

I think there was at least one other major problem with Hillary's campaign, and that was her vote for the war in Iraq. Her vote to give Bush approval to invade Iraq, combined with her refusal to admit that was an error and somehow deal with it, created an opening for an opponent in the Democratic primaries. Obama is a brilliant politician and stepped in to take advantage of that opening.

Then the campaign for the Primary itself has demonstrated how effectively Obama has organized to win. Hillary was not allowed to make mistakes in her campaign. Obama also demonstrated that he can recognize and quickly deal with problems where Hillary has clearly demonstrated that she cannot do so.

This isn't the final word on what has happened in the Democratic primaries, but it is a good start.

And yes, this is a postmortem of the Democratic campaign for the nomination for President. The campaign is over, Barack is the presumptive nominee, and now we will watch the Democrats work to unify the party.

Clinton campaign: trapped in unreality, spouting blind spin

The Clinton campaign seems stuck, with wheels spinning but traction lost. Obama seems to be moving rapidly towards the nomination with the wins over the last weekend. The political momentum is away from Clinton and towards Obama, and the Clinton campaign seems to have no idea what action they can take to change the situation.

The Clinton campaign has responded with strange, unrealistic threats that they will take the nomination based on the decisions of the superdelegates even if Obama gets more regular delegates. This has been a major misstep, one that Josh Marshall blames on Clinton adviser Mark Penn.

How a misstep? Take a look at yesterday's post by Digby. The suggestion from the Clinton campaign that if the regular delegates break towards Obama that the Clinton campaign will take the nomination on the strength of the superdelegates has infuriated a lot of Democrats. That's not a reaction that a campaign that finds itself sliding out of the lead wants from the party members they expect to represent.

Not only has revealing that proposed tactic made the Clinton campaign’s problems worse rather than better, it's also obviously unrealistic. It looks as though the Clinton campaign, having run the campaign for the nomination from the start on the theory that they would simply overwhelm the opposition and roll to victory, has bought into its own fantasy and can’t respond when reality intrudes. Clinton is clearly no longer the inevitable Democratic nominee for President. Are they so trapped inside the beltway bubble that they can’t see that the dynamics have changed? What makes them think that if Obama gets more regular delegates, the Clinton campaign has a lock on the superdelegates?

Nothing forces the superdelegates to vote for Clinton, not even their previous commitments. Superdelegate, Congressional Representative and long-time Civil Rights leader John L. Lewis, who earlier endorsed Clinton, has just announced that he is switching his support to Obama.

As Josh Marshall says, endorsements don’t ordinarily sway votes. But Lewis’ is not just an endorsement. It is also proof that the supposed inevitability of the Clinton nomination is a mirage. Even the old-line Democrats who make up the superdelegates are wavering and Lewis’ announcement gives a lot of other Superdelegates as well as primary voters in Texas and Ohio new freedom to take a second look at the decision between Clinton and Obama. Since the Clinton campaign has been based on the Mark Penn strategy that Clinton is the inevitable nominee, the events of the last few weeks leave Clinton without a viable campaign strategy as well as a clear appearance that they don't know how to react to the Obama surge.

Spin isn't going to get the Clinton campaign any traction. Nor is going negative on Obama, since that feeds into his real strength as a candidate that he is above the nastiness. So Clinton's strategy to run the campaign based on appearing to be the inevitable candidate is gone. Worse, the Clinton people clearly don't know how to respond to the changed circumstance. In fact, their attempts to deal with the new situation gives the appearance that they don't even realize that their circumstances have changed.

It's really looking like the Democrats will nominate Obama for President in Denver this summer, and Clinton is simply gobsmacked. She and her people can't believe it and don't know what to do about it.

Of all the surprises that have occurred during this strange Presidential campaign season, I think this one surprises me most.

So far.

The extent of the Democratic Party conflict and problems

As I read around the blogosphere, I am surprised at just how many people are writing about the Obama - Clinton conflict as though it was the most critical thing for Democrats since - since forever maybe? It's time to sit back and put a bit of perspective on the situation. Is Hillary really an ogre tied to the corporations and the DLC? Is Obama just a hyper ambitious politician who can spin speeches and paint visions of a better world, but makes no promises that he can be pinned down on? Does the very existence of America and the Democratic Party depend on the decision between which of them to nominate for President this year? How much hyperbole and manufactured division can we take? How does this last month's conflict fit in perspective over the longer period?

I am a long time Democrat who voted for LBJ in 1964, and I watched Nixon and Joe McCarthy in black and white on TV. I also voted absentee for Nixon in 1968 from where I was stationed with the Army in Germany because I trusted Nixon's promises to get us out of Vietnam, and I learned firsthand what Republican lies meant. I've seen it go downhill since then. This year is the best for Democrats that I have ever seen.

Right now the Democrats have two really fine candidates (unfortunately, I thought it was three but my favored candidate, Edwards, is gone) and the question now is which of the two will we support. I see Hillary stronger at getting stuff done. At my age, I have learned that experience counts a great deal and Obama hasn't got it on the national level. Hillary was well prepared to start the campaign and has responded really well to roadblocks. She is also a known quantity. We in the public have a decent idea of what to expect from her, though one thing I do expect is some surprises, mostly positive. She is one of the best debaters on the national scene. If Joe Biden could get to the point as effectively and as clearly as Hillary can, he would have been President. She has also done a masterful job of dealing with the anti-Hillary Press. She knows the Democratic Party nationwide in a way Obama will take years to achieve. Compare her to Obama.

Obama has great rhetoric and he appears to have really good organizing and fundraising abilities. His ability to motivate and bring in the youth vote is better than anyone I have ever seen run for President. Plus the media likes him (today only - they hide the expiration date.) He's new on the national scene, but he has a great personal story, and he is amazingly difficult to dislike. His speeches are good, although his debating style is somewhat lacking. I am enough of a wonk and an analyst that I find his great visionary rhetoric lacking in the detail needed to explain how to achieve that vision, but I recognize that the very detail I crave turns most audiences off, and Obama is speaking to his major audiences, not so much to me. I can recognize that his ability to speak of visions and gloss over the engineering detail is a lot of his strength as a politician even as I find it somewhat discomfiting, since I am looking for more of a road map than a vision. I already have my own vision, and it is described in the Constitution. But my vision requires a Democrat as President, and Obama may well be the man who can get that job. Which brings me to the question of policies.

I preferred the policies that Edwards promotes to what either Hillary or Obama has announced, but both of them are very bright and educable. The most important thing about the policies either Obama or Hillary present in the campaign is still the 7,000 political appointees the incoming President will appoint to the Plum book positions anyway. Those are the people who will implement and shape the policies that the President directs, and the nature of our government will be determined by the collective character of those appointees, just as the collective character of the Bush administration has been determined by the appointees that Dick Cheney selected in 2000 and 2001.

As long as Democrats replace the Republican cronies, incompetents and Cheney's made men, either candidate will be a major step forwards for America. The most important point to remember is that both Hillary and Obama will be selecting the personnel from the same pool of Democrats, and they will be replacing the mostly incompetent and corrupt Republicans who hold those positions today. Ultimately, policy is more a personnel matter than it is one of campaign rhetoric.

It'll be nice to see political appointees who have read and understand the Constitution, unlike the un-American individuals like John Barton and David Addington or like FEMA's Michael Brown. Those personnel selections are much more important than which to the two otherwise very similarly qualified candidates the Democrats nominate. But of course, there is the Republican reaction to the ultimate Democratic nominee to consider.

Will Clinton's nomination energize the Republicans to oppose her? I live in Texas. Believe it. The nomination of Hillary for President will bring the crazies out of the walls and from under the rocks. The Republicans in the South and Texas are haters to begin with, and they make a fetish of Hillary-hating. But if you think they won't come out equally to defeat a Black man, you are living in a fantasy world. This is going to be the nastiest Presidential campaign I have ever been aware of, and that goes back to 1960.

As we Democrats make our choices for the Presidential nominee this year, we have a great opportunity. The differences - the reasons to choose one candidate over the other - are miniscule compared to the many, many great qualities they both bring to the race. For a while I thought that Obama would shake up the D.C. establishment more than Hillary, but as I watched Hillary in last Sunday's debate, I realized she already knows how to make the changes and Obama has to learn how to do it. She may not promise as much change as Obama does, but that may be because Obama doesn't know how difficult making all that change is going to be.

I can't even use identity politics to decide. First Black President vs. First Woman President? Both are outstanding steps forward for America, and neither significantly MORE important than the other. And still, I have to decide which to choose.

That is the real problem this year, of course. There are two really outstanding candidates to choose from, and we have to choose only one of them. For too long Americans have been offered only a single competent candidate for President. It has been easy to choose that one while putting down the others. The decision was made for us, we did not have to choose between two similar and essentially equally competent candidates.

The Press (especially TV) and a lot of people are trying to force the choice into the old decision-making model by anointing one candidate and down-rating the others. They don't know any other way to decide. They have never been offered two essentially equally qualified candidates and then been required to decide between them. When there are two such qualified candidates, the process of anointing one and demonizing the other will be clearly seen by many as unfair and simply wrong.

What we Democrats are going to have to do is each make our individual choices, then use institutional processes to select which candidate will be our party nominee. We should rejoice in the difficulty, because it means we are a lot less likely to make a mistake of the kind American made when Bush was selected in 2000. Neither Hillary nor Obama would have made the series of panicky and incompetent decisions as President that Bush did in 2001 and since. Our problem is a good one. When we choose our candidate, we will be selecting against an almost equally good candidate, and that can't be comfortable. But it is great for both America and for the Democratic Party. So I think I have made my decision. Now we have to go through the party selection process to see how everyone's individual decisions get lumped together.

My choice is down now to the fact that Hillary is a known quantity, and Obama is too new on the scene for me to believe that he is capable of doing what he promises. I simply do not think that Obama has been on the national political scene long enough to understand the overall complexity of America well enough to know which way to jump when he has to make a quick decision. Of course, as Somalia showed, Bill Clinton wasn't ready for the decisions that bush 41 dumped on him, either. JFK was handed a similar situation by Eisenhower when the Bay of Pigs invasion was initiated. Between Hillary and Obama I think that Hillary is better prepared.

So as I run my precinct primary election on March 4th and then run the caucus to choose delegates to the county convention, I'll go as a Hillary delegate.

Noise, venom and hurt feelings. There's a lot of that in political campaigns. The old saying that politics in academia is so nasty because there is so little at stake really applies here. Logic doesn't provide an easy decision when the choices are so equally matched, so all we have is politics. What we shouldn't forget, though, is that for the first time in half a century, either choice is probably as good as the other, and both are very, very good.

So from this perspective, here's what I see happening between now and the Democratic Convention.

I really think it is coming down to an effective tie for delegates when the Democratic voters and caucus-goers are counted, so the final decision is going to the 20% Superdelegates at the convention. Those are Democratic Party professionals and they will choose the person with the greatest likelihood of coattails. Since that will have the greatest power to build the Democratic Party, that's the way the decision needs to be made.

Undemocratic? Forget such kneejerk ideological reactions. There is more to consider than just voter impressions, especially when they are essentially tied. There is also the question of how to build a better Democratic Party, one able to prevent the conservatives from destroying America as it has for the last thirty to forty years. Jimmy Carter's worst flaw as President was that he did nothing to build the Democratic Party at a time when the Goldwaterites, John Birchers and unreconstructed Nixonites were bringing the political evangelists and Reagan Democrat racists into the Republican Party and building the Reagan coalition. Party-building matters. A strong Democratic Party is better for America and for Americans in the long run. If the voters are essentially tied when it is time to choose a Presidential nominee, then it is appropriate for the party professionals to consider the realities of electoral politics. If the superdelegates get it wrong, then American democracy will correct them on the first Tuesday in November. So as things look right now, the Superdelegates may make the final selection between Hillary and Obama, and that's not a bad thing to have happen. They really can't go wrong deciding between those two.

My bet is that Hillary will get the nomination. If so, I would hope she offers the Veep to Obama, and since he is young and desperately wants to become President someday, he'll take it. He'd be a fool not to. I remember the shock when Kennedy chose his bitter rival, LBJ and no one thought it something they could do, but they did it. This nomination hasn't been nearly that nasty.

On the reverse side, though, if Obama gets the nomination, then I'd love to see Hillary stay in the Senate and replace Harry Reid. I've seen reports that he isn't wild about the job and would be happy if Hillary took it. She'd be superb. (Obama doesn't have the experience yet.)

An Obama, Hillary, Pelosi government would be an outstanding opportunity for the Democrats to bring democracy back to the U.S. and break the stranglehold of the conservative movement, allowing America to work on the problems of the American people instead of the International corporations and the wealthy.

Since Romney suspended his campaign yesterday, it looks like McCain will be the Republican Presidential nominee. His challenge is going to be to unify the Republican base, get the radical extremist right-wingers and talk show hosts to vote for him, along with the social conservatives. If that's not challenge enough, he has to do it in such a way that he can draw in the independent voters. On top of that, McCain's support of the Iraq war and his known bad temper make him a person who will be easy to Goldwaterize as a radical crazy extremist militarist who cannot be trusted with nukes or the military. While I don't think that McCain will be easy to defeat, all the Republican swiftboaters in the country (see here and here) are not going to make McCain's success easy. I expect this to be the nastiest Presidential election I have ever seen.

What it all comes down to is that the Democrats need to get back into control and start to work to repair the damage done by thirty years of the Reagan Revolution and the conservative movement. Either of the two current candidates for the nomination can do that. We simply have to decide which one, and then all of us support that person. And we will!

The disaster of conservatism is about to be lifted from America's neck. We Democrats just have to decide which road we will take to get there.

Lieberman stripped of superdelegate status for endorsing McCain

This is good news. Independent Senator Joe Lieberman will not be one of the Superdelegates at the Democratic national Convention in Denver this year because he endorsed McCain for President.

Democratic Party superdelegates

In the 1970's the Democratic Party established a system of primaries and caucuses to select the delegates to the Presidential Democratic Nominating Convention. This removed the selection of delegates from the control of elected Democrats and party officials and made it a more open and democratic process. While this removed the party power brokers from total control of who the nominee for President would be, those power brokers wanted to retain some power, so the concept of the "superdelegate" was adopted. [The Republican Party does not have superdelegates to their convention but do have 123 delegates who are representatives of the Republican National Committee.] So who are superdelegates?

Superdelegates are party officials and elected Democrats who are permitted to attend the Presidential convention and vote on the nominee even though they have not gone through the primary/caucus selection system. They are not bound to any particular candidate, although they can endorse whoever they please. Here is the official description of who superdelegates are, as found on the Democratic Party website:

1. The individuals recognized as members of the DNC (as set forth in Article Three, Sections 2 and 3 of the Charter of the Democratic Party of the United States); and,
2. The Democratic President and the Democratic Vice President of the United States, if applicable; and,
3. All Democratic members of the United States House of Representatives and all Democratic members of the United States Senate; and,
4. The Democratic Governor, if applicable; and,
5. All former Democratic Presidents, all former Democratic Vice Presidents, all former Democratic Leaders of the U.S. Senate, all former Democratic Speakers of the U.S. House of Representatives and Democratic Minority Leaders, as applicable, and all former Chairs of the Democratic National Committee.

At present the total number of delegates to the Democratic Presidential Convention will be 4,049. That includes 3,253 delegates selected by either primary or caucus from the states along with 796 superdelegates. Superdelegates thus make up 19.66% of the total number of delegates at the convention. [These numbers exclude all delegates from both Michigan and Florida because the Democratic Parties in those states scheduled their primaries earlier than permitted by the Democratic National Committee. The convention will have the power to reinstate those delegates should it be considered desirable.]

The website 2008 Democratic Convention Watch is keeping track of which superdelegates have endorsed which candidate for the Democratic nomination. CNN Politics.com is performing a similar function. The two differ slightly but not significantly in the number of superdelegates each candidate has.

At the moment, Hillary Clinton has about 210 delegates to Obama's 123 and Edward's 52, with the magic number of 2,025 as the number of votes that will determine the Democratic nominee.

The results of the Nevada Democratic caucuses

Yesterday there were caucuses in Nevada for both the Democratic and Republican parties, as well as a Republican-only primary in South Carolina. The Democratic primary in South Carolina is next Saturday. I'll look at South Carolina later when there is more information.

In Nevada Mitt Romney walked away with the Republican delegates, while on the Democratic side Clinton and Obama split most of the Democratic delegates between them. Hullabaloo was in Nevada and made some interesting comments. Edwards essentially did not contest the caucuses strongly, while Hillary and Obama spent a lot of money to influence the national press. Let's look at the Democratic caucuses.

It was a beauty contest held for the national political press.

Nevada was a beauty contest. For the most part, the results of the Nevada caucuses are not much more significant nationally than a witch doctor killing a chicken and spilling the guts to divine the future.

Hillary's camp is claiming a win because she got 4% more Democratic caucus-goers to support her than supported Obama. Obama's camp is claiming a win because Obama gets 13 state delegates to the national convention while, because of the arcane weighting Nevada gives rural counties, Hillary only gets 12 national delegates.

Maybe. Those are "projected" national delegates, not selected delegates bound to a candidate. Those delegates selected yesterday were to the county conventions, not to the national convention. At the county conventions the parties will select delegates to the state convention, where delegates to the national convention will be selected. Delegates to the county and state conventions are not bound to a candidate. So there is no real telling who got how many delegates in Nevada.

Thus, yesterday was a beauty contest that has less real significance than a single, very local poll. Really, no one cares except the Nevadans and the national press looking for something to report before February 5th.

The rest of the Nevada Democratic delegates

Today's reports show that Hillary and Obama are splitting 25 delegates to the national convention between them, but as I posted earlier, Nevada gets 33 delegates to the national convention. That's eight missing. I just rechecked the New York Times, and 33 is what they reported. Where are the other eight?

Super delegates? That's my bet, but I don't know yet.

[Addendum #2 - 1/21/2008 12:39 PM - see Democratic Party superdelegates for a description of who the Democratic Party superdelegates to the convention are.]

Democrats showed they considered the 2008 election to be important.

There is one thing real about the Nevada caucuses. In 2004 about 9,000 Democrats came out to the caucus. This time more than 114,000 attendees showed up. That's more than a 1200% increase.

That means that more than a quarter of the number of Democrats who voted for Kerry in 2004 (397,190) came out to the caucuses, and it is harder and more time-consuming to caucus than it is to vote. Democrats are saying it is time for change in Washington. It is only the exact nature of the change and the person to make the changes that is still in question. [Michael Barone in his “Almanac of American Politics” describes Nevada as a basically Republican state, so comparing turnout across parties probably has little relevance for the national election.]

No evidence of voter suppression.

There were allegations that members of the Culinary Union were trying to coerce voters to support Obama rather than Hillary, but since Hillary got the majority at eight of the eleven special caucus locations on the Las Vegas strip, apparently if there was such an effort it didn't work. Prior to the caucus, but after the Culinary Union endorsed Obama, the educational unions that supported Hillary suddenly suspected that the Culinary Union would be in a position to herd an unrepresentative number of Obama caucus-goers to their "captured" caucus locations or to coerce caucus-goers at those locations step over to the Obama side. (No secret votes in a caucus.) So the educational union sued to prevent those caucus locations. They lost. The national Press loved it, though. It gave them something "sexy" to report. But the caucus results show that there was no "there" there.

Dday observed a lot of passionate disagreement on the candidates, but has no evidence that there was any voter suppression or manipulation . Such rumors make good, shocking news reports that will be widely printed, but those reports should be considered highly unreliable. Wait for any official investigations before they become believable.

It doesn't look like any investigations will occur. That's probably because there was no coercion. For someone with a conspiracy turn of mind an alternative explanation is that because the stakes in Nevada after the press leaves are so low that it isn't worth raising such very negative issues in what is an entirely internal Democratic Party process. My bet is that nothing remarkable happened. The Press hates that kind of result.

The Poor showing of Edwards.

Edwards got no projected national delegates at all. But as he points out, he did not advertise, while both other candidates spent heavily to get a good result that would influence the Press. Edwards didn't have the money to waste on a beauty contest.

If Edwards were to show a strong result on super Tuesday and after, nothing stops the Nevada Democrats from supporting him at the National Democratic Convention. So, except for the national press reports that Edwards did poorly, Nevada doesn't matter to Edwards. If his message starts resonating between now and the national convention, that won't matter, and Edwards has enough financial support to run all the way to the convention. His message should get more traction as the economy gets worse, and the Democratic Party is moving away from supporting corporations and towards supporting American workers largely because of Edwards. His message is the one that Democratic candidates running in Republican congressional districts in 2006 won on, and it is only because the national Democratic leadership and the national Press don't have a clue what his happening outside of Washington, D.C. that the Democratic generally are still running on the corporate K-Street dominated status quo. Edwards is changing that, and he is bringing his message at a time the nation is finding it appropriate.

Anything else?

The Nevada witch doctors have killed the chicken and spilled the entrails. This is as much as I can divine from the process so far, but I'm sure there will be more to read in the next few days.

---

Addendum 5:08 PM CST
dday has a good report on the accusations regarding voter suppression and vote stealing. This is not a definitive guarantee that nothing untoward actually happened, but it describes why such reports have been spread.

As I say, don't take any accusations seriously until a real investigation is started, and even then check to see of that is a PR move. So far there is nothing but a few unsubstantiated rumors caused by clearly understandable administrative errors and decisions that were perceived as unfair but were not. If Obama is half the politician I think he is, he'll have a statement out shortly that he has had the issue looked into and there was no significant problem.

Clinton took Nevada

The caucuses in Nevada were close, but Hillary took more than Obama. here are the results of entrance polling, and interesting they are.

I find it especially interesting that while Blacks did tend to vote more for Obama, it certainly was not a knee-jerk vote. The same is true for Hillary. Whites did tend to prefer Hillary, but the percentage of White voters for Obama was roughly the same as Black voters for Clinton. Essentially, while race was a factor, it was not a dominating factor.

Edwards, my preferred candidate, did poorly. In the entrance polls roughly 9% of the caucus-goers initially preferred Edwards, but Josh Marshall points out that, like Iowa, if there were not enough delegates at a given caucus to meet a minimum threshold, they were invited to support one of the other candidates, so Edwards ended up with only about 4%.

Romney won the Republican caucuses rather as expected.

The reports are not in from the South Carolina primaries yet.

The primaries as America's Rorsach test

The many candidates for nomination for President represent a breakdown in what had been an American consensus about what problems America faces and what the best solutions were for those problems. Each of the Parties and each candidate represent definitions of what the problems are, and each candidate is offering himself, with his or her view of what those problems are and his or her solutions, to the public in an effort to convince enough voters that they should be given the power of government to try to solve those problems.

This started out as an effort to answer dday's question at Hullabaloo, and this analytic approach seemed like it would tell us a lot about the Republican candidates also. So what problems, with their solutions, are being presented? Let's look at them, first withing each party and then between the parties. The approach is to take the Democratic candidates first, Then the Republicans, then compare across parties.

The Democrats

dday at Hullabaloo poses this description of what the top three Democrats appear to stand for.

Hillary Clinton is running to change the President; Barack Obama is running to change our politics; John Edwards is running to change the country.

This is the image each has acquired, and as image goes, seems to carry some truth. It encapsulates the rhetoric each candidate has been running on, together with the public response to that rhetoric. At the same time, it seems accurate for any one of the candidates in part because of the contrast with the other two. Does it really describe how each would act as President? Or is it establishing artificial distinctions between the individuals in order to try to impose some clarity on the race? I think it is more of the latter, but it's the best we have.

dday's description suggests that Hillary is a old line politician who knows how to both get elected and how to work the levers of power, while Obama represents a unique breakthrough for America in our long battle to overcome the American disease of racism. That would imply that both Hillary and Obama offer excellent candidates who are at the top of our political class, but are still trapped by the existing political system. Hillary can do what good politicians can do and can hold the nation together, while Obama offers a great deal less in policy terms but also offers a great breakthrough in dealing with the American problem of Racism. He is vague on policy but implies that his very candidacy for the Presidency is America's solution.

Which leaves Edwards as the candidate who recognizes that America is in the middle of unparalleled changes. Edward's rhetoric is that he is the only candidate who really recognizes those changes and that he is prepared to deal with them. All of this is implied in that three sentence description of the images of the campaigns.

If Edwards is correct about the fact of the need for structural changes and that there is a great deal of strong resistance to those changed in powerful corners, then the next question is whether Edwards' proposed solutions will deal effectively with the problems America rather clearly has. Of those two issues, the first is the more important, because the government will be better able to deal with big changes if the public has been prepared in advance during the political campaign and shows they agree with and support the candidate they elect.

If America really is in a situation that requires significant changes and new initiatives, then the image that Edwards has developed will make it easier for him to actually accomplish anything. His specific solutions proposed now are less important than the fact that he is preparing the American public to accept the need for changes. That's going to undercut the defensive moves from Wall Street and the economic conservatives when the time comes to make changes.

This is the description of problems and solutions as seen through the Democratic candidates. This "compare and contrast" for the Democratic candidates appears to have clarified what the issues really are, so let's expand the analysis and compare the images of the Republicans to each other.

The Republicans

In contrast to the Democrats who are running on the need for changes, the Republicans are all running by offering proposals from the Republican past. The consensus they have is that America's problems cannot be rooted in the America's existing social or economic structures and that something general and unspecific called "conservatism" is the answer. It is when they try to get at the specifics of what conservatism demands that they have no consensus. The variety of solutions the various candidate offer show they to not agree on what the problems are. The varied positions of the candidates shows that.

McCain and Giuliani agree that all of America's current problems can be described as being attacked by enemies, and they both offer to fight those enemies. Both are offering militaristic solutions. The distinctions between the two is that McCain focuses on enemies outside the U.S. and he appears competent to apply those militaristic solutions and maybe with less corruption. Rudy sees enemies everywhere, and will apply military and police solutions to immigrants and minorities as rapidly as to terrorists. I expect to see a Rudy slogan of "America uber Alles!" at any time. Rudy appears to be the least ethical Republican running for the nomination, and he is certainly the most likely to be influenced by organized crime.

Fred Thompson is running on a campaign of "Elect me. I'm the REAL conservative." He doesn't describe America's problems, but suggests that whatever they are, conservative ideology is the solution and he will apply it. Other than that, he has no real policy. He simply offers himself, the new Reagan, as the solution. He is also, as Reagan did and Nixon before him, catering to the Republican Racists and Nativists. Fred is also more low key (lethargic even) than Rudy, or any other Republican candidate is.

Huckabee is offering the Bible as the solution to all our problems. He identifies America's problems as resulting from the rejection of Biblical Truth, and he proposes solving those problems by enforcing the prescriptions that he reads from the Bible.

Ron Paul is running on the platform that the very existence of government, including most use of the armed forces, is the source of America's problems, and he will solve America's problems by eliminating most government services. The idea is that every individual is so limited by the controls placed on him that he cannot be fully productive, so the problem is the controls. Remove those controls to achieve greater social and economic productivity and freedom. His literal, nonhistorical , and extremely limited view of the U.S. Constitution attracts a lot of people but would certainly do away with the Common Law and stare decisis in the Supreme Court.

Which brings me to Mitt Romney. Mitt recognizes that the modern Republican Party has been a coalition of the Wall Street Free marketers and Libertarians, the evangelicals, and the militarists and Nativists. That coalition has broken up, and the problem Mitt is trying to solve is reconstructing the Republican coalition. The evangelical Republicans have gotten very little back from the Republican Party, making Huckabee very attractive. The other problems Mitt doesn't face up to include growing economic disparity because the government has been redistributing American income from the middle class to the wealthy and failing to act on the export of middle class jobs or on the failure of the health care system to protect so many Americans, it is going to be hard to sell conservative free market solutions to the evangelicals. Then the failure of the militarist Republicans to resolve anything with the invasion of Iraq, leaving the American military stuck there while both Afghanistan and Pakistan fall apart, Mitt is going to find it difficult to sell a return to the failed Republican coalition. So Mitt's problem, the one he is trying to solve with his candidacy, is nothing more than the collapse of the Republican coalition. He offers nothing beyond possibly getting him elected President as a solution.

So having looked at the individual candidates, what can we tell about the two parties and their view of the problems and solutions?

The Party differences

The Republicans now face the collapse of the Republican Party consensus on both problems and solutions. The Reagan Revolution was based on a shared consensus (at least in the Republican Party) that if government planning, controls and limitations were removed, then private enterprise consisting of individual corporations and people, all led by "The Right People" using the social and economic institutions of free enterprise and wealth accumulation, could solve all the problems America faced. They sold this to America, and they have tried it for thirty years with disastrous results.

Yet the Republicans never saw or acknowledged the real problems (terrorism, globalism and its rejection, Peak oil, the hollowing out of the American productive economy and its replacement by a largely financial economy in which the middle class is of much less importance, and now Global Warming just for a start) of the 21st century coming, and when those problems became too obvious to overlook, the Republicans had no tools with which to solve those problems other than military invasion, replacing the court powers of warrants and habeas corpus with police power unified in the Department of Homeland Security and directed by intrusive spying on everyone, all linked together with a corrupt form of unplanned and uncontrolled free enterprise to hopefully solve them.

The result of the Reagan Revolution is an economy that is rapidly eliminating much of the middle class by remaking America socially and economically along the Latin American model (Mexico and Brazil especially) while miring America in the same boom-and-bust process that existed from the end of the American Civil War until the Great Depression. That's not the worst of it.

Since the Reagan/Libertarian/Free enterprise model allows government no power to act outside of the military and police, we have become enmeshed in a series of expanding wars in the middle east while at home we find expanded police powers, elimination of the protections provided by the courts and the Rule of Law, and the growth of secret government run by a society of spies and spy-lovers.

The only response the Republican Party offers to this set of conservative-caused or accentuated problems is to accuse the Bush administration of not being real conservatives, because if Bush had been a real conservative, America would not be having the problems that we all recognize we are having. The Republican mantra is that Conservatism never fails. Only people fail by being insufficiently conservative.

The Democrats, on the other hand, recognize that there are problems which are big and growing bigger. Barack Obama seems to have the least understanding of the general magnitude of those problems. He is a product of America's greatest and longest running problem, Racism, and sees that if America elects him President that action will signal that American is overcoming the Race problem. He is right.

But Obama's solution to the rest of the problems America faces today is to try to stop the bickering with the conservatives, listen to them and honor their input and work out a set of consensus solutions to those problems. It's not clear that he even understands the problems America faces. He clearly does not understand the health care crisis. He offers himself as someone with the abilities to make a problem solving process that removes the "bickering" that has paralyzed Washington and thus lets both Republicans and Democrats come together and solve the real problems. The recent racial flap between Obama and Hillary showed he is fully capable bickering with the best of them, but he and Hillary have worked to quickly tamp down that bickering. But was the solution an example of Obama's Kumbaya politics, or of Clintonian triangulation? And how does Obama's promise to eliminate bickering in Washington differ from Bush’s promise in 2000 to being a kinder and gentler tone to Washington? Obama is repackaging the same old promises and selling then as “New and Improved” as far as I can see.

Edwards has expanded the message that America's problems are structural and now Obama has expanded the message that bickering between adults can be resolved. I agree with Edwards, but I simply don't believe that the Republicans can afford to give up their obstructionism in the Senate. They have nothing positive to offer as solutions, but they still have the old guerrilla tactics of preventing the government from functioning and thus challenging its legitimacy, then offering themselves to the public as the solution to getting a government that works. I don[t see how Obama can get around that Republican dynamic. They HAVE to obstruct government if they have any hope of retaining power at all.

So that's Obama and Edwards. How about Hillary? Is Hillary too mired in the corporate-dominated past that she and Bill Clinton had to live in during the 90's? That’s a part of her image I’m sure she would get rid of. It’ll be hard to do while she is collecting corporate money to run on, though. I don't know if that really is the modern Hillary or just the image she is stuck with.

Conclusion

Personally I prefer Edwards among the three Democratic candidates. I suspect that the Press is ignoring him in large part because he does not have a machine that can compete with the machine Hillary has built over the last eight years and the one that Obama has been building. The difference that large sums of money have on the Press is obvious. Maybe he’ll break out in the next six or so weeks. UNfortunately, it's probably between Obama and Hillary, and I am moving to choose Hillary. Obama is too insubstantial as a candidate. He clearly has no clue on health care, and he has tried to run on positions that are the the right of the DLC even. Still, I'd sure rather have any of the Democrats over the pack of blind and ignorant men who are offered by the Republican Party.

It’s hard to avoid the fact that the Republicans are so heavily mired in the past and in conservative ideologies that they can't even recognize the seriousness of modern problems or accept that the solutions will require abandoning the failed Reagan Revolution. (Huckabee is really mired in the past - two thousand years ago.) America's current problems have grown out of the past, and the answers that supposedly worked before will not solve them, even if they are mixed with unrestrained militarism. The conservative ideology is a major barrier to even recognizing what has caused current problems, as well as a barrier to determining what the solutions need to be. To rephrase St. Ronnie, Government is not the Problem. The conservative movement is the Problem.

The Democrats do recognize that there are real and modern problems, with, I think, Obama being the least publicly aware of them. But Obama may also be the least tied to his own past. I don't know, because he has only come on the scene nationally in the last two or three years and I can't say that I know enough about him to trust his reactions or abilities. Unfortunately, all three Democrats come out of legislatures, so there is less clarity in their images. Legislators simply cannot be held accountable for government actions the way executives can. But all three Democrats are looking towards the future, not the past.

This next six weeks is going to be especially interesting as all these contrasts play out against each other.

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Caveats
The initial statement by dday appears to me to be framed in a pro-Edwards context. That doesn't bother me much because I had already come to much the same conclusion about Edwards and I do prefer him as a candidate.

I am describing my reactions to the carefully crafted public images of each of the above candidates. Such crafted images are designed to conceal more than they reveal. Only Giuliani and Thompson seem to have lost control of their public images so that we have a better view of the flaws of the individual behind the image. McCain, interestingly enough, appears to have minimized the constructed image and redefines the flaws thus exposed as an advantage he calls "Straight-talk." The rough edges exposed now have become a sort of image of no-publicly-crafted image for him. It is, of course, carefully crafted.

I am then comparing those carefully crafted images with the public descriptions of America and the world that have been presented by the Press and those descriptions that I can find on the Internet. Overall, most of the data is of doubtful reliability, but it is the best I can get. This is my attempt to pull those disparate sources of data together into some form of rational structure that I feel comfortable with. The structure should then show what data is good and what does not fit. To pull it all together, I have made a lot of judgments about what to accept and a lot more judgments about what to ignore. So be it.

This analysis applies to the current situation. I am not trying to predict the future.

Given those caveats, I do not offer this as "The Truth." Any reader should look at it, see if it contains anything that resonates with them positively or negatively, and then accept or reject part or all of what I have written. I'm betting that this is worthwhile. It's up to the reader to decide if they agree or disagree.

Why is the best Democratic candidate ignored by the media?

Greg Sargent at Talking Points Memo Horsed Mouth documents the strange blackout of coverage of the Democrat's best possible candidate for President. There is no rational explanation even attempted to explain the problem.

When there is no rational systemic explanation for such a clear aberration in coverage, the logical explanation becomes some kind of powerful conspiracy. Who's afraid of him that also has the power to limit coverage of his race for the nomination? The answer is more likely to be a small group than any single individual, of course.

I suspect that public financing of political campaigns would eliminate this kind of apparent conspiracy.

[I DON'T LIKE CONSPIRACY THEORIES! What is an alternative that passes the laugh test?]

Here's one reason for the Ron Paul phenomenon

Taylor Marsh reports discussing why all her Mormon relatives like Ron Paul and detest Mitt Romney. Go read it.

If I hadn't lived in Ron Paul's district for an election, I might have agreed with them. They're right that the speaks his mind honestly. And he has some really good ideas. Unfortunately, he has some ideas that are really screwed up, too. His comments on the American Civil War simply run off into insanity. Not that his approach wouldn't have been far better in 1860 - had it been close to possible, but Jesus, Man, this is 2007!

He is right that it would have been far cheaper to have the federal government simply buy up the slaves and free them, but at the time the Southerners fired on Fort Sumpter and Lincoln properly sent in troops to put down the local rebellion (similar to Shay's Rebellion under George Washington), no one seriously thought combat would last six months or that the rebellion would spread to the entire South and become serious warfare. With that attitude, how could a bill to buy the slaves and free them ever pass Congress? Not to mention the fact that the Southerners could have easily blocked it and certainly would have. Which is entirely beside the point. Ron Paul may think this is 1860, but it's really not. Ron Paul is simply a wack job and a fruitcake. It's just that sometimes only the insane dare speak the Truth publicly. That doesn't make him acceptable as President on all these issues.

Back to Taylor Marsh's relatives, though. They want Ron Paul to run as an independent when the Republicans refuse to nominate him, and Ms. Marsh thinks that if he does he will also get a whole lot of Democrats who are disgusted with the Democratic Party to vote for him also, seriously messing up any predictability in November 2008. I know that my disgust with Harry Reid, Nancy (impeachment is off the table) Pelosi and the Democratic so-called leaders has reached a high level, so that the only reason today to be a Democrat is that the Republicans are headed rapidly towards Fascism, and the Democrats are only assisting them to get there, not actively pushing.

So that's my opinion. Go read Ms. Marsh's article and see what you think.

Is Obama as unprincipaled as Romney?

I think that Obama has totally lost me with his attack on Unions as somehow "special interest groups." This is from SusanUnPC at "No Quarter."

Mark Halprin posted the following memo from the Obama camp earlier today – take a look:

“Right now groups supporting Hillary Clinton and John Edwards are flooding Iowa and the other early states with millions of dollars in paid ads, phone calls, and mailings. Some of it is negative and even deceptive, and a lot of it is paid for by huge, unregulated contributions from special interests. Taking on these groups isn’t just a matter of setting the record straight about me or my positions. It’s about proving that a new kind of campaign - funded by ordinary people who want something better for all of us - can defeat the same tired, old political textbook that so many Americans just don’t trust anymore.”

…and Halperin includes the following data…

So who is Obama talking about? Here is the most up-to-date independent expenditure information in Iowa. For Hillary Clinton AFSCME: $907,177.24 AFT: $635,822.19 Emily’s List: $297,806.69 Total: $1,840,426.12 For John Edwards Working for Working Americans/Carpenter s: $516,216.51 Alliance for a New America (SEIU): $760,801.00 Total: $1,277,017.51

(emphasis mine)

He goes on to beg for donations, calling Emily’s List, teachers unions, carpenters, SEIU and AFSCME “Special Interests“, like they’re something evil and dirty or working to undo what we’ve accomplished in the area of worker’s rights, social justice, and other areas over the years.

Obama wants to be the party’s standard-bearer in next year’s general election, and he not only failed to garner the support of these stalwart Democratic allies, but he’s attacking them in an effort to generate campaign contributions.

I've had some doubts about Obama, but this tips me over the edge. There is no way I will vote for a candidate who takes this position against unions. I will also do whatever I can to defeat him.

Who are the conservatives? Just ask them.

Sara has written the definitive explanation of who the Conservatives are:

Oprah Winfrey once said that the best advice she ever got in her life was from Maya Angelou, who said: "When people tell you who they are -- believe them."

I've gotten good mileage from this advice over the years. Being raised fundie, you spend a lot of your life being told to believe someone else's preposterous interpretation of events over your own lying eyes. Growing up this way really twists your reality lenses; and those of us who come out of it as adults spend a lot of time and energy learning to see and interpret the world clearly again. Angelou's quote is one of the mantras that gave me permission to trust my own observations of what people were saying and doing, knock off the false hopes and wishful thinking, accept this information as literal truth, and rely on it as an accurate indicator about how they were likely to behave in the future. It's knowledge that was acquired late, but has since kept me out of an amazing amount of trouble.

It struck me recently that, too often, we've been very slow to believe conservatives, even when they told us in no uncertain terms who they were. Some things were easy to acknowledge, even in the early years: they're the party of business, they don't care much about the middle and lower class, they believe in hierarchy and aristocracy and low taxes. Others came later: it took us a while to really admit to ourselves that they were pandering to racists, that they were perfectly willing to throw the middle class overboard, and that they didn't really care whether or not a rising tide lifted all boats. The hardest realizations have been the most recent ones: that these people are openly willing to destroy the Constitution, the country, and the planet in the name of privilege and profit; that they have absolutely no concept of the common good, and that the most horrible accusations they level at us should always be taken as an open admission of what they're intending to do themselves.

My parents raised me to always think the best of other people, so my view of conservatives was skewed until Bush took office as President. Now I understand. Sara's right.

I had really wanted to support Obama for President, but his statements make me think that his eyes are not yet open to the utterly selfish destructiveness of the American conservatives. It's clear that neither Edwards nor Clinton harbor any such illusions. Unfortunately, I don't think that Harry Reid understands who he is facing either.

2008 is not going to be pretty politically, but I still expect a strong election for the Democrats. Then the conservatives will take the gloves off and make the Bill Clinton years look like a pleasant tea party.

Is Obama running against the Democratic Liberals?

Once again, Digby comes through and clarifies my severe discomfort with the campaign that Obama has been running.

It is Obama who introduced the right-wing talking points about the solving the (nonexistent) "crisis" in Social Security. For him to bring that into the campaign allowed the Republicans to demagogue the issue on which they were decisively defeated just two years ago. Then he made the stupid statement that somehow his health care plan can achieve universal coverage of Americans without mandates. When Paul Krugman called him on this piece of idiocy, Obama attacked Paul Krugman.

I chalked this up to Obama's effort to portray himself as someone who would reach across the aisle to the Republicans and work with them. That has been his "Kumbaya" politics, or "Why can't we all get along?" Such an attitude is clear idiocy, as the Republicans will never work with Democrats in good faith. Reach out a hand to a Republican and he will strip off your rings and wrist watch before you can get the hand back - if you get anything back except a bloody stump. Republicans are the Party of hatred, war, corruption and a warped and non-Christ-like God. I chalked The Kumbaya politics up to Obama's inexperience in national level politics. But Digby doesn't think it's a mistake. Instead she thinks it's a clear plan to win the nomination.

Here's Digby's description of Obama's politics.

Running to the right on health care and social security combined with the anti-gay gospel singer, taking Robert Novak smears at face value, repeating Jeff Gerth lies and now going after Paul Krugman, leads me to the niggling awareness that this is a conscious, if subtle, strategy. Any one of those things could be an accident, and perhaps some of them are. But taken as a whole, conscious or not, liberal fighters in the partisan wars are being sistah soljahed. Unlike the big issue of Iraq where being on the right side is being on the left side, these little digs and policy positioning are all sweet spots for the Village --- and sore spots for the base.

Perhaps that's the smart move. It has long been known by just about everyone who matters that the rank and file activists of the Democratic party are a huge liability. And anyway, where are we going to go? Mike Huckabee? Ron Paul? We have no choice. So, no harm no foul. Running to the right of even Hillary Clinton on health care and social security and using GOP talking points and symbolism is probably all upside. It may be the best way to insure a win in the fall. But I can't say that it looks like either a transformative inspirational politics or a willingness to fight the conservatives and win on the merits.

Is Obama doing a "Sistah Soljah" moment on the Democratic left wing base?

Like many other Democrats outside the Washington beltway, I have concluded that America's greatest enemies, far above the relatively minor (but very very real) dangers of anti-American terrorists, are the politicians and members of the Republican Party. The create enemies where there were none before, then abandon the U.S. Constitution in order to fight those very enemies they have created. Then the Republican base consists largely of Dominionists who wish to similarly abandon the Constitution and instead create a strange America that is controlled by Biblical law rather than the Constitution and the Common Law. This is an effort to recreate America in an older, racist and anti-immigrant form. The widespread effort to teach the sanitized version of Creationism called Intelligent Design in science classes in public school is just one manifestation of this organizational insanity. Their idea that government should not function and their efforts to make sure that happens is another manifestation of their insanity.

OK. So the Republican Party is an insane organization representing millions of dangerous warmongers, bigots and theocrats who are happy to see others die or be injured in behalf of their beliefs and fantasies. Unfortunately, the Democratic leadership in Washington has proven itself to be not too much better. The fact that the Democratic Congressional leadership was briefed on the process of torturing prisoners and only one of the Democrats even bothered to write a (classified) letter expressing an objection is one piece of evidence that the Democratic Leadership is as bought and paid for in many ways as the Republicans with their K-Street Project are.

Then there is the manner in which the Washington political media carefully avoids discussing thing like Giuliani's many financial and political misdeeds, but instead writes hit pieces against Democratic candidates shows that the media, too, refuses to acknowledge that there are a lot of us out here who find good reason not to trust them. The heavy doses of blatantly partisan anti-Gore journalism in 2000 allowed that Presidential election to become so close that Bush could steal it. They performed a similar function for the Republicans in 2004.

In short, this Presidential campaign has taken on an appearance of mainstream America against the religious and anti-government extremists as well as against the entire culture of Washington, D.C.

Now, looking at all that, consider also that George Bush and the Congressional Republicans have so totally discredited the Republican Party, and the current Republican candidates for the nomination of the Republican Party for President are so lame, both individually and as a group, that the Democratic nomination for President will essentially be the election for President. OK. Never say never. But there is no candidate for the Republican nomination that even the republicans can unify on, and general election voters aren't likely to disagree with the Republican primary voters.

Has Obama decided to run to the right of both Edwards and Hillary to get the nomination? Is he willing to abandon the "dirty fucking hippie" Democratic left wing in order to please the Washington establishment and the Washington Press corps and avoid the beating that Gore and Kerry took from the Press Corps?

Because that's what a strategy of doing a "Sistah Soljah" against the Democratic Leftwing amounts to. Because let's face it. Obama isn't my favorite Democrat for President, (I prefer both Edwards and Richardson over Obama or Hillary. Senators don't make good executives.) but there isn't a Republican living who I would vote for over him if he gets the Democratic nomination. But if this is Obama's strategy, and he does win in the Fall, he certainly won't take with him a strong mandate to dismantle the conservative legacy he will find blocking him when he enters office. He'll be sacrificing short term gain for long term pain.

With the front-loaded primary season, we'll all know soon, probably before the end of February.

What is happening in the run-up to the 2008 election?

Want to get a really good analysis of the current stage of the 2008 elections? Digby has the best analysis I have seen yet.

Is Obama mean and ruthless enough to take the Presidency?

I'm not sure if I agree with Josh Marshall (channeling (yuk) Maurine Dowd) but his comment resonates with me.

Obama is an impressive person, and I have really wanted to like him as the nominee. But Edwards is presenting the policies I prefer, and Clinton has placed an electoral juggernaut on the field. Barack just hasn't shown me that much in comparison with Edwards and Clinton. I've attributed that mostly to his lack of experience on teh national political stage, but it may also be that he is trying to demonstrate what a great person he is and then waiting to be anointed as the nominee.

It's still three months until the first of the (much too early) primaries. I don't have to make a final decision until the Texas Primary in March 2008.