Obama vs Hillary; the primary in perspective - by Sara

The futurist, Sara, provides some very interesting commentary over at Orcinus on the long Democratic primary. Why did Hillary come so far and then finally come up short to Obama? Sara offers four interesting comments. This is a very brief summary of Sara's lengthier and better stated comments, followed by observations of my own.

I. Hillary is the last of a cohort of pioneer women feminists all born in the period between 1945 - 1955. They broke the trail and did a lot of heavy lifting, but they were not fated to reap the final results of a lot of the work they did. There's a lot left to do.

II. The Blacks-vs-women narrative of the primary was a false one from the get-go.

III. While women all Spring have been saying "It's our turn," that flies in the face of the American history of improving conditions for Blacks and women.

For 150 years, women's rights advances have pretty reliably followed African-American rights gains by about 10-15 years -- and were almost always precipitated by them. The original suffragist movement was a direct outgrowth of the abolitionist movement; and most of its early founders were members of both. The feminist revolution of the 1970s likewise grew directly out of the civil rights struggles of the late 1950s and early 60s.

I had vaguely noticed this historical trend myself, but Sara spells it out clearly. Her historical statements are spot-on.

IV.

The real conflict that defined the choice between Hillary and Obama wasn't about melanin content or X chromosome status. It was about a generational hand-off of power -- a demographic shift that Obama saw coming, and Hillary did not.

This trend was pretty clear to anyone who read the voting results and the polls by the time the SuperTuesday in February was over. The Boomers are in shock and denial. For the first time since they started voting in mass in 1968, they have had control of the results of an election taken away from them. And as a pre-boomer born early in WW II myself, all I can say is "Thank God! Finally!"

Sara refers to what looks like a very interesting book Millennial Makeover. The blurb points out "...the so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the largest in American history, boomers included, and that roughly 40 percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One in five Millennials has an immigrant parent. It’s this generation that is fueling the excitement and some of the record turnout of the Democratic primary campaign, and not just for Mr. Obama." The Boomers have been the pig in the python for four decades, and now they are beginning to fade fast into history. The Millennials are ready to replace them.

It is this new generation and their attitudes that is bringing out the conservative anti-immigration attitudes. The older White and mostly male individuals (like Lou Dobbs) find the attitudes and ethnically and racially mixed make up of the Millennials to be quite frightening. They feel that they are losing control that they thought they had over American society and don't know where it is going. The conservative reactions to the Civil Rights Movement and to feminism has a similar cause - fear of loss of control.

America's biggest problem has not been sexism. It has been slavery and the resulting racism. That's not to say that sexism has not been a major problem, only that racism has been much, much worse; and correcting slavery and the resulting racism has always been the first priority. But the corrections for racism have exposed the similar problems faced by women and gays (and all LGBTs.) The corrections for racism have also built the tools and organization techniques that other minorities needed to get their problems addressed.

The Democratic primary this year has been an interesting set of events that "played-out" the on-going relationships between racism and sexism, against a background of the generation shift as the Boomers begin to lose their dominance over our American society.

Of course, that's not all. In the political arena there is also now a reaction against the conservative overreach as the conservatives have tried under Bush/Cheney to remake American society in their preferred conservative small-government, low tax, non-regulatory federal government yet militarily monarchist image. This form of conservatism strongly resembles that of the pro-slavery plantation-owner elites in the South in the run up to the American Civil War.

The large plantation slave-owners prior to the Civil War made up most of the wealthiest men in America, based on their control of exported cotton. Cotton was the most significant raw material in international trade during the four decades before the U.S. Civil war, which made cotton then comparable to oil today.[*] Slavery allowed those plantation owners to sell cotton at a lower price than anyone else in the world, since they had total control over their labor supply. That's what made Southern cotton so extremely profitable. Slavery was the basis of the wealth of the planter class, much as oil and similar international trade today is the basis of the extremely wealthy conservatives. Wealthy families fight hard to protect their wealth and the status that it gives them, and their wealth gives them a lot of tools others don't have with which to conduct the battle. That's a key to understanding conservatism.

Even that's not all. Stack on the challenges of Peak Oil and Global Warming, as well as the continued population growth and urbanization of American society as well as the relative decline of America's economic and military power globally. It's going to be an interesting 21st century, in the same meaning as the old curse usually said to be Chinese"May you live in interesting times."

Go read Sara's discussion of the Hillary - Obama confrontation for a more in-depth presentation. Read Howe's book for a fascinating discussion of how America was formed in the first half of the 19th century. Much of the conflict there continues to today.

---

[*] See "What hath God Wrought: The transformation of America, 1815 - 1848" by Daniel Walker Howe. (2007) (in the series The Oxford History of the United States.)

He has a very interesting chapter entitled "The World that Cotton Made."

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.

The current status of the Democratic primaries and the general election

Here's where I think we are right now.

Obama's increase in Pennsylvania has apparently been blunted, but not reversed. See CNN Politics and from TPM, More PA Polls. TPM also posted this analysis from TPM reader YA which may describe the current state of play in Pennsylvania - that it shows no real change from a week ago. Here is why I don't think that matters much. The Democratic primary contest for the Presidential nominee is winding down fast. The end of the contest will come suddenly -and for many shockingly. [I don't know if the political media is too dense to recognize this, or if they don't dare point the the rapidly nearing end because that would eliminate the apparently important conflict that they are reporting to attract more readers/viewers. Nothing stops both from being true, of course.]

Let's look at the list of remaining primaries and caucuses.

Month	Date	Day	State	Party	Type	Delegates	Party	Type	Delegates
April	03	Thur	District of Colombia	Dem	Cauc	38	-	-	-
-	05	Sat	Virgin Islands	-	-	-	Rep	Other	06
-	22	Tues	Pennsylvania	Dem	Prim	188	-	-	-
May	03	Sat	Guam	Dem	Other	09	-	-	-
-	06	Tues	Indiana	Dem	Prim	85	Rep	Prim	57
-	06	Tues	North Carolina	Dem	Prim	134	Rep	Prim	69
	13	Tues	West Virginia	Dem	Prim	39	-	-	-
	13	Tues	Nebraska	-	-	-	Rep	Cauc	33
-	17	Sat	Hawaii	-	-	-	Rep	Cauc	20
-	20	Tues	Kentucky	Dem	Prim	59	Rep	Prim	45
-	20	Tues	Oregon	Dem	Prim	65	Rep	Prim	30
-	27	Tues	Idaho	-	-	-	Rep	Prim	32
June	03	Tues	Montana	Dem	Prim	24	-	-	-
-	03	Tues	South Dakota	Dem	Prim	23	Rep	Prim	27
-	07	Sat	Puerto Rico	Dem	Cauc	56	-	-	-

[full list is found here.]

The Pennsylvania Primary is next Tuesday, and it's not going to change the lead Obama has nationally over Clinton, so Hillary is running to change the votes of the superdelegates. That's now extremely unlikely. Unless there is a clear crisis between now and late June that clearly marks Obama as unable to win the general election, the superdelegates are not going to overturn the delegate decisions made by Democrats in the primaries and caucuses.

Why won't the superdelegates overturn the primary/caucus results? Doing that would alienate so many Democratic voters that McCain would have an easy walk to the White House. The function of the superdelegates is to place the position of the Democratic Party as top priority, something that cannot be accomplished by throwing the Presidential Election to the Republicans. Losing the general election would be very bad for the party. The Democratic superdelegates are political professionals. They know what is happening and they are not going to throw the election, no matter how much the media and Hillary supporters want to create the impression they might. It's that simple.

Barring a catastrophic disaster by or to Obama, the Democratic nomination race is over. That's why we are seeing the shift into the general election with the ad describing McCain as out of touch and linking him to Bush and the DNC lawsuit against McCain over his abuse of the public financing system.

I'll admit that I never thought the Democratic primaries would run from January into April, and the uncertainty at this late date is unsettling to say the least. But here in Texas it has galvanized Democratic voters like I have never before seen on the Democratic side. (The Republicans here have been galvanized since Goldwater, with a short period of confusion after the Watergate crisis.) I give it through May 20th at the latest, and then Hillary is going to decide to drop out and will hug Obama and promise her full support in his race for the Presidency.

Following about a week or two of confusion among Hillary supporters, which will be filled with Democrats and Democratic ads attacking McCain and exhorting all Democrats to recognize who their real enemy is, the party will turn full bore on McCain. Disappointment over Hillary's loss of the nomination is not going to hide who the real opponent tis election.

The Democratic primaries have created a long period of excitement and hope, and this long period of excitement is going to be focused on McCain. The Republican 527 groups like Freedom's Watch are not getting the needed donations to counter the expected attacks on McCain. McCain will wither in the face of the excitement like a daisy in a firestorm.

The firestorm will be fueled by Iraq, the Recession, Bush's lawlessness in office (especially his recent admission of approving torture and the White House staff directing how individual prisoners are tortured) and the general dissatisfaction of the American voting public with Republican misrule. Take all of this and add the excitement, energy and political direction that Democrats have developed during this primary season, and I think this is going to be a very good election for Democrats.

With some luck, Progressives are going to send a number of new members to Congress also. This business of having an extreme right-wing corporatist party and a mild right-wing corporatist party is going to fade quickly. This nation has real problems that can only be dealt with by some rather radical changes in governance, and the Republicans, with the assistance of the Blue Dog Democrats have been supporting the entrenched powers that will lose a lot when those changes are made. The health care crisis is the most obvious example of the current crises. (See this video about Charlie Rose's interview with T. R. Reid regarding the Frontline documentary "Sick around the world".)

The U.S. Constitution was designed, largely by Southerners, to allow a significant minority to block radical legislation - like outlawing slavery - unless there is an overwhelming majority in favor of the change*. That was a key part of the set of compromises that allowed the colonies to join in an effective central government after the problems created by the Articles of Confederation. The New Deal was the result of such an overwhelming majority of Americans in favor of radical changes in how America was governed. So was the period during the late Civil Rights Movement when LBJ passed the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights legislation.

We are, I think, entering another such time when there is an overwhelming majority ready for big changes in American governance. John McCain and his supporters see this time of change coming towards us and McCain is the man who intends, as Bill Buckley once colorfully described his own conservatism, to stand in the way of history and cry "Halt!"

I predict that McCain and what he stands for is about to become political road kill. That's what this general election, just now beginning, is all about.

---

* When that politically overwhelming American majority elected Lincoln President and appeared about to outlaw slavery in spite of the difficulties the structure of the Constitution placed in their way, the Southern states attempted to succeed from the Union and the South Carolinians fired on Fort Sumpter, starting the Civil War.

Radical change can elicit radical reaction. Some Republicans are going to be tempted.

Obama's response to the "Obama is Elitist and out of touch" attack

Here, from TPM Election Central, is a robo-call being presented in Pennsylvania.



It looks like an excellent response, and it clearly sets this issue up for the Fall against McCain.

So what is the social and economic value added by private health insurance firms?

Any fact-based and rational discussion of America's health insurance "system" will get stuck on the question "What do private health insurance companies do to add value to the health delivery system? Here is a brief discussion from Harold Pollack :

Why do we have this industry again? I understand that history and politics make this industry hard to replace, but what social value does it really create? I don't ask this question about the oil industry, the pharmaceutical industry, or computer software giants. Whatever the misdeeds of particular firms and the pressing needs for public regulation in these latter industries, we understand why it's good to have firms competing to find new energy sources, new drugs, new operating systems. I don't believe private insurers are less ethical, as a whole, than soft drink manufacturers or manufacturers of plush carpet. I just can't explain what we are getting here.

In the case of private health insurance, firms have some expertise administering claims and perhaps designing wellness programs. Yet to the extent that their business relies upon avoiding high-cost patients their activities are social wasteful. In so many ways, their incentives are poorly aligned with the public good.

Even if we could correct these misplaced incentives, it seems as though anything beneficial insurers can do could be accomplished better and cheaper by government. Private insurers are too fragmented to promote needed efficiencies such as electronic medical records. A Chicago provider dealing with 20 payers is hardly swayed by the pay-for-performance standard of any one of them. In general, private payers are too fragmented to exert powerful market discipline on providers. The embarrassing history of Medicare managed care provides one of many embarrassments for those who assert the inherent superiority of the private sector.

Private insurers do have two advantages: They are more nimble than government is. More important, they can take the political heat for saying "no" when patients want some desirable but unjustified service, drug, or therapy. This is hard for government to do, and "no" should sometimes be said even when this is painful.

But maybe we have this backwards. It seems to me that even when insurers are justified in saying no--as Cigna might have been in the liver transplant case promoted by John Edwards, and as insurers sometimes are regarding potentially useless or harmful experimental therapies--profit-making firms lack the legitimacy to deny anyone a desperately wanted treatment that provides some plausible benefit. Denying important treatments is an inherently political question. A transparent process, by financially disinterested parties, is required to secure public legitimacy.

If this is so, private insurers themselves have a strong stake in government assuming a larger role in scrutinizing costly therapies. And they have a strong stake in some larger regulatory structure to constrain the more predatory aspects of current market practice.

I write this as (by HuffPo standards) a politically moderate free-trade policy wonk who instinctively favors market solutions for most economic concerns. If people like me feel this way--and many of us do--the industry should be worried.

We know that any reform of the health care system will immediately face insurance company financed "Harry and Louise" ads to try to scare voters out of rationally considering the problems insurance companies cause and their inability to add anything positive to the health care delivery system. But really, are physicians and nurses so brain washed that they are willing to continue to waste thousands of man-hours trying to get insurance companies to do things that are rational and provide decent patient care?

It is fear of government bureaucracy? Why is rational government bureaucracy any less efficient than the existing multiple bureaucracies of thousands of different health insurers? (Answer - a single government-run bureaucracy is clearly capable of being much more efficient than what we have now.) Given that the inherent difference in the source of a bureaucracy is negligible, then the clear cost savings of a single, rational bureaucratic system with a decent appeals system and media oversight is obviously preferable to the current inefficient and corruption-ridden private enterprise system. And health care providers will have greater ability to influence a government-run single payer health care financing system than they do to influence powerful insurance executives who answer to no one except their investors.

I think America is ready for realistic health insurance reform. I do wonder if Barack Obama understands why previous efforts have failed and what he has to do to avoid those same traps if and when he is elected President. Hillary is clearly the preferred candidate if the intent is to reform health care. She understands the need and understands many of the pitfalls that Bill Clinton was unable to navigate around in 1993.

This is a subject that needs to be continually readdressed. America can't afford the gold-plated system that fails one in six Americans when they need it.

Today's primaries

Today we have

• Republican Primary in Kansas (39 delegates)
• Louisiana primary (Democrats - 68 delegates; Republicans - 47 delegates)
• Nebraska Democratic caucus (31 delegates)
• Washington state caucuses (Democrats - 97 delegates; Republicans - 40 delegates)
• Virgin Islands is holding a Democratic caucus worth 9 delegates

[See A list of 2008 state primaries and caucuses for everything this year.]

MSNBC announces that Huckabee has won the Kansas primary with a resounding 60 percent to McCain's 24 percent over McCain. Texas Rep. Ron Paul got 11 percent to maintain his usual showing in the republican primaries. This is the first Republican contest since Romney suspended his campaign.

Obama has won the Nebraska caucus. In Washington State, with 24% of the votes counted MSNBC reports "Obama was winning 65 percent of delegates to Clinton's 33 percent." MSNBC goes on to point out that with both Obama and Hillary seen as offering very similar policies, the issue seems to be a question of which of the two is more likely to be able to defeat McCain in November.

The International Herald Tribune has reported some interesting results from the Louisiana primary, but the winners and losers are not yet known. Louisiana has long been close to evenly split between Democrats and Republicans, but with the loss of over 200,000 people from the Democratic stronghold of New Orleans after Katrina, there is a strong likelihood that Republicans will dominate that state for the foreseeable future.

DEMOGRAPHICS

Blacks were close to half the Democratic electorate, while nine in 10 Republican primary voters were white. As is typical for presidential primaries, men predominated in the GOP electorate while more women voted in the Democratic contest. Close to one in 10 voters in both primaries were under age 30 and one in four were over age 65.

HURRICANE KATRINA IMPACT

One in seven Democratic voters and about one in 10 Republicans said Hurricane Katrina caused their families severe hardship and they have not recovered. About one in four in both parties said the storm caused severe hardship but they have recovered. Two-thirds of Republicans and a little more than a half of Democrats said Katrina did not cause their family severe hardship. There also were early indications from the exit poll that the northern part of Louisiana was a larger share of the electorate in both parties compared to past primaries, reflecting a population decline in New Orleans and other coastal areas. [Snip]

RACE AND GENDER

In the historic Democratic contest to nominate either the first black or first woman for president, about one in five voters said gender was an important factor in their vote and about as many said that about race.

The results out of Louisiana should provide a hint regarding the political future of that state.

What is Obama doing right?

In reading the interview with Rick Perlstein by the Chicago Review of Books this statement about how Rick conducts his history of conservatism jumped out at me.

...if you can’t feel what they feel, then you can’t take them seriously as political opponents. You see only the flimsy intellectual foundations and miss the motivating power of strategically harnessed resentment. From Adlai Stevenson to John Kerry, high-minded liberals have acted as if they were blind to the root feelings that feed the followers of politicians like Nixon and Bush. Instead, they alternate between expecting a fair fight on the issues (and getting swiftboated instead) and imagining that once people realize what a bad person Nixon or Bush is, the people will turn against him.

There is a lot in that statement.

Decision-making by resentment or logic

First, as is so often clear in many conservative policy decisions and their justifications, conservatives make the decision about what they want to happen first, then build a justification for it.

An example of this is the ideological concept that the free market solves all problems and is always better than government solutions. This is not an idea, it is an ideological presumed truth, never to be questioned. Whether real markets between independent buyers and sellers exist is never questioned, it is simply assumed that anytime a buyer pays a seller for something it is a free market. Also, the high cost of collecting data on other market transactions so that each transaction is embedded in the pattern of all other similar transactions taking place at the same time is ignored. These costs will exist anytime a real market transaction occurs, even if it is just like the dozen or so others just like it before and after. The fact that by sacrificing a little of the flexibility of a market decision in exchange for an administrative decision to follow routine could sharply lower the cost of the product or service to where market-based competitors cannot effectively compete is ignored intellectually (but not in business practice.) Similarly, government is dismissed because it operates with relatively rigid bureaucratic rules, and therefore can never be as good as a free market. The fact that human beings cannot mentally process large amounts of data without breaking it down and routing it to specialists who handle especially defined parts of the overall situation and therefore need an organizational structure that incorporates departments and specialized work roles in order to function is ignored. So is the fact that all large organizations, including all large business organizations, have the same human limitations of data processing and thus require bureaucracy in order to function.

Conservatives ignore the complications. They are interested in getting the job done the way their ideology directs, and the ideology is not to be questioned. This is emotional decision-making. The decision is made first, and then justified. But since the decision was actually made emotionally based on faith in the ideology, all discussion of the complexities and possible points of failure which the ideology excludes are ignored by conservatives.

A second example is religious Creationism or its Trojan horse, Intelligent Design. The Bible states that the earth was created by God in seven days. That is the decision. The justification is a sales pitch to attract believers to accept the previously made decision, and any facts that contradict that decision must be ignored or repressed. The key is that for conservatives, the decision is made first and the explanation for the decision is then built to sell the decision to other people. Facts to be used in that explanation are limited to the facts the "prove" the decision was correct, and facts either predicting failure or showing that the policy has failed are ignored or actively repressed.

This approach to decisions is difficult for liberals to understand. Liberals collect facts and then develop theories that both explain those facts and suggest where to look for additional explanatory facts. They also look for facts that show the theory has failed and when those are found, attempt to develop a new and better explanatory theory that includes the facts that contradicted the previous theory. Theories thus grow out of history and experience, and do not take on an aura of perfection the way ideologically justified programs do. The high degree of emotional involvement in the theory that justifies an emotionally made decision doesn't exist for liberals. In fact, they are always looking for facts that disprove an existing theory so that a better one can be built to replace it.

What is the difference between conservatives and liberals? Whatever it is, it appears to be something each is born with. Psychologists would say that liberals have a personality structure that includes a Tolerance for ambiguity. "Ambiguity tolerance is the ability to perceive ambiguity in information and behavior in a neutral and open way." A liberal who makes a decision recognizes that the decision is imperfect and may well be wrong, either in detail or overall, and so he will build in measures to help recognize both problems and failure.

Conservatives tend to be different. They have an ambiguity intolerance. This "... was defined in 1975 as a 'tendency to perceive or interpret information marked by vague, incomplete, fragmented, multiple, probable, unstructured, uncertain, inconsistent, contrary, contradictory, or unclear meanings as actual or potential sources of psychological discomfort or threat.'" That discomfort or threat will drive many people to a degree of anxiety. Anxiety creates "... the feelings that we typically recognize as fear, apprehension, or worry."

If making a decision and being aware that it is certainly imperfect and maybe wrong leads to fear, apprehension, or worry, then a very effective solution is to find a leader who will make the decision and who declares that the decision is perfect. Then the conservative needs only to justify a decision which he already knows to be perfect because his authority has told him it is. Not only is that decision presumed perfect, any effort to analyze it in detail that might lead to finding flaws in ti will also lead to that same ambiguity and anxiety that assuming the decision was perfect relieved him from.

Liberals without empathy for conservative feelings are blind to the different approaches to decision-making

Liberals running for office tend to reduce policy and decisions to sets of non emotional facts and expect the fact to speak for them. Conservatives are making decisions based on ambiguity intolerance and resentment that their feelings are ignored. This is exactly what was being said when voters said that Bush was someone that they could be comfortable drinking a beer with, while both Gore and Kerry were considered out of touch elitists. This is what the poll question "Do you feel that the (named candidate) is like you?" gets at.

The campaign approaches of the Democratic candidates

Obama offers rhetoric that suggests he understands how the conservatives feel, while Clinton is offering in-depth logical policy positions and Edwards is appealing to those liberals who consider conservatives to be bad people and who reject everything that is conservative because it has proven itself to be so destructive to America.

I'd say that Obama is avoiding describing conservatives as bad people and instead is trying to show that he recognizes and respects their feelings. He is also avoiding presenting much policy. Clinton is offering herself as best able to deal with the swiftboating the Republicans will conduct and as having more real Senate experience so that she can better deal with Congress. Edwards is offering his progressive ideas to counter the failed policies of thirty years of the Reagan Revolution.

Will Obama's approach work?

It's a shame we can't get all the characteristics in one candidate. The polls suggest that Obama has an appeal to independents using this approach, while Edward's results suggest that since he is going after the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, he's just not getting enough traction to get the nomination. The constant refrain that Hillary is "too polarizing" suggests that she is touching a raw nerve by ignoring the emotional needs of the conservatives.

Since it looks like the decision is between Clinton and Obama now, with each beginning to adopt some of Edwards' ideas, I'm not sure which approach will work. I do think that recognizing and empathizing with the feelings that drive conservatives will make America a lot less polarized place politically. But will Obama's approach work to get him elected, and if elected, will it make him a successful President.

Those are two separate questions, and while I have some guesses, I really don't know the answer. But I do think that the quotation I started this piece with should be carefully considered by Democrats as we all move to elect a Democratic President.

---

Addendum 2:55 PM CST
This is from a strong pro-Obama supporter, Mark Kleiman.

Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. If (probably when) Hillary is the nominee, I'm sending her the maximum contribution and working my butt off to get her elected.

I'm angry about the tactics the Clintons are using in this race largely because they make things harder in November, whoever is the nominee. But while it would be nice to elect an inspirational, potentially transformational President who knows how to make a speech and knows that waterboarding is torture without waiting for his Super-Duper Top Secret briefing, it's essential to prevent four more years of Republican misrule.

If Clinton is nominated, my advice to my fellow Obamites is: Think about the Supreme Court. Think about war with Iran. Think about global warming. Think about the abuse of science. Buy yourself a clothespin. And then do the right thing. This is not a year for sulking in your tent.

And I'm dead certain that Barack Obama is going to be leading the charge.

We Democrats need to keep our priorities straight. Right now we squabble among ourselves, but once a nominee is chosen, he or she is the Democratic nominee and the goal is to defeat the Republican. Whoever it is, they will need all of us to beat back the true forces of darkness who are even now working to destroy the American Republic.

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.

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.

---

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.

Americans face a consumption-driven Recession by pulling back on consumption

Americans, staring a consumption-driven Recession in the face right after the last piggy bank they had to maintain spending was taken away with the collapse of the housing bubble, are doing the only thing possible. From the New York Times:

Strong evidence is emerging that consumer spending, a bulwark against recession over the last year even as energy prices surged and the housing market sputtered, has begun to slow sharply at every level of the American economy, from the working class to the wealthy.

The abrupt pullback raises the possibility that the country may be experiencing a rare decline in personal consumption, not just a slower rate of growth. Such a decline would be the first since 1991, and it would almost certainly push the entire economy into a recession in the middle of an election year.

There are mounting anecdotal signs that beginning in December Americans cut back significantly on personal consumption, which accounts for 70 percent of the economy.

The perpetual Republican solution, Tax cuts for the rich, won't work to restore consumption. All they will do is hand more money to invest to the wealthy, who will invest where the returns are highest - outside the U.S. (Krugman points out that Obama's only prescription for the Recession is a tax cut. At least both Edwards and Hillary are economically competent, unlike Obama and the Republicans.)

The fed has already announced informally that they will lower interest rates again, but the resulting inflation will shortly wipe out any gain because lenders will raise interest rates to counter anticipated inflation.

Paul Krugman points to both Edwards and Hillary for their fiscal stimulus plans. First from Edewards:

last month, before the economic consensus turned as negative as it now has, he proposed a stimulus package including aid to unemployed workers, aid to cash-strapped state and local governments, public investment in alternative energy, and other measures.

and then Hillary, in response to Edward's proposal came out with

a broadly similar but somewhat larger proposal. (It also includes aid to families having trouble paying heating bills, which seems like a clever way to put cash in the hands of people likely to spend it.) The Edwards and Clinton proposals both contain provisions for bigger stimulus if the economy worsens.

As the economy continues to get worse and the election gets closer, this is going to become a larger and larger issue for all the candidates, and who ever become President is going to have to deal with this Republican-created and worsened Recession for quite a while.

Right now it is enough just to recognize that the consumers, who have been the mainstay of the American economy since 2001, are now finally pulling back on their spending, there is nothing in place to replace them, and most of the politicians who are even slightly aware of the problem have no clue regarding what might work or why.

Ambition in Presidential aspirants

Name the candidates for a Presidential nomination who are displaying a massive, achingly obvious ambition to become President, causing them to conduct carefully calculated and expensive campaigns that display their personal abilities for that office.

Hillary Clinton.
John Edwards.
Rudy Giuliani.
Michael Huckabee.
John McCain.
Barak Obama.
Bill Richards
Mitt Romney.

Name the candidates whose ambition for the job of President brings forth cries of personal hatred towards them from a lot of people.

Hillary Clinton.

Why is that happening? Easy. Strong ambition is an accepted part of the stereotypical male role, while it is specifically listed as a major negative characteristic of the stereotypical female role.

A lot of people get very upset when others fail to conform to their personal social stereotypical roles, especially gender roles. They try to enforce those stereotypes on people who defy them. The enforcement takes the character of ostracizing and expressions of hatred. Yet the twentieth century has not been kind to women who tried to become stereotypical wives and mothers, especially in Great Britain after WW I when there was only about one potential living husband for every ten women, or during and after WW II when women first had to enter the (stereotypically male) work force. Then the economy changed after about 1960 so that a single worker could no longer support a family on one job. Yet women were looked down on for breaking the stereotypical female gender role and going to work.

Now, almost fifty years and two generations after the two worker family has become the norm, a lot of people are really upset that at age 60 Hillary Clinton is violating the out-dated female role typified by June Cleaver as the Beaver's sweet den mother non-working housewife. Instead Hillary Clinton actually has the gall to try and compete with "the men", most of who in fact feel thoroughly threatened because they don't have the ability to compete with her.

That's what is causing all the expressions of Hillary-hatred. Chris Matthews is a prime example. Hillary could easily do his job better than he does, while he could not compete with her. On a gut level, he knows that, and it drives his misogynistic commentary.

America has a lot of men who depend on gender stereotypes to keep them from having to compete with more competent women. (Rachel Maddow could replace Chris Matthews in a heartbeat, and ratings would quickly rise.) There are also women who have so thoroughly adopted the passive, quiet, non-competitive female stereotype that they feel threatened when Hillary proves that stereotype is not necessary for a woman to be a good and competent person.

That's what all this rapid Hillary hatred is all about. It's basically frightened and conservative people who expect other individuals to adopt the gender stereotypes that those people assign to them, and when those others do not adopt those gender stereotypes on their own and prove successful without them, then such stereotype-breakers will be met with anger and will be ostracized.

But society has passed the frightened, angry people by, and their nasty tactics no longer work. Which, of course, will just make them even angrier. Watch Chris Matthews if you don't believe me. Barring a sudden insight into his own personal fears which I doubt he has the capacity to conduct, he has no choice except to get more and more rapidly anti-Clinton as he joins Bill O'Reilly.

The Washington Post doesn't like or respect Democrats

The recent imbroglio about the story of totally unsupported rumors that Obama is a secret Muslim was the a recent attack piece written by By National Desk political reporter Perry Bacon Jr.and edited and placed by editor Bill Hamilton. Hamilton has defended the article with the lame excuse

I thought the facts that 1. these falsehoods persist and 2. Obama make mentions of his time living in a Muslim country on the campaign trail as part of his foreign policy were both worth remarking. I think the story makes clear, including in the candidate's own words, he is a Christian.

The so-called rumor has been totally discredited. The story is not one about a rumor. It is a story about lies, nothing else. But at no point in the story is this fact revealed.

The Washington Post saw fit to report the lies as "rumor" with no indication that there was no shred of truth to it. There was no mention that independent sources had researched the rumor and found them to be mere lies. Then, beyond the inadequate story, the editor used newspaper slight-of-hand to make the lies seem even more true. Hamilton then placed the misleading story on the front page of the newspaper. Such placement of the story, and carrying the story with no reference to independent reporting that established the rumors as lies, made it appear that the Washington Post considered the rumors to be true.

After defending the story to the best of her ability, Deborah Howell (Washington Post Ombudsman) finally admitted that the Washington Post had badly botched the story. That is acknowledgement that the story was a Washington Post hit political piece, one that proves the truth of the old saying "a lie has gone around the world before the truth has put its shoes on."

OK. WaPo error. No conspiracy, right?

What about the story by the Washington Post's Robin Ghivan from last July in which she wrote the very unflattering description of Hillary Clinton's "cleavage on display."

She was talking on the Senate floor about the burdensome cost of higher education. She was wearing a rose-colored blazer over a black top. The neckline sat low on her chest and had a subtle V-shape. The cleavage registered after only a quick glance. No scrunch-faced scrutiny was necessary. There wasn't an unseemly amount of cleavage showing, but there it was. Undeniable.

The picture that accompanied the article showed an outfit that was in no way remarkable for a woman Senator, yet Ghivan's article seemed to imply that she was wearing the latest Lindsay Lohan or Paris Hilton Frederick's of Hollywood outfit. Ms. Ghivan has not written any similar articles on the clothing choices of any of the other Senators or candidates for the Presidential nomination. Still, her article was not the over hit piece that the attack on Obama was.

Unfortunately, Ms. Ghivan seems to be trying to show how effectively she can trash Hillary by analyzing her clothes. Is Ms. Ghivan trying to take on Maureen Dowd's signature irrelevancies-as-significance style? Because she has done it again.

Today Ms. Ghivan tries to parse the political significance of Hillary's pants suits.

The pantsuit is Clinton's uniform. Hers is a mix-and-match world, a grown-up land of Garanimals: black pants with gray jacket, tan jacket with black pants, tan jacket with tan pants. There are a host of reasons to explain Clinton's attachment to pantsuits. They are comfortable. They can be flattering, although not when the jacket hem aligns with the widest part of the hips (hypothetically speaking, of course). Does she even have hips? [Snip]

Women have come a long way from the time when wearing a pair of pants was considered "borrowing from the boys." So it would be highly regressive to suggest that the candidate is using trousers to heighten the perception that she can be as tough as a man. And yet . . .

This is a campaign in which gender stereotypes are being challenged even as the old assumptions are proving stubborn and resilient. Voters are being asked to envision something this country has never had: a female commander in chief. And the culture is gently roiling as audiences try to color in the outline of an XX president.

Is even considering the senator's clothes a kind of chauvinistic assault? Or is it merely the intellect trying to wrangle some sort of order out of the imagination? Oh, the tumult!

I don't really think that it is likely that the top editors of the Washington Post have put out a directive to subtly attack the Democratic candidates they way they did both Gore and Kerry - though the top editors may have chosen editors and made reporter assignments to make such attacks likely.

No, I am going to use the approach that Ms. Ghivan uses. I am going to suggest that you can recognize a subtle style that the Washington Post has of covering Democrats negatively while ignoring the major and very obvious flaws in the Republican candidates for the nomination for President.

Keep watching. You will see that the Washington Post in general does not want the Washington D.C. scene dominated by Democrats. This may not be overt bias, but it is certainly born out by their style of writing stories and placing them in the newspaper. They have gotten comfortable with reporting whatever the Republicans tell them without checking it (stenography, not reporting), and reserving most negative coverages for Democrats.

Their style shows that Washington Post simply does not want to have to adapt to a new crop of powerful strangers, so we can expect more hit pieces on the Democratic candidates for the Presidency while Giuliani, Romney, Huckabee, etc. are permitted to skate.

Hillary, Obama, Edwards refuse to cross CBS writer's picket lines

The CBS writers have not had a contract with CBS for 2 1/2 years now, so they went on strike. CBS had planned to hold a debate for the Democratic nominees for President on December 10, 2007. It looks like the CBS negotiators better get it in gear and finally negotiate with the Writer's Guild in good faith. According to Sam Stein at Huffington Post the top four Democratic candidates have acted to support the writers and will not cross the picket lines.

Hillary Clinton:

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, declared that: "The workers at CBS News have been without a contract for close to two and a half years. It is my hope that both sides will reach an agreement that results in a secure contract for the workers at CBS News but let me be clear: I will honor the picket line if the workers at CBS News decide to strike."

Barack Obama

Sen. Barack Obama, D-IL, weighed in as well, issuing the following statement through his campaign: "If CBS News is unable to reach an agreement with its workers and they decide to strike, Barack Obama will not cross the picket line to attend the debate."

John Edwards

former Sen. John Edwards, D-NC, offered his support for the strikers, declaring that he and his wife Elizabeth "will also honor any picket lines at CBS News, up to and including the CBS presidential debate on December 10th... I hope that in these disputes, management and the union are able to agree on a just settlement. But until those settlements are reached, I will stand firmly with these workers in their fight for a better life."

Bill Richardson

Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico has offered his support for the strikers as well, saying in a statement, "Supporting workers' rights is more important than anything I will say at the debate."

I have to wonder what the CBS management is thinking when they fail to bargain in good faith with their writers. Without their writers they have no product to put on the air. No contract for 2 1/2 years is simply stupidity on the part of CBS.

Clinton is wrong to take lobbyists' money

Sunday Edwards and Obama went after Hillary for taking campaign money from lobbyists. Clinton defended the practice by saying (in effect) that lobbyists do important work for all of us by bringing our issues to the attention of the politicians holding office.

Mark Kleiman makes the very important point that since the lobbyists are giving money to the politicians and at the same time asking that the politicians do something for them, the distinction between a campaign contribution and a bribe is nothing more than the belief in the politician's mind whether he or she has been bought or is actually just using another source of information to come to an unbiased decision.

Are we challenging the politician's personal integrity when we disagree that they took money from a lobbyist, clearly returned what the money-giving lobbyist asked for, and thus the politician was bought no matter what they say? Of course we are, and if the politician thinks he or she was not bought, she is simply fooling herself.

Sure we are challenging their integrity - but they are politicians, after all. Who are they to get all huffy about it? Unless they totally personally finance their campaigns out of inherited money from an old fortune, they were bought and paid for the day they started to run for their first office. The only way to avoid the challenge to her integrity is to simply refuse to take money from any lobbyist. Period. Full stop.

The lobbyist may be doing nothing more than merely buying face-time so that they can make their case to the politician, But Hillary's argument was that we are all represented by lobbyists who try to convince her, and it is only right that they should be allowed to represent various parts of the public.

OK, but is it right that some lobbyists get more attention because they bought it? Money-for-access is another way a politician is bought. If a lobbyist for my cause gets second-rate access because I do not provide a budget that allows my lobbyist to buy face-time with a politician, that politician is NOT representing me. She is representing those who buy her time.

Clinton is playing politics in the big league, and politics there are played dirty. She has decided that to win she has to play dirty with the rest of them, rather than to attempt to change the dirty system. It may make her a winner, but it certainly makes her no better than Sen. Stevens of Alaska or Randy "Duke" Cunningham of California. She is wrong to take contributions from lobbyists.

"We didn't have this kind of biography in the year 2000"

Carl Bernstein is out pimping his new book on Hillary Clinton. Here, from Media Matters of America, we get a few of his comments as he tries to get people to buy his screed.

"We didn't have this kind of biography in the year 2000, and the country has suffered catastrophically, because they didn't know who or what they were voting for in some instances."
-- Carl Bernstein, Paula Zahn Now, 6/7/06

BILL O'REILLY: I have to tell you, I still don't know what to make of the woman even after -- even after reading the book. That's how complicated this woman is.

CARL BERNSTEIN: That's terrific.
-- The O'Reilly Factor, 6/5/07

Gee. Do you think that Carl will publish a similar set of books on Rudi Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and/or John McCain?

My bet is he won't. Not that the subjects wouldn't be at least as interesting, and certainly are not as well-known, but he probably can't find a wealthy right-wing angel to pay him to write it, pay to get it published (Regnery Press? Knopf Publishing?) and then to buy his books by the gross so that they can give them to the shredders their friends.