Reality Check on Grocery Costs

In early January I put up a post Grocery Costs at Casa Anglachel, talking about my shopping habits and spending in 2011. A few days ago, an article was posted in the local paper, the Union-Tribune, about restaurant menu prices going up. The article included a table on wholesale food cost increases, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor.

Slowly Returning

Life slowly returns to normal.

I've been watching a lot of stuff from Netflix - on demand and DVDs - as I've been wading through my  emotional detritus these last two months. I cam across a very interesting British detective series I recommend to anyone. It's called Life on Mars and has two very short (by US standards) seasons of eight episodes each. The basic premise is a contemporary police detective, Sam Tyler, is involved in a car accident. He wakes up in 1973, still a police detective in the same city. Much psychopathy ensues. The first season deals with a specific problem from Sam's past (which is the series' present) while the second season tries to provide a satisfactory explanation of what the hell is happening. It is a brilliant bit of story telling.

The New Year

I've been unable to post recently due a severely pinched nerve in my neck that has rendered any motion in my left arm and hand excruciatingly painful.

In lieu of posts from me, and probably a far better exchange, I recommend reading the articles of the most recent New York Review of Books. The edition is solid from top to bottom. Among my favorites:

• Where do we go from here? Paul Krugman and Robin Wells repeat the call for a primary opponent to Obama, providing the political and economic rationale for it to happen. Their theme of delinking is one I have tried to work with recently, but have been held back by the nerve problem.
• Why Wikileaks Changes Everything - Christian Caryl delves into many of the same themes I raised early on, particularly the political implications of the indiscriminate release of government data. I particularly like the evaluation of Assange as an incoherent twit, which has been my estimation all along.
• The Concealed Battle to Run Russia - Amy Knight makes excellent use of some leaked diplomatic cables in her review of a book on Russian politics. You want a picture of a truly criminal state? Cheney could only dream of this level of power.
• The Beleaguered Cambodians - Margo Picken provides a look at another criminal state. This one goes into the ways in which imperial & colonial powers have abetted a local elite to rob the nation blind. 
• China: From Famine to Oslo - Perry Link discusses two new novels by Chinese writers in the context of the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to Liu Xiaobo. As with the articles on Russia and Cambodia, the author goes into life in a repressive, authoritarian state, discussing the reality of life for people who truly are oppressed, spied upon, imprisoned, tortured and murdered by their governments, and how they respond to this condition. These articles individually and together serve as a useful corrective to the denizens of the Left blogosphere wringing their hands and bemoaning the horrible, horrible behavior of the US Gubmint against Our Hero Julian and who might just be coming after poor little ME next! Get a grip, people.
• Curveballs - Joseph Lelyveld's review of Bush's account of his administration. Cool, almost cold, it eviscerates W's self-exculpation. The final paragraphs on exchanges between W and Bush 41 are particularly good.
• No Thanks for the Memories (access for NYRB subscribers only, but first few paragraphs are available) - Gordon Wood provides a much needed counterpoint to professional liberal pundits' mocking dismissal of the Tea Party by talking about the difference between fact and meaning in cultural memory.

Anyway, I hurt and don't know when that will change. I hope your new year is starting out better than mine.

Anglachel

Belated - Support Corrente!

Wading through my backlog of emails, I was embarrassed to find out that I totally missed Corrente's recent fund raising campaign.

Please visit Corrente and read up on all the incredible things the insightful and fearless crew over there provide on a daily basis.

Better yet, throw some spare change in the donate bin and, if your finances allow, consider subscribing.

Anglachel

The Political Question

I was prompted to this thought by an email from a friend who sent me a link to a Joan Walsh piece on Salon. Walsh is more right than wrong in the article, though she misses (or deliberately overlooks) the use of institutional power within the Democratic Party to bring about the desired nomination outcome.

However, the big political question is not being asked, let alone answered, and that is why did Obama end up running for the presidency not against John McCain but against Sarah Palin?

I'm going to continue my blogging hiatus a little while longer, but that question has been nagging me since September.

Anglachel

Voting Reform

I'm reading various reports about voting from around the country, paying close attention to those which document long lines at polling places. Delays in voting are a discouragement to vote and are anti-democratic.

There's really no excuse for these lines as every precinct has a count weeks before election day of how many people are registered in that precinct, even if there has been a surge in new registrations. Every precinct knows that there are predicatable high and low times for voting volumes. Every precinct knows what the average voting time is given voting method X, Y or Z.

Until variance in voting methods is corrected, valid votes will go unrecorded and fraudulent votes will find ways to persist. Here's a few suggestions:

1. Enough with the crap about having to reregister every time you move. Your registration should be your SSN, and you should be allowed to vote wherever the hell you like. No more arguments about ACORN paying drunks to fill in fake registration cards for money. If you are legally prevented from voting (currently sitting in jail, dead, etc.), that will be traceable via your SSN
2. Mail-in or drop-off ballots in a standard format, readable by scanners. This provides an easy-to-read paper trail for everything, yet takes advantage of automation for counting.
3. Lost your ballot? Pick one up at a precinct drop-off location.
4. Use SSN to determine if a person voted. Remove double votes by retirees and students. Also a way to track the "cemetary" votes. Too bad for the Chicago Combine.
5. Move election day to the weekend and make it a full weekend for dropping off your vote, getting problems straightened out, etc.
6. What about state and local elections, where district is important? Your last recorded ZIP code will determine what ballot you get. Have you moved? Bring in your mailed ballot plus proof of residence (bills are best) and exchange your original ballot for one that is appropriate to your new ZIP.
7. A Federal standard for ballot layout. No more butterfly ballots.
8. Automatic manual recounts on randomly selected precincts, enough to provide a manual review of 0.5% of primaries and special elections, 1% of regualr elections.
9. Any precinct where a reasonable allegation of fraud/bad procedure has been filed gets a manual recount to three election cycles or until there are three clean elections. This is on top of the regular manaul counts of #8.

These are just a few ideas off the top of my head and all are in need of work, but I have three basic goals: reduce barriers to voting, provide checks on common modes of vote fraud, perform regular audits of vote reporting accuracy.

Anglachel

Losing My Religion

Arthur has a new post up linking to the new campaign merchandise rolled out by the Obama campaign today. My reaction to all of this is mixed. The Left has been far too facile in its rejection of faith (as Arthur does in the rant that ends the post), which provides the Republicans too much manuevering room in that arena. The attempts to reach out and be inclusive about faith, however, are worse than the original sin, indulging in vacuous pandering and (worse to my mind) reinforcing the American practice of religion as a fashion statement. There doesn't seem to be any recognition that blasting Palin for her faith while selling bumper stickers linking voting for Obama with being an Xtian is the actual expression of hypocrisy.

I look back wryly at posts I made two years ago in defense of Obama, when he was under attacks from the netroots sites that now sing his praises like choirs of angels. They attacked him because he had made a speech about the relationship of religion and public life, pointing to it as sign of his retrograde beliefs and sneering at his DLC connections. Their attacks were also, frankly, racist. It seems that Obama read the reviews and has reimagined himself quite thoroughly.

The attacks on Obama over his speech on religion were of the same temper and in the same mode as the attacks upon Hillary in support of him this year. I discussed these attacks in depth in this post, Adopting the Frames of the Right, where I tried to talk about how the violence of the attacks upon those who are not seen as part of our tribe alienates people who would otherwise be on your side, such as my father. Indeed, as a result of the speech Obama gave, my father decided on him as a candidate and (as far as I know) still supports him. I still think Obama's speech is a good one and for the right reasons, even as he himself has sold that vision short.

Ed Kilgore went into greater detail than I did in analyzing the speech, picking up on elements that I, a secular humanist, overlooked. What struck me most Kilgore's analysis was how thinking about modes of religion can help us think more clearly about modes of politics. I wrote then:

The danger of the rules-bound left is, as I said in an earlier post, that they will not acknowledge that people are divided on progressive issues and consider their religious teachings valid guides for political decisions. I think my father is a great example. I also have friends in a very strict Christian family who are mostly liberal, but who are under enormous social pressure from family and church to conform. Lots and lots of love for toeing the line, lots of ostracism for not. These are people who do require some strong outreach because they will be outcasts.

The anti-religious faction will not or cannot understand the courage it takes to defy the beloved community. Read the Salon article. Understand that this is not religious behavior, per say, but the actions of tradition bound communities for securing order, obedience and stability. ...

This post took on particular resonance as I was reading it immediately after having read the Salon piece. The point that Kilgore (and Obama) make about the danger of "prophetic" activism is both subtle and unsettling, because it is a two edged sword. It warns against the prophetic mode of rule, which is not always a religious stance. If you are a humanist, you understand that the structures of religion are human patterns of thought and interaction, and that secular instiutions and movements too can be afflicted by this mode of power.

As with the fundamentalists who thunder about the certainty of fire and brimstone for those who stray from the path of righteousness, the message about the dangers of conceptual certainty appear to be going right over the heads of the most agitated critics of Obama's speech.

Perhaps Obama should listen to his own words more often. Maybe we all need to watch Pan's Labyrinth and ponder the lure of obedience when wrapped up with desire for belonging and fear of being singled out.

But in response to Arthur's challenge that people send in definitions of God that stand up to analysis, I keep thinking back to my father and his faith which I do not understand but I most certainly perceive as something integral to this person whom I love so deeply. I can only point to Garry Wills' Christ Among the Partisans as an oppositional view, that any attempt to conceptualize this mythic and historical figure from a political perspective (see also Kilgore's arguments), whether from the Left or the Right, whether to praise faith in God or to debunk it, simply uses the wrong language for the argument. Christ-as-Nietzsche, in Wills' forumulation, strikes me as about right, which is probably why, when Obama recast himself as a political messiah, I could not support him as a candidate.

To be political means to lose one's religion, to set it aside and live in the mundane and mortal world upon its terms and for the rewards it offers.

Anglachel

Affirmation

It's been really difficult to try to come up with what to say about affirmative action in light of the responses to "Barking up the Wrong Tree". I know it's not going to come out the way I want it to, but I need to get thoughts down before it all goes away.

One of the things that surprised me in the comments was the extreme hostility to affirmative action itself. This was coming from people who I have read and who have commented here before for the most part, and these are not Republican trolls or closet Libertarians, though I did get a few missives from those whackos. The Republican presentation of affirmative action as an illicit racial rewards system where grossly unqualified individuals replace "deserving" candidates by the truckload just because of race has become ingrained in people's thinking. The Democrats have not done a good job of counteracting that argument, and the events of this election cycle are reinforcing the rightwing narrative.

I don't think that this is true of affirmative action. I have worked in environments where it is taken seriously and in places where it is not. They are very different. In places where it is enforced, like my current company, I work with women in positions besides office assistant and HR. I see women in upper management, in senior technical positions, and managing significant budgets. They also run HR and fill the administrative seats. My current co-workers are every color under the sun, though not as ethnically diverse as at the military base I worked on. My customers are also very diverse. In a recent meeting, with 14 people in the room, fewer than half were white, only only one of them male. Something else that I have noticed is the number of physically disabled people I have been working with. Wheelchairs, crutches, white canes, seeing eye dogs, hearing devices and so forth. Until I worked in operations that took their EEOC obligations seriously, I never saw a dwarf employee. Oh, and there are many, many immigrants from every part of the globe, some of them US citizens, some of them on their way to that status, others content with being residents.

In the other environments, out in the private sector, white guyz ruled, east Asian guys wrote code, and girls stayed in HR or Marketing. Black guys worked in the warehouse or cleaned the garbage. Dark(er) skinned Latinos drove trucks or did maintenance work. Light skinned Latinos were "white". No gimps or freaks need apply. One boss I had would never hire anyone with a dark complexion, be that person AA, mestizo, or south Asian. Never because of himself, of course, oh no, not him, but what would customers do? How would they react? He had to think of the whole company, after all, not just what he would personally be OK with... European and SE Asian immigrants were OK to hire. South Asians could have unpaid "internships", but only if they weren't too dark. This guy is an Obama supporter, by the way.

My point here is that my personal experience of the institutional effects of affirmative action and other equal opportunity measures has been to encounter some incredibly cool and engaging people who work their butts off, and that operations that did not enforce such things also had cool, engaging and hard working people, but that these companies were far more likely to put people into stereotypical jobs and to not let others in the door.

My other point here is that while there can be individuals (like my former psycho boss) who discriminate against other individuals, the power to enforce equitable treatment on a wide scale is institutional. This is an argument I have been making all along when disussing politics - institutions are the social and legal constructs we use to maintain power relations over time and across distance. These power relationships are what must be constructed, or deconstructed, to bring about long term social change. Changes in power mean changes in relative advantage between social groups, and those who are losing advantages will resist change unless they are either too weak to oppose it or can be persuaded that it is in their self interest to relinquish some current advantage for future advantage.

Affirmative action and related equal opportunity measures are examples of using political power to channel institutional power into more equitable courses. It is about institutions, not individuals. If institutions are not required to include a disadvantaged group, then disadvantage is reinforced. If I don't have to allow a class of people (women, Jews, Blacks, parapalegics) into my college, then whatever benefits accrue to my college students are not available to this class of people. When we are under conditions where discrimination and inequity are glaring, then it is easier to focus on the role of institutions in maintaining structures that deliberately disadvantage certain groups in relation to others. It helps if this happens during a time of economic expansion and growing wealth so that people respond positively - yeah, everybody should have a chance to make it rich! What is it with you guys?

However, what has happened is that Republicans have led the way to changing the focus on the purpose of equity policies to recast it as a form of reverse discrimination by focusing on ostensibly "qualified" candidates who "lost their position" to someone who was "unqualified". This is the obsession with quotas, with the fantasy that somehow some brilliant straight A student is being set aside for some flunk-out who happens to be the right color or sex. The focus on the harm done to the otherwise advantaged individual is comparable to the focus on the "innocent life" taken in abortion - what seems so clear in the abstract becomes more equivocal in reality. If you are in a time of economic downturns and people are feeling insecure, then they are going to fight to secure their own advantage or to punish those who they believe have been unfairly awarded what they want. If the person receiving the prefential treatment does not appear to come from a condition of disadvantage, then the resentment is just that much greater.

How many people here have actually conducted job interviews? Not been interviewed for a job, but did the interview to hire someone? I have been doing these since the mid-80s. I have conducted 35 interviews in the last year and almost 200 for 6 different companies and three different universities. The idea that HR forces a department to hire an unqualified minority male or woman of any ethnicity over some white guy is patent bullshit. Most people interview really badly, quite frankly, and resumes are interchangeable. For example, this guy has 10 years of C++ and JAVA programming and knows all the major relational databases, but has never done web development; the gal here has only done web work with SQL server and doesn't know a thing about Oracle and she's been working only 4 years, but she knows ASP.Net 3.0 and PHP like nobody's business and she does graphics. OK, you tell me who will be the better web developer in a mixed MS Windows/UNIX environment where we have to port things to web interfaces from desktop and old mainframe client/server apps? I'll give the nod to the person with web dev experience on the assumption that she can pick up Oracle easier than the desktop app developer can understand how to create stateless web apps, but how do I convince you that I wasn't just hiring the woman, especially because I am female?

Academic affirmative action debates are different because there is a fantasy that somehow the standardized tests are an accurate reflection of subject knowledge, and that high school GPAs can be compared. I hold myself up as the poster child of how fucked up the standardized test system is. I never took a single math class after my sophmore year in high school (and I had straight Ds on the classes I did take) and no science or math in college. My SATs were phenomenally good because I knew how to take a standardized test. My GRE was magnificent, even as I cheated on it and went back to finish up a math section I had not been able to complete the first time around. Guess what? Once you get into a school, nobody cares what your scores were. Nobody cares how you got them. How is anyone to know that my scores are simply being really good at standardized tests vs. actually knowing the subject? There isn't an admissions office in the country that doesn't know how fake this stuff is. Educational institutions themselves are deeply complicit in maintaining structures of advantage and wealth that have jack-shit to do with performance when they continue to prefer the children of alumni. They also know that accepting someone with ho-hum HS grades and foul SATs, who had only worked in menial jobs like driving a delivery truck and being a gardener at a golf course, but who is the first person in his family to attend college and who did a few years at a community college is worth taking a chance on.

How many people in Califonia today would look at my husband's Hispanic surname and scream that he was an undeserving minority taking away a place that rightly belonged to some rich white kid from a gated community in Silicon Valley, whose parents had paid out the kazoo to give little Johnny every educational advantage they could? "But he has great scores and a perfect personal essay and look at all those after school activities! How could you pick that slacker Portigee over our little Johnny? Why should our son be punished when he didn't discriminate against anyone? Reverse racism! "

This is an environment tailor made for political exploitation, which I will try to wrap my brain around in subsequent posts.

Anglachel

Posts in this series:

1. Affirmation
2. Easy Come, Easy Go
3. Qualified Success

NOTE: I will publish some comments that come in on this post. The comments that are posted are representative of what is being submitted. They do not necessarily reflect my opinion, but do present a particular perspective or line of argumentation concerning Affirmative Action. If you mark your comment as private, I will not post it.

Ponies, Cows and K Street

The last three posts, Presence and Absence, Fear and Loathing, and 1968 or 1976?, are part of my attempt to think through what this current campaign can tell us about the state of the Democratic Party as we enter a period of great political opportunity. The last Democratic period of dominance was with LBJ and ended because of the Democratic embrace of Civil Rights. As Paul Krugman elaborates in The Conscience of a Liberal, (and if you have not read that book, hie thee to a library or bookstore at once), a large enough block of middle and higher class Southern whites, especially former Democratic party bosses, defected to the Republicans to cause an electoral shift. Mark Schmitt has also documented this.

While we had two Democratic presidents during the sea-change, overall it was a time of loss and retrenchment for Democrats as the pre-New Deal Southern wing of the party abandoned it over race, and significant portions of the pre- and post-New Deal Northern working class wing have wavered in their support due to a mix of school integration, perceived weakness in national defense and thoroughly deserved disgust at Congressional corruption. One of the reasons that Bill Clinton was not able to consolidate a restructured party was because his term in office coincided with the final exit of the Dixiecrats and a wholesale house cleaning of a lot of old machine Democrats. Anybody here remember Dan Rostenkowski? Big Dog was also being rejected by his own party because he represented (as Hillary does now) a challenge to existing power structures. One of the reasons Kennedy & Co. so strongly support Obama is because he has not yet developed a full political entourage and thus another faction's network can be substituted, allowing that faction to retain control even as the leaders age and retire. We're talking politics here, not tiddlywinks.

I have written extensively about the fear of the reemergence of the South as a power center in the Democratic Party and the various strategies being deployed to try to alloy the "West" (note - there is no "West" just as there is no "South") with the Northern tier to neutralize the Democratic Southeast. (Dumb move, in my anything but humble opinion. I myself am left very uneasy by the "F*ck the South" attitude of certain party thinkers, but that is a post for another day.) One of the reasons given for celebrating Obama's ostensible strength in "the West", as demonstrated by some caucus votes (Oh, and when did California, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada stop being part of the West? Just askin'...), is that he will bring the western states into the Democratic fold and thus we can safely abandon the South. In the wilder flights of fancy, you see the liberal elite hoping that the unreliable northern working class can be done away with as well, leaving just us arugula eaters. You're right, it is as incoherent as you think, but that's what we're reading.

That the clothes have no emperor is a realization that people are coming to as they understand the claim to be recruiting new kinds of voters is not holding up when tested through actual elections. The Unity Pony is not quite the fine steed we’ve been told to Hope™ for.

But the other animal in this contest is the Cash Cow, and this is something that The Precious appears to have on a leash. The money issue is fascinating, and may have as much salience as the obsession with driving the Clintons from the party. While I don’t think Obama has managed to create a substantially new voting base, he is clearly trying to control all the money. Whether or not he can do that is another question. It will depend on the outcome of the general election.

The candidate whose appeal is to the big bucks donors (and not always Democratic donors, if the attendees of his Bittergate San Francisco fundraiser is any sign) is now trying to monopolize Democratic cash flow to create the simplest and crudest of political machines, a straightforward cash-exchange patronage system. He’s done some time-honored practices like giving to large sums of money to other politicians’ campaign chests, and handing over donor lists in exchange for endorsements. The new twist (and I have to admit a certain admiration for the sheer chutzpah of it all) is to demand that his donors not provide money to any other outlet than himself so that he can be the Godfather of campaign funds, dispensing it to reward loyalty and punish defections and opposition. You do business with us and only us or else (sound of knuckles cracking). Got it? It does fit well with the bully-boy tactics we’ve seen in everything else this guy has done.

The demand that other modes of political communication and action be denied operating funds is savvy in several ways. It makes Obama the arbiter of political viability. It boosts the power of his message by reducing the number and efficacy of competing voices and alternate views. It enforces loyalty to his agenda, preventing an internal opposition from forming. In its structure, it is the same as the Republican’s K-Street project, a shake-down racket.

Hmm, maybe The Precious should have been a little more specific about exactly which Republican ideas he thought were so good.

The DNC has struck a Faustian bargain with Obama over this money. They have cast their lot fully with the Obamacans to root out the Clintons and to gain access to the cash cow. Here’s the problem with that bargain, which I’m sure is really kicking in about now. The drive to destroy a wildly popular candidate is drying up the donations that would otherwise have been coming from Clinton supporters, which will make the DNC and similar party organs increasingly reliant on the Obama ATM, which demands greater loyalty in exchange for the operating capital. The more aggressively Hillary is demonized, the fewer independent sources of funding and the more dependent the party is upon The One.

Dean has bet everything on this one horse, not just an election but the future of the party and the cohesion of the constituencies under the Democratic umbrella. As all of the contests since early March have demonstrated, money can only buy you so many votes. The rest you have to earn. If Obama gets the nomination and is defeated in the general, it is unlikely he will be able to maintain his hold on the donors, who want access to power, after all. It is unclear what condition the party would be in after such a defeat having tied its fortunes so closely to this single candidate.

Anglachel

Responses

What great comments the last few posts!

Anyone who wishes to contact me directly: look in the right hand menu for the link Romenna under "Other Stuff". Go there and fill out the Contact form. It will get to me. You email will not be shared or sold. However, you may or may not get an answer depending on what you put in the comments.

lakelobos offered interesting objections to the post Democratic Blind Spots. (One question to you is, if you are a newcomer, where do you hail from?) He notes: "Obama seeks, in my opinion, to replace the old guard, never mind that its leaders Kennedy and Kerry jumped on the Obama band wagon, and totally ignores Hispanics, border states and, of course, working class voters."

I don't think this is in conflict with my claim that the old guard is trying to prevent the rise of a new power center. Obama is not necessarily playing the same game as his ostensible backers. Yes, I'm sure he would like to replace all power centers with his own even as it is not clear exactly what he would do with it, but as I pointed out in What if No One Comes to the Revolution, I have yet to see that his machine is as effective as is claimed. The proof is in the pudding and all his voter registration and fund raising isn't turning into any significant electoral advantage for him. He is talking a good fight, but it's kind of like his policies, lacking detail and muscle. Thinking several jumps down the game tree, it is just as likely that the current power brokers are using him exactly as the Republicans hope to use him - to knock out the real threat to their power and then get rid of the lesser annoyance at their leisure. Call it the "Fall Guy" theory.

The brass ring for the Democrats is the southwest. It is the core of the "forget the South" contingent led by Tom Schaller. He rightly sees that the Democrats need to capture the growing power of the Hispanic vote, but he sees it as a replacement for white Southern votes, a way to permanently exclude the South from the Democratic Party. This maintains Northeast/northern tier dominance of the party for a variety of reasons. The biggest reason is also unspoken, though present if one reads between the lines, and it is singularly unpleasant. Mostly, the overriding desire is to prevent Southern leaders from gaining power within the party. Why? Same roots as CDS itself. All of this ignores the data that Krugman and others have presented about working class white voting patterns, not to mention the analysis of politicians like Jim Webb, who see dismissal of this winnable voting block as a sure way to minority party status.

Then Hillary proves heself to the NE elite's worst nightmare - she gets all the people except the wine-trackers themselves. She can form the Hispanic-Hillbilly coalition and move the power center of the party south of the Mason-Dixon. Were it not for Obama, the AA vote would be solidly behind her as well and there really would be an unstoppable Democratic steamroller. (Side note - the one group of Democrats most in favor of a unity ticket - that means the group who most wants to see Hillary on the ticket - is African-Americans. Obama's strongest and most dedicated supporters have the least problem with Hillary. I think this proves my contention that most AA voters are choosing positively for a favorite, not choosing punitively against an opponent. Eat my shorts, Blogger Boyz.) Long term, I think consolidating the southern tier is the only way to ensure long-term viability for the party, but it is going to mean a shift of leadership away from the Boston to DC corridor.

lakelobos also objects to my use of the term Left. I see your point, but we are also in a struggle for exactly what will count as "Left" in this country. The US Left is more centrist than I might like (being one of those creative class types and all full of book learnin') but more to the point this is the ground on which American politics is fought, to prevent it from being dragged off to the Right. US political theory and practice has always been practical and commercial, and is subject to the virtues and vices of that orientation. It makes for social stability amidst social dynamism, but it means a constant listing towards imperialism in the power centers.

To wrap up, while there is deep hatred of Hillary (even more than of Bill) among the Best & Brightest, something that is an ugly mix of misogyny, class arrogance and loathing of "white trash", I think the stonger political feeling among the Stevensonians is resentment. I've been chastised (stupidly) for talking about AA identity voting for Obama, even as I've said repeatedly that this is not a pernicious phenomenon even as it may frustrate the livin' bejeezus out of HRC supporters. What is not so obvious is that the wine-track is doing class identity voting when going for Obama; there are a lot of bitter, resentful "creative class" voters out there, clinging to their overly inflated opinions of their cultural and intellectual superiority. This is what is oozing out of their diatribes against Hillary supporters as well as against her. The recent posts by Bowers, DDay, and others of that ilk crowing about the triumph of Whole Foods shoppers to rule the world has always been there. It's just been coded and disguised with a lot of hooey.

Anna mentions something I had not considered, but which rings true on a number of levels - that there is more than a little pattern of the Clarence Thomas hearings in the curent contest. I don't want to push the comparison too far, but her core observation is right on the money: "Any and all criticism of the nominee is discounted as suspect racism and the woman trying to report reality is demonized with glee. "

OrionATL talks about how Mark Warner is kicking off his senate campaign - by going to the western hill country of Virginia. Right into the middle of the people the Democrats are supposed to reject and give up on because they'll never support "us". And, yes, I know which "Mudcat" you meant. ;-) Saunders is a favorite aggravation of mine. Orion also reminds us here that there were slavery opponents in the South, and they tended to be the ancestors of the people now being dismissed as irredeemably racist.

Ivory Bill Woodpecker, please remember that a lot of people who visit this blog, not to mention the prickly Anglachel herself, are card carrying, wine chugging members of the creative class, and most of us were shiftless, irresponsible college students in our glory days. What else is blogging but trying to recapture the joy of spouting off all sorts of nonsensical things and being judged clever for doing so? Just as there is no monolithic "bitter white working class," the unity of the Stevensonians is greatly exaggerated. Raise a glass of your favorite libation (I'm drinking a nice Rhone at the moment) in honor of people who think, no matter how much education has been thrown at them.

Anglachel

Patterns of Settlement

For interested readers, here is the Wikipedia entry for Appalachia.

I was most interested by the maps on the page, espcecially this one:


If you compare the areas marked as Appalchia on this map to the US electoral map here on the NY Times, and drill down into the county level information, you will see broad overlap of Hillary's electoral wins with this geographical map. The pattern in South Carolina is hidden in part because Edwards split the vote with Hillary in those counties.

While I'm focusing on this one group at the moment, similar voting patterns can be found among non-Anglo working class whites, those who made up the great post-Civil War immigration wave and who became part of the urban machine politics on the eastern seaboard and throughout the Midwest. These immigrants were from Eastern and Southern Europe, with large numbers of Catholics and Jews compared to the existing populations in the US. They were considered "unassimilable" by many and acceptance of them into electoral politics, much like the inclusion of women, was often mixed in with anti-Black sentiment, i.e., bring them in to vote the Blacks down and out. The use of racism to gain the franchise for women stands out as the lowest point in battle for women's rights.

In the upper Midwest and plains, immigrant populations were more often German and Scandanavian than Scots-Irish or East/South European. These populations, especially the Scandanavian, were the major ethnic groups to settle the Pacific Northwest. This is the heritage on both sides of my family, my father's family being predominantly German (he had cousins who were taught in German speaking public schools), with an admixture of Scots-Irish. His maternal family, however, was French-Canadian. On my mother's side, her maternal family was Ukranian-Germans (settled in the Ukraine by Catherine the Great) plus some Jewish admixture no one admitted to. On the paternal side, pure Swedish. South Dakota, Wisconsin, and Nebraska.

In California, it all mixed together. The dust bowl, which blended the Germano-Scandahoovians and the Hillbillies into Okies, sent them all to the Central Valley, especially Bakersfield. On my husband's side, the Portuguese who didn't go off to make their fortunes in Brazil either settled in the fishing and whaling towns of New England and spread inland (New Bedford, Somerville, Fall River), or else decamped for Califonia, where they dominated the tuna industry in San Diego, could be found in every fishing port, and the steadily took over the dairy industry from the Danes in the Central Valley. Yup, there were a bunch of Danes settled in California by the turn of the century. Plus the Armenians. Of course, there was already a large Hispanic population all along the Camino Real, which stretches from San Diego up to San Francisco. Oh, and don't forget the Russians! They settled in northern coastal Califonia for the sea otter fur trade.

After WWII, California in general and LA in particular, became the place to move to - sun, sand and surf. The children and grandchildren of all the previous waves of immigrants to the nation created a new internal migration, looking for the military-industrial complex jobs that dominated the LA region and much of San Diego during the Cold War. If you are a fan of Walter Mosely and the Easy Rollins books, then you know about the AA move to LA at the same time and what happened in the following decades.

In California, there has always been a substantial Chinese and Japanese population (enough of the former to inspire massacres and crushing immigration restrictions, enough of the latter to lock up in concentration camps and steal their considerable property in WWII), plus Pacific Islanders and Filipinos. The Asian migration to the US is very much a West Coast thing, though Hurricane Katrina revealed the substantial and growing Southeast Asian population in the Gulf Coast, badly hurt by the destruction of their fishing industry.

My brother's wife, who is Mexican, has a grandmother who was born in Chicago, part of the long standing migration of Mexican families to meat packing centers, with the men working in the plants and the women working in domestic jobs. The Hispanic population along the Mississippi River and its tributaries may be growing, but it has been there a very long time. While California and Arizona may get the bulk of the spotlight about illegal immigration from Mexico, every growing region of the west has significant Hispanic migrant worker populations, foreign and US born.

No particular point here except to talk about what the US working class looks like and how it got to where it was going.

Anglachel

Back Online

We've been having work done in my study (and it is now painted a lovely shade somewhere between salmon and melon) which has meant my computer has been under a plastic drop cloth the last few days. Also, one of the connecters on the coaxial cable was broken, so there was no InterTubz in Casa de Anglachel yesterday evening.

While I'm catching up on my politics, please take time to visit some of the fine blogs listed to the right. I've added a few new ones that have caught my fancy lately. Give your traffic to people who are fighting back against the homogenization of Left Blogistan by offering insightful, cogent, cranky and challenging views. The Blogger Boyz have abandoned any pretense of being part of independent political thinking, so here's where it's at. I have a short blogroll, so be sure to check out the sites these other bloggers link to. There are amazing treasures out there, waiting for you.

Anglachel

This is What a Democrat Sounds Like

Jeralyn at TalkLeft has linked to a long and fantastic interview Hillary did with the Indianapolis Star.

I'm not embedding it here, but I encourage everyone to go over and watch it and post some comments at TalkLeft. (watch out for funny play controls on the player. You have to click the "On Demand" button.) I rarely watch online videos, but I sat enraptured for the hour or so that it ran. I lost track of time. Good grief but this woman is impressive! Some take aways:

• China. Holy shit. The US is in for some serious trouble if we don't get on the ball with regard to this country. Hillary's run down on the nature of our relations with China (political, economic, military) left me with my jaw on the floor. She really does know this stuff inside and out and knows exactly how to relate it to the specific audience she is addressing. When I read sneers about how she is just pandering to the audience, I have to reply, No, doofus, she is educating them. She is making them aware of things in the nation and the world that they may have wondered about but did not understand in context. She pointed out how our economic and national security are threatened by talking about a plant in Indiana that produced industrial magnets for the military - until it was purchased and moved to China. Hello? Why is anyone surprised that working class voters listen intently at her speeches and like what they hear?
• The "young vote". She was challenged about how she's not attracting young voters. She pointed out that she has won the youth vote in California and Texas (thank you Latinas!) and has been on parity in other states. She also turned the question back on the reporter by identifying the class divisions within this group, talking about young working families, people who are not in college, and people who have joined the military often to save money for college. Not every youth" is a white male philosophy student from Notre Dame, y'know.
• Bill's role in her administration. In this one, she did a subtle push back against the "serving tea" nonsense Obama tried throwing at her. She spoke about the ways in which presidential spouses have always been confidants and advisors to the office holder, a person whose opinion is valued and trusted above all others. She also said she would send him around the world to be an ambassador to repair the damage done by W and restore the nation's standing in the world. Yup, Big Dog's a rock star.
• Party unity. Hillary gave an impassioned defense of unity, refusing to accept a reporter's challenge about the divisions in the party. She noted that she was a personal friend of John McCain's and respected the man greatly. Then she said, "His ideas are simply wrong." She honored the person while contesting the policies, which is the only way you can fight this guy - on substance. Then Hillary said what a true Democrat does:

  “Anyone, anyone, who voted for either of us should be absolutely committed to voting for the other” in the general election, Clinton said during an hour long meeting with The Indianapolis Star Editorial Board. “I’m going to shout that from the mountaintops and the valleys and everywhere I can, no matter what the outcome of the nominating process is.”
  
  ...“no matter what the differences are between Senator Obama and myself, they pale in comparison to the differences we have with Senator McCain and the Republicans.”

  Damn it, Hillary, you better win this thing because you are an incredibly persuasive speaker.
• Policy differences. She reels off three broad areas of policy in which she differs from Obama (who she kept calling Barack throughout the interview. It was very sweet and big sisterish.) and why her positions were better for the country. What are they? You'll have to listen to the interview. ;-)
• Iraq timeline. She was asked if she would change her timeline for withdrawal if the situation on the ground changed. She said "NO." and then explained why the the time for US involvement was through. This is a stance she got directly from Wes Clark, who was my choice in the last presidential round and whose name has been bandied about as a possible VP choice. I personally think he is aiming for head of the NSC.

So if you haven't seen the interview, head on over and settle in with some popcorn and scotch for a really impressive hour with one of the smartest, most on the ball, most qualified presidential candidates you will ever see.

Anglachel

Much Better Than I Can Say It

Two articles today get to the heart of what I've been trying to say for the last month, but haven't been able to pull together. I'm offering extended quotes because what these two have to say is important.

First is Michael Lind's brilliant piece in Salon, The Rubes and the Elites. He engages in some reasonably straightforward political science cross-cut with sensible sociology and comes up with a calm explanation of the voting patterns we are seeing in the campaign. If you don't subscribe to Salon, you may need to sit through an ad to read the article. Believe me, it's worth it. Some key paragraphs:

The events of the past few days are additional evidence of a profound rift in the Democratic Party, one revealed in the differing constituencies of the two remaining candidates. One story, told by Obama backers and the mainstream media, holds that there is a white racist problem: The Democratic Party is deeply divided between anti-racists (that is, supporters of Barack Obama) and racists (Democratic primary voters who preferred Hillary Clinton or any candidate other than Barack Obama, particularly the working-class white men who are often described, in zoological terms, as "white males"). The other story, which has yet to be told, holds that the difference between the constituencies of Obama and Clinton has little to do with race and reflects instead long-familiar regional and cultural splits among whites in the Democratic electorate. The prospects of the Democratic Party in the fall depend in part on whether these rifts can be healed.

The path of least resistance for liberal journalists and bloggers is to respond to these disturbing numbers by demonizing less-educated white Democrats. That is easier for them than to grasp the idea that these voters might actually like Hillary Clinton. One theory holds that "low information" voters, ignorant of the candidates and the issues, favor Clinton because of name recognition. But contrary to the progressive mythology about "low-information voters," a March Gallup poll shows that "both Obama and Clinton have near-universal name identification across all educational levels."

Even more common has been the claim by many supporters of Obama that the Clinton campaign, by means of subtle appeals to white racial prejudice, has attracted a large number of bigots who oppose Obama because he is black. The "race baiting" is alleged to have consisted of Bill Clinton's comparison of Obama to Clinton's friend Jesse Jackson, and Hillary Clinton's praise for the civil rights efforts of Lyndon Johnson, which, it was said, denigrated the achievements of Martin Luther King Jr. Since when have white race baiters praised Jesse Jackson and LBJ?

To judge from Obama's several statements on the subject, he sincerely believes that working-class whites, lacking the self-awareness to recognize the actual economic origins of their distress, seek relief from their pain by praying in church, slaughtering deer, and making illegal immigrants and imports from foreign countries scapegoats for ills that have nothing to do with immigration or trade. They may not be racists, they may even be sympathetic victims, but they are too irrational to understand their genuine problems and their true interests, which are chiefly economic, a fact that university-educated progressives in big cities and college towns can readily perceive.

Whether the "bitter" controversy helps Hillary Clinton win enough votes in the final primaries to beat the odds and win the Democratic nomination remains to be seen. At press time, she was surging in the polls. One thing is certain: In the fall election, John McCain, whoever his Democratic opponent might be, will portray himself as the candidate who defends the dignity and pride of working-class and lower-middle-class Americans of all races against the disdain of elite liberals. Unfortunately, many progressives will make that task much easier by repeating the litany of contempt: Rubes. Rednecks. Retro.

The other post of the day is from the incomparable Bob Somerby. A blogger before the term existed, Bob takes no prisoners on the electoral impact of elitism on Democratic Party prospects:

Truly, it has been embarrassing to watch some liberals attempt to come to terms with this matter. Just as an obvious matter of fact, condescension toward average people has plagued progressive movements at least since the late 1960s, when Dr. King stopped being the public face of progressive change and various Middle America-trashers took his place in the public imagination. (Abbie Hoffman, for instance.) In his brilliant public ministry, Dr. King confronted people who turned dogs and hoses loose on children; blew up churches where children were praying; threw him in jail on tortured pretexts; and eventually chased him down and killed him. But quite aggressively, Dr. King refused to deny the soul of the Bull Connors—of those who behaved in such fallen ways. Within a few years, it became possible to tag progressivism with the face of those who loudly showed the world how much they hated the mores and life-styles of their horrible mommies and daddies. From that day to this, progressive politics has been damaged by a sometimes-accurate perception—the perception that progressives and liberals are a bunch of snooty snobs

In fact, progressives sometimes are snooty snobs. We love to display our cultural and moral superiority to those whose values or instincts may differ. We love to call them xenophobes, vigilantes and racists. We love to ridicule their religion (just read the comments whenever Amy Sullivan posts). Indeed, Bob Herbert starts off this morning’s column by giving vent to this very instinct. This is exceptionally sloppy exposition—and it’s probably very bad politics:

HERBERT (4/15/08): Maybe Barack Obama felt he couldn't afford to give the correct answer.

He was asked at a fund-raiser in San Francisco about his campaign's experiences in the run-up to next week's Democratic primary in Pennsylvania. One of the main problems, of course, is that he hasn't generated as much support as he'd like among white working-class voters.

There is no mystery here. Except for people who have been hiding in caves or living in denial, it's pretty widely understood that a substantial number of those voters—in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and elsewhere—will not vote for a black candidate for president.

“There is no mystery here,” Herbert says, betraying the confidence of the elitist. (In his first sentence, he modestly acknowledges that he knows “the correct answer.”) And then he makes a sweeping (if imprecise) assessment of the souls many people; “a substantial number” of Pennsylvanians won’t vote for Obama because of his race, he says. Later, he leans down from the mountaintop, saying this: “No one has an obligation to vote for Mr. Obama, and it's certainly not racist to vote against him.” Gee, thanks! But wouldn’t you know it? Right at the start of his piece, he seems to say something quite different.

Are there people in Pennsylvania who will vote against Obama due to race? Presumably there are—although, in fact, there’s plenty of “mystery” about how “substantial” the “number” might actually be. But at least since the late 1960s, many progressives have behaved just as Herbert does here. It’s our first instinct! We start by attributing the worst possible motives and attributes to wide numbers of everyday people—people whom we’ve never met. What exactly does Herbert mean when he says “a substantial number” of Pennsylvanians won’t vote for Obama due to his race? There’s no way to know for sure—but his formulation seems to take everyone in. This formulation—the first thing he offers—quickly makes everyone suspect. “There is no mystery here,” he says—although, of course, there is.

Unfortunately, many “progressives” simply can’t understand the nature of this decades-old problem. They can’t understand why it’s bad politics (and basically foolish) to ridicule people for being religious. They don’t see why it’s bad politics this week to build jokes around the word “gun-toting.” A few months ago, they didn’t understand why it was morally obnoxious (and vastly stupid) to accuse everyone in sight of being a slobbering racist. Sergio Bendixen, for example—so accused for answering a question he’d been asked about a delicate subject. They could tell that Bendixen was a big vile race man—and that others had conspired with him!

To all appearances, some men get into comedy so they can ridicule women from a stage. Similarly, some people seem to become progressives so they can forever parade about, telling the world about their moral superiority to all the unwashed rubes. For them, progressive politics is about name-calling. A movie is playing in their heads. In this movie, they and their friends are the very good people. Mommy and Daddy are not.

We’d be inclined to say that this political/moral problem began to afflict progressive movements in the late 1960s. And uh-oh! In the last few days, conservative columnists have sometimes shown that they know this terrain rather well. This morning, George Will goes back to FDR to illustrate this liberal problem. We won’t necessarily go along with his assessment of Adlai Stevenson. (He works from a few offhand comments here.) But as a general matter, we think he’s uncomfortably close to the mark as he describes “liberalism's transformation since Franklin Roosevelt:”

WILL (4/15/08): What had been under FDR a celebration of America and the values of its working people has become a doctrine of condescension toward those people and the supposedly coarse and vulgar country that pleases them.

When a supporter told Adlai Stevenson, the losing Democratic presidential nominee in 1952 and 1956, that thinking people supported him, Stevenson said, "Yes, but I need to win a majority." When another supporter told Stevenson, "You educated the people through your campaign," Stevenson replied, "But a lot of people flunked the course." Michael Barone, in "Our Country: The Shaping of America From Roosevelt to Reagan," wrote: "It is unthinkable that Roosevelt would ever have said those things or that such thoughts ever would have crossed his mind." Barone added: "Stevenson was the first leading Democratic politician to become a critic rather than a celebrator of middle-class American culture—the prototype of the liberal Democrat who would judge ordinary Americans by an abstract standard and find them wanting."

Many “shirts-and-skins” players will reject any words spoken by Will and Barone. But in this matter, Will and Barone are uncomfortably close to right—and Robinson and Cohen seem largely clueless. But then, conservatives have long understood these matters better than “progressives” have, thereby gaining electoral advantage. Often, they have overstated or misstated particular claims, with mainstream journos playing along. (How dare Kerry go wind-surfing?) But they seem to understand the terrain better than liberal counterparts.

Elitism isn’t about what you do. It isn’t about how much money you have. (FDR was wealthy.) It’s about the things you think and say about those small-town or working-class rubes. Some progressives have shown, again and again, that they simply can’t understand this distinction. Will Obama’s remark cost him votes? We don’t know; we hope they won’t, although we’re beginning to get concerned about his rookie mistakes. But if they do, it will be because there have been so many such remarks, by so many other people, remarks which often weren’t off-hand comments. This has been a major problem for many years; some liberals still seem to lack the first clue about what the problem consists in.

What so many Obamacans fail to get from the SF statement is that the truth or accuracy of whether people are bitter isn't electorally significant. The impact is whether those so described believe the Democratic candidate is the one who is going to do something concrete to aleviate their situation, and whether they will do so with respect for the humanity and dignity of the person in need of help.

So far, the answer appears to be "No" where The Precious is concerned.

Anglachel

Bunker Mentality

[Updated to clarify final paragraph.]

Big Tent Democrat of TalkLeft posted this morning a not entirely rhetorical question asking if the A-list Blogger Boyz (poster child – Josh Marshall of TPM) hate Hillary Clinton so much that they would destroy the party to guarantee her defeat. Well, duh, of course they would. It’s what they are doing right now. Then they will deploy the excuse used by domestic abusers around the world – you made me treat you like this - to justify the violence done to both.

But this is not an interesting question. I have written for years (since before the 2006 elections) that the “netroots” is not that liberal nor is it a trustworthy political partner to Democrats, so I am 100% unsurprised by what I’m seeing now. If you had been reading my blog all along, you would have known this as well. These guys are easy to explain. They are made up of the demographic most likely to support Obama (young, white, male, college educated, usually with some graduate school, and with enormous upper-middle class earnings/earning potential). These are people for whom political choices rarely have immediate life altering consequences for them. In the case of the Blogger Boyz, they have hitched their wagons to Obama’s star in a very public way. If he fails, he takes them and their credibility with him. Their problems with powerful women I have discussed in greater depth elsewhere.

The interesting question is why people like Howard Dean appear willing to destroy the Democratic Party rather than permit a Clinton victory. What’s up with the party power brokers? There is nothing I have said as a point of analysis on my blog that Howard Dean doesn’t already know. He’s a smart guy even if you hate what he’s doing. What I’m going to talk about is mostly speculation on my part. I’m not trying to address the horse race going on (Simple – count Michigan and Florida and let the chips fall where they may, or else lose by a landslide in November.) , but instead try to understand why we are in this situation without reducing it to individual personalities or the power mad fantasies of this or that individual. Parties do not engage in internal battles like this for simple reasons.

This is also part of my long term thinking about politics in America, and relates to my shifting views of “The South” in the liberal imagination.

I think we are seeing the North/South split among party power brokers, but not so much physical geography as much as “North” and “South” as modes of political thought, clans of political actors, and styles of political strategy. As articulated by outstanding liberal thinkers like Paul Krugman, Mark Schmitt and Rick Perlstein, the major parties have gone through a tectonic realignment starting with FDR and due almost entirely to a reversal in their stances about race and their pursuit of white Southern votes. The Republicans took advantage of the racist exodus from the Democrats and incorporated it almost without modification, whereas the Democrats have declared that mentality as “not us” and engaged in a simple but absolutely necessary rejection of that legacy. However, what the Democrats have yet to do is to articulate the ways and conditions under which we will say “us” and include the South. This is the third act of our multi-generational political drama. Act one was from FDR to LBJ. Act two was from LBJ to WJC. How will the Democrats handle their Southern problem?

The other part of this internal battle (and it is no mistake that we tend to deal with these two issues in tandem), is the tension between the “elite” and the “lunch-bucket” Democratic partisans. The terminology is misleading, of course, and engages in some unhelpful stereotypes. Anyone who is a high-ranking member of the Democratic Party leadership these days could only be considered an “elite” – college educated, professional class, with a higher likelihood than the general Democratic population of coming from that kind of background and of being part of a political family. The dynastic and multi-generational upper class affiliation would be greater in the Republican Party, but it is still present in the Democrats. Perhaps we can call these broad and often over-lapping groups within the party the Truman contingent and the Stevenson contingent. Perhaps we can call it class. As much as North and South look askance at each other, these constituents of the Democratic coalition do not always see eye to eye.

FDR was supremely successful at bridging the class division, bringing workers and eggheads, unions and academia, to mutual advantage in the New Deal, though he did so to a saddening degree by leaving race untouched. The bigotry of the base (and even more so the bigotry of the elite) was left unchallenged in tacit exchange for their support at the ballot box. Paul Krugman goes into a good amount of detail about this festering sore upon the New Deal, and the way in which everyone knew it was going to have to be addressed. Then, LBJ brought down the curtain on that act with the Voting Rights Act. It took a Southerner to do that, someone for whom the experience of racial privilege was not alien or academic and who knew in the depths of his soul why it was so appealing to its beneficiaries. It kept you from the bottom, no matter how low you were, if you had even a sliver of that privilege in your favor. The Republicans’ electoral brilliance stems from the way in which they tied loss of that privilege with liberal policies as such, and held out the (not entirely empty) promise to defend the Southern status quo.

In the minds of the liberal elite, the problems and failures of the progressive agenda could be laid at the feet of bigoted whites, the “Archie Bunkers” of the North, and the “Bubbas” of the South. And there lies the strategic fault line of the Democratic Party, the willingness of a significant portion of the party, and I’m willing to wager the majority of the party power brokers, to see the electoral problem as how to minimize the damage of the Bunkers. The nadir of this strategy was under Reagan with the rise of the Reagan Democrat, when Democratic Party leaders simply could not speak to this socio-economic constituency, and believed the worst of it. Nor were they entirely wrong. The Republicans rewarded this constituency for acting out their worst, most selfish and hateful impulses in culture wars and through Darwinist economic policies. At the same time, the lack of powerful Southerners in the Democratic Party leadership helped to preserve the Stevenson contingent’s dominance of the party. There may have been people like Sam Nunn or Al Gore, but you did not see any LBJ.

Onto the scene came Bill Clinton, equal parts Bubba and Rhodes Scholar, the walking, talking embodiment of where the South, as geography, as history, as cultural imagination, could go. He was the New South. He had the Elvis. He liked fried food and NASCAR and wonkish policy papers in German. He made being “Bubba” OK, even something to be proud of, in a way that called upon culture constructively. I’m not talking about Clinton’s policy accomplishments, as they are a mixed bag, though more good than not, as much as the psychological effect he had on working class America. More than anything, Bill Clinton was an immediate and powerful threat to the power elites of both major parties because he made the South an unapologetic player in Democratic Party politics again.

This scrambled a lot of socio-political narratives, not to mention upsetting various power-broker apple carts. The opposition to him within the party, it always seemed to me, came more from his effect on the balance of power than any policy or even any scandal he brought about. It is important that political cartoonists who hate Clinton, especially those on the left, emphasize him being a Bubba – a hillbilly, a hick, an untutored rube, someone who can’t speak good English, who dresses in overalls, chews on grass stems, and eats varmints for food. Oh, yeah, and he fucks a lot. Can’t forget that. Hillary becomes the foil, an uptight shrew who hates the slob she married and throws things at him. These two brilliant, educated, well-traveled, scary-smart people denigrated as Southerners. Pundits who write critically about the Clintons have no compunction against speaking of them as coming from a lower class than the deserving DC politicos. “Bubba” is used derogatorily, just as the Obama campaign dismissed Ohio voters as “Archie Bunkers.” My point here is not to promote the Clintons (though I think they deserve it), but to emphasize the way in which they are demonized by their own party. They become the embodiment of the old South, the unrepentant, segregationist South, just as northern blue collar voters who challenge the party orthodoxy are labeled Archie Bunkers. Working class Democrats know that those terms are meant as put-downs, shorthand code for “stupid racist we have to cajole through Election Day and can then ignore.”

This is why the current campaign reminds me of 1968 all over again, except that the targets of the high-minded ire are so unlike the caricatures being painted that I’m left going “WTF?” From Hillary herself as some kind of crypto-racist to Hispanic women Ohioans being compared to a 70’s era ethnic white male bigot, it just boggles the mind. The Stevenson contingent has no narrative, no political frame adequate to address the coalition that has formed around Hillary. They are left grasping at what this person represents to people who do not fall into the educated (male) wine-track or the uneducated (male) beer-track. On the other hand, I’m not sure anyone else has a clear concept of this new constituency either. What does it mean that an upper Midwest born, New England educated white woman who lived for several decades in Arkansas and now calls New York home is sweeping border state primaries and also cleaning up in Florida, California and Massachusetts? What part of the Democratic imagination is she setting on fire?

She is creating a new coalition of voters, more diverse than the pundits are really aware of. It is different than the powerfully Southern draw that Bill had, but, given her strength in Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia, southern Ohio, roughly the Appalachian areas plus Oklahoma and Texas, there is definitely a Southern component. It is too easy to write it off as race due to the tremendous appeal that Obama has for AA voters, because it assumes only “Bunker” and “Bubba” stereotypical motivations (race hatred) for her supporters, and not that a large portion of people who would otherwise gladly be counted on her side are motivated by salutary racial pride to support another. Racism and ethnic prejudice exist in this country, but I refuse to reduce the political decisions of the majority of my fellow Democrats to destructive racist motives, whether in Hillary’s favor or in Obama’s.

Stepping back from the current campaign and refocusing on the power plays that must be happening, I get this weird sense of déjà vu all over again. The northeast liberal elite with the help of the Chicago Daley machine is battling against a wily Southern populist who carries a lot of baggage, but is immensely popular with “jus’ folks.” There is no picking between these two constituencies if the party is to remain the majority party in the country. The question is where the balance of power will lie. And I think we’ll have a better answer to that question after the convention, though probably not a final answer until after the general.

What I do know is that to the degree that the base of the party is equated with "The South" in the minds of the Democratic Party leadership and the leftist punditocracy, and that "The South" means Archie Bunker and Bubba, there is no future for the Democratic Party.


Anglachel

Wonking the Vote, Take Two

Great comments, kids.

• The votes per delegate ratio I tossed out was just for ease of calculation. It would probably be something more like 1 per 10,0000 votes or even lower. The ratio has to be low enough that small states can earn a decent amount of delegates, but large states won't have too many. The key is that it is based on actual Democratic Party voters. What we want to prevent is individual voters from being disenfranchised or have their vote be worth less per delegate compared to another voter.
• Awarding extra delegates based on percentage of turnout could be good, too. The top ten turn out states get an extra ten delegates each, or some calculation. My point is to reward states for getting big turnouts, so that would go with the model.
• The primary going to June is a feature, not a bug. Make the candidates work for it. If the nomination is based on total votes, well, every vote has to be counted. No shortcuts. No racking up delegates and cutting off competition. You win based on actual turn-out, not gaming some caucuses.
• The purpose of creating voting blocks is to makes relatively equal blocks of votes available every two weeks, which also prevents front-loading and building up inevitability narratives so easily. A truly popular candidate will be consistently popular.
• Spreading the voting out over a six month period allows plenty of time for vetting and plenty of time for minor pseudo-scandals to be smothered.

The one thing this model does not address, though I'm thinking about it, is how to deal with evenly split electorates based on true popular vote count. If you have two candidates, like this season, then there will be someone who is ahead, if only by a sliver. But what about a three person race, where each has below 40%? That's not so easy to decide because you do need a nominee who is clearly the choice of the majority of the party. Plurality winners are not necessarily strongly supported by the majority of the party. This is why I don't do away with the delegates entirely, because you may need some negotiation at the convention (or before) to achieve a clear and acceptable majority nominee.

One of the purposes of the current system is to exaggerate the voters' decisions specifically to ensure that there is a clear majority winner by the time of the convention so as to avoid the specter of a divided convention. The problem is that it leads to the campaign we see today, where you have one candidate trading in over-valued delegates (red state caucuses) to the detriment of the stronger GE candidate, who wins larger vote totals in key states. The reason you want the latter type of candidate to be the nominee is because the Electoral Colelge is winner-take-all in most states, and thus the person who can rack up large volumes of votes in those places is more likely to continue to do so in the General, where is it always a head-to-head contest. Of course, proportional representation and closed primaries/caucuses would have prevented this situation, too.

Anglachel

Wonk the (Primary) Vote

OK, I fully admit up front that this is kind of geeky, but the spousal unit and I spent dinner discussing voting procedures to try to make the Democratic primaries more representative and providing more opportunities to more kinds of candidates. What else do two former political science graduate students discuss? And it was really interesting! Well, maybe if you were there it would have been interesting. Anyway, here's a modestly wonky proposal to try to bring some order to the primaries.

First, what are the structural/organizational problems of the current primaries? They are too dissimilar in nature (caucus vs. primary, open vs. closed, multi-stage vs. single vote, etc.). They over represent small states, older voters, and caucuses. They are not equally open to participation. They are decidedly stacked against non-establishment candidates with the Super Tuesday blow out. They tend to clump regionally which distorts perspectives. They tend to clump chronologically which causes rushes of contests followed by long lulls. The lack of order encourages larger, well funded states to shove to the front of the line. Voters in states that vote late in the primary usually (though not this year) have no functional say in who gets chosen.

What are ways to address these various issues in a way that will still result in a fair, transparent, democratic election, giving people enough time to view and judge candidates?

1. Close the contests. Unless you are a registered Democrat, you cannot vote. On this, I am adamant. This is choosing our party's nominee. Republicans can stick to their own sorry group of losers. Independents can shit or get off the pot. You want to pick the Dem candidate? Commit to the party.
2. Allow day of election party registration. But we don't want to suppress turnout, so make it easy to become a Democrat. This one is trickier because of the rules different states have about voter registration. My opinion is get 'em in the door and have them put their name on the dotted line. Then hit them up for donations.
3. Establish electoral blocks of states that are distributed geographically and are created based on their Electoral College weight. There are 538 total Electoral College votes. The smallest indivisible EC voting unit is California, with 55 EC votes. Place Califonia as a voting block on its own, then take the remaining 483 and divide them into eight or nine other blocks. Divided by 8 means blocks of about 60 EC votes (there would be a little variation) while nine voting blocks gives you about 54 C votes per, both comparable to California. The idea is to make each round of voting worth approximately the same in tems of general election outcome as possible. Also, states would need to be allocated to represent different regions to reflect the nation's population divesity and to provide opportunities for different candidates to excel.
4. The electoral blocks rotate their position each presidential election season. First year order is chosen by lot, then the first block from this cycle goes to the end of the line on the next cycle. This prevents permanent campaigns in places like Iowa and gives all states opportunities to set the tone, make the difference, and have a good chance of being heard. It also makes the state parties more important in relation to the national party as it will never be clear which state may be the decider.
5. Elections should be held every other week, starting the second week in January. Though it would be preferable to have all the block vote on the same day, as long as they all voted within the week, that would be sufficient. Even with 10 voting blocks, it would be wrapped up before June 1. Besides, we're seeing the phenomenon that the longer the contest goes on, the more excited people are getting and the higher the turn out. I can see voting blocks contesting with each other to see who can claim bragging rights for the biggest turn out.
6. Now, the big decision here is what to do about the primary vs. caucus and small state vs. big state which diminishes the votes of people who are in big state primaries. Rule one is you must have a single contest. No Texas Two-step or Washington Waffling. The next part will take a bit of explaining:

Allocate delegates on the basis of proportional turn out. This means that a delgate is granted for every 100,000 or 15,000 or 250,000 or whatever the threshold number is no matter what state you are in. No gerrymandered districts with the voter in precint 1 counting for more than those in precinct 4. States that want to hold caucuses can do so, but the low turnouts for caucuses will result in a lower delegate count and thuis voice at the national convention. Want more voice at a national level? GET OUT YOUR VOTE.

This offers a poweful incentive to state parties to get people in the door. Candidates will find it tougher to game a system by suppressing votes or trying to appeal to only their own consitutencies. A small state that has a big Democratic presence and a strong GOTV operation, can increase its influence in the national party in relation to a large state, yet big states are guaranteed of having their larger populations be accurately represented. States that are traditionally Republican are made to get off their asses and pump up their communications efforts or be ignored. Less prominent candidates can make inroads in smaller states because it takes the same number of voters to get a delegate as in a large state, where they may not be able to do the big media buys or get the attention of the more popular candidate. Finally, it behooves a candidate to run strongly in every state, as poor turnout and low votes means fewer delegates even if you win. You can't win except by increasing participation.

States have every incentive to engage in massive get out the vote efforts. They begin to contest with each other for delegate representation based on turn out. And, well, that also means you don't know who gets how many delegates until all the votes are in, the total turn-out is tallied, and the delegates apportioned in accord with that. A candidate then gets the the number of delegates in a given state based on what percentage of that state's vote she garnered.

If state X turns out 2,000,000 voters, and they are apportioned 1 delegate per 25,000 voters, there's 80 delegates. Candidate 1 got 45% of the vote, candidate 2 got 35%, and candidates 3 & 4 each got 10%. The delegates are apportioned 36 to #1, 28 to #2, and 8 each to #3 & #4. State Z who decided to hold a caucus the same day only turned out 250,000 voters, so only gets 10 delegates. Caucus states have to report total number and actual vote counts at the end of the caucus, and delegates are allocated to candidates proportionally. In the case of fractional delegates, overall vote allocation in the voting block will determine who gets to claim the delegate. A candidate who is a bigger vote getter across states will pick up the extra delegates as a reward for being more competitive in more contests.

So, that's how I spent my Friday night dinner. What were you up to?

Anglachel

When Wishes Come True

The DNC leadership has put itself into a jam. After fighting tooth and nail to defeat the most popular candidate running, Hillary Clinton, it has found that it has only succeeded in delegitimizing itself and its preferred candidate with a growing number of Hillary supporters.

Unlike the Obamacans, these voters are lifelong Democratic stalwarts, like me. I'm willing to bet that the majority of us were very favorably disposed to The Precious a little over a year ago, and looked forward to a contest of great ideas on progressive programs for the next President. (Hell, I wrote several blog posts defending the guy from attacks on MyDD and FDL (among many places), back when Left Blogistan said Obama was a "DLC shill".) Then we hit primary season, which has become open season on Hillary. I said long before the Iowa caucuses that Hillary was running for president and all the others were running tro beat her. We watched, slack-jawed as Golden Boy Barry and Mr. Goodhair joined forces with Tim Russert and Chris Matthews to trash her with right-wing talking points, as the A-List Blogger Boyz cheered from the peanut gallery.

The decision to disenfranchise Michigan and Florida in favor of Iowa should have set off more warning bells. The Precious has nothing to stand on from a policy perspective, having stolen it all from Hillary and Edwards, only the argument that he is the white knight (ahem) to defend us agains the evil Hillary Mommy Monster. His gutter tactics are justified because "we all know" she'll do anything to be elected, including getting the votes, that bitch! How dare she win New Hampshire and upset the coronation! Time to take her out. When Barry's campaign, with the tacit approval of the DNC, went out in force trashing the Clintons as racists to drive up margins in southern states, HRC supporters knew the fix was in.

A funny thing happend on the way to the honor killing, though. Hillary kept winning the big states and kept garnering the majority of Democratic votes. The Democrats for Life are strongly behind her, and she is drawing an increasing number of Republicans and Independents who appear to actually be voting for her, rather than voting against an opponent. In contrast, the Democrats for a Day ^TM tactic was never anything other than Vote Your Hillary Hatred, and has done nothing to build the party. It was purely strategic and it has run out of steam.

The interesting number to me is the steady increase in the number of Hillary Democrats who are taking the brutal treatment of their preferred candidate and the deliberate and cynical disenfranchisement of Michigan and Florida very seriously, enough that they will not vote Democrat in November. It is the combination of the two that has created the backlash conditions, I think. If The Golden One was simply getting more votes in the same contests, then, yeah, sucks to be on the losing team, but the votes are the votes. However, the fact that the inclusion of these two states changes the math completely and that the votes are being blocked by Obama and that the press is brutalizing Hillary and making shit up and that we need both those states in our column come November and, well, yeah, we're getting pissed.

As I have also said time and again, it all comes down to political legitimacy. A nominee who will not willingly face the voters in all 50 states is not considered the legitimate nominee by a substantial (and growing) portion of the party. As long as The Golden One prevents the revotes, he is the one responsible for delegitimizing the process and will not win in the GE, even if he can bully his way to the nomination.

Thus, Dean has painted himself and the party into a corner. The only solution that will be seen as legitimate is a revote of Michigan and Florida, and Dean is allowing his preferred candidate to block that option. As I've said before (dang, but I'm prescient...) if Obama has popular support, he would welcome the revotes. The fact that he is fighting hammer and tongs to prevent this from happening, despite the support of the party leaders, the pundits, the MSM and an alleged huge advantage in cash, tells me that he knows he will bomb. The frontrunner is on his way to being a has been.

To keep from losing everything in November (and I'm beginning to think we may lose control of the Seante at our current rate), Dean and the DNC leadership are trying to beg/cajole/threaten Hillary into conceding the nomination before she becomes any stronger.

Somehow, I don't think she will.

I want her to make The Precious fight every step of the way in order to teach Howard Dean that a 50 state strategy includes all the voters of all the states, not just those who support Howie's favorite. I want her to continue to stand up for the millions of voters Golden Boy Barry has declared to be untrustworthy and undeserving of a vote because they may not vote for him. And, after Obama's forces descend on the Denver convention in buses chartered by Obama to haul half of Chicago accross the plains, and hold a made-for-the-media "riot" (kind of like 1968 crossed with the Florida recount), and threaten the super delegates into voting for The Precious, I will grimly watch the crushing defeat of Obama, Dean, Pelosi, Brazile, Richardson and all the other idiots who succumbed to Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

This is what the DNC deserves for having turned a campaign to promote our party into a witch hunt to politically murder the person most popular with the Democratic rank and file and the most qualified to lead the nation in a time of growing crisis.

Be careful what you wish for. You may just get it.

Anglachel

Back to 1968

The more I think on the Obama campaign, the less I think of my preferred candidate and the more I think about the party and the course of American politics in my life. My intended post on "the South" in the liberal political imagination is changing on an almost daily basis as a result of this electoral season. What I had once seen as a mostly academic argument between two sets of political thinkers and strategists has taken on a life within the primaries. Knowing I am being too reductionistic here, the anti-Southern faction regards the legacy of slavery and racism an intolerable stain upon the nation, one that prevents progressive governance, and so must be spurned as irredeemable. "F*ck the South!" you can read in blog after blog when the topic comes up. With this primary campaign, I think we are getting a picture o what that stance concretely means when used as political strategy. It means campaigning on racism.

With every electoral victory of his opponent, Obama has intensified his cries of racism and increased his own overtly racialized claims. Casting common phrases, such as a roll of the dice, as racist code. Claiming that his opponent did not shed a tear for the black victims of Hurricane Katrina. Sneering that his opponents supports were Archie Bunkers. Sampling Malcolm X's anti-white rhetoric in Mississippi. The more he is challenged on basic issues such as economic policy and electability, the more he escalates his rhetoric of race.

His speech the other day had a peculiar theme: America's racist past can only be laid to rest by voting for Obama, which would prove that his accusations aren't true. What Obama does with his rhetorical strategy is turn something salutary - a proud vote by the African American population for a competitive AA candidate - into something corrupting - that a failure to vote for him is nothing less than an expression of (white) racism. The fundamental reason you typical white folks aren't voting for me is because you are driven by racism. He presented a peculiarly bastardized version of John Edwards' Two Americas; the enlightened one who will vote for him and the retrograde one which will not. And, by virtue of this speech being made in a primary campaign, the division is one that runs through the Democratic Party, not a marker of distinction between Democrats and Republicans.

This argument reversese forty years of principled, painful, exhausting battles done by the Left to overcome the crippling bigotry that once was ubiquitous. These very battles are the ones he disdainfully dismissed in his interview with the Republican paper in Reno. He returns the Democratic Party to the state it was after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, as though nothing had happened in the party or in Democratic politics since 1968.

Why is his rhetoric so corrosive to the Democratic Party? He has crossed the line from condemning racism as such to declaring individual Democrats to be racists, making this the core of his campaign strategy. Rather than praise the successes of the party in combatting bigotry, he flings reckless smears that his opponent is nothing but a racist, foregrounding that as the common ground for AA support of him and deliberately fanning the flames by casting a possible defeat as white machinations to deny the just rewards of a black candidate. As I said in my earlier post about his legitimacy problem, Obama won't admit that there is any legitimate way to defeat him (perhaps because he himself does not utilize legitimate means and thus projects his own questionable tactics onto others) and, thus, any defeat must have been a dirty trick engineered by the racists in the party.

It is an incredibly incendiary assault. To fail to vote for him is to be racist, an "Archie Bunker." That image is invoked not because Archie was dumb but because he is the American cultural icon of racial bigotry. The growing fury at Obama for placing the party in this position gets turned again as racist backlash, deliberately using the fear of AA anger instrumentally for his own gain - gimme the nomination or your convention will be 1968 combined with the Rodney King riots. The MSM, bless their evil little hearts, are salivating at the thought.

This corrosive narrative is a cold and brutal campaign calculation in accord with Obama's continually demonstrated contempt for anything or anyone who denies him what he wants. He has accomplished what the Republicans alone could not do, split the party itself on race. The Republicans peeled away those who were racist - read your Krugman - and Obama has declared any who oppose him to also be part of that group, rejecting the innocence of any act (she'll do anything to get elected, it's all calculation) that can be twisted into a racialized mode.

Looking at this from a party standpoint, there is political need for acknowledging foolish but not ill-intentioned trespasses, such as Obama's own moronic words about his grandmother, so that errors may be forgiven and cooperation secured. Such a space must also be established so that we can clearly identify what is too much, too far, too destructive, too deliberate, to be forgiven. Finally, there has to be political room in which there can be legitimate disagreement about policies and approaches. If your opponent is not simply someone who holds a different opinion or who has come to an incorrect stance, but is in truth a "monster," beyond the pale of the civic community, then there are no grounds upon which you can cooperate. There is only capitulation. You make enemies of people who should be allies.

Political judgment is missing from the Obama campaign (and the DNC stance) in their calculation that "we" all know the rhetoric and strategy is "just politics," except that you have just declared that I am the moral equivalent of George Wallace in 1968.

The Democrats have already fought those battles and have nothing left to prove.

Anglachel

Fun With the Electoral College

I've found a site which is loads of fun for the whole politically divided family - 270 to Win. It has a lot of fun and informative (OK, fun if you're a political science major...) maps, charts, and displays. The most fun is a clickable national map where you can play what-if scenarios on the upcoming election.

Remember my post from a few days back? I gave a short-hand explanation of the importance of four states in the general election: Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania. Have fun with the map trying to construct a win for the Democrats that has only two of those states in the blue column. If the two you pick are Ohio and Florida, the win is pretty easy. Take one of those two away, and the win gets harder. You have to win Pennsylvania if you lose Florida, and you are going to risk it if you lose Pennsylvania and Ohio, but manage to hold Florida and Michigan.

What is important is what other states you have to line up if you lose Florida. Even with Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, it is possible to lose the national election. And those scenarios presume you hold the west coast and every New England state, plus West Virginia and most of the upper midwest. Dems have to hold all of the upper midwest and win New Mexico if they don't get Florida.

With the news today, it sounds like Obama has lost Florida for the Democrats in the general. Battling against seating the delegation was going to be hard to overcome, but the deliberate interference with conducting a new vote combined with the Wright mess will cost the Dems the margin of victory there. The state overwhelmingly supported Hillary, even when Obama had been running his Democrat for a Day operation since last summer and despite his heavy cable ad buys. Had he agreed to allow Florida to be seated (and fought Michigan on the basis of an incomplete ballot), the antipathy would not be so much. You win some, you lose some. Badly.

OK, now go pull up a window with that electoral map and play along. Set it to the default which shows strong Dem/Rep states in blue/red and the swing states in tan. Take a look at the Obama primary states which are firmly red: AK, ID, WY, UT, NE, KS, LA, MS, AL, GA, SC. These are not up for grabs in this electoral round. There simply aren't enough Democratic voters in those states to overcome the Republican dominance, especially as McCain is recovering from his primary battles. Hillary won the popular vote in TX, so I am counting it in her column, OK and AZ. She will not win Arizona from McCain, and she can contest Texas, which does have a sizeable Democratic population, but it is really, really unlikely she can win it. Oklahoma? Fuhgeddaboudit...

As for the Democratic states, she won CA, NY, RI, MI and MA for 119 electoral votes, and Obama won WA, MN, DC, MD, DE, HI, VT and ME for 44. Added together (and tossing in OR), either of them has a good starting point of 174 votes. I do not think it reasonable to say that either of them would lose the core Dem states, though it is possible that Maine and Michigan could defect, given that Maine ahs some strong Republican ties, and that Michigan voted Republican through Reagan and Romney might end up on the Republican ticket. With Obama at the top of the ticket, especially if Romney is the Rep VP, we could lose Michigan.

OK, now we get to do electoral math.

Illinois will go Democrat, regardless of the nominee. If Obama is the nominee, we lose Florida. Period. If Hillary is the nominee, it is possibly in our column. With a Florida win, Dems are over 200. With a Florida loss, we're two ahead. Let's stick with a Florida loss as that is the most statistically likely, regardless of Dem nominee. That means we must win Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Colorado is going to go McCain. Let's give him NH, too, given its voting history. It's now 195/189, D/R.

NV to McCain and NM to Dem., for no added advantage to either side, 200/194. The Dems hold a slim, 6 vote lead.

WI, NJ and CT go blue. It's now 232/194.

At this point, there are 59 winning vote combinations for the Dems and 36 winning combinations for the Reps. Also, at this point, we have almost run out of states where Obama did well. He has Iowa, where his "blowout" in the caucuses needs to be taken with a big grain of salt due to the nature of caucuses, and Virginia, where heavy black turnout gave him a big win, but where he lost the western counties. Remember me telling you that geography is important? We'll be getting to that.

McCain will win Virginia and North Carolina regardless of the Dem nominee. We are now 232/222.

Iowa will go Dem, regardless of nominee. Hillary is stronger there than you think. 239/222.

This leaves MO, AR, OH, PA, KY and TN. There's also WV, which really should be considered a swing state.

Hillary could win them all, and will win OH, PA and AR, and will flip WV back to the Dem column. 291/247 and the Dems win. If she takes back Tennessee and Kentucky, last won by Bill, it's 310/228. Hillary is immensely popular with white, working class voters in both those states. If she takes Missouri, also last won by Bill, we are at a Dem victory of 321/217. Given the way voters, especially white, female working class voters, turned out in these states for her, I think her chances are very, very good. If she squeaks out Florida, and I think her unwavering committment to the Dem voters there is going to give her a boost, we're talking 348/190. Almost a repeat of Bill Clinton in 1996, and for pretty much the same reasons.

On the other hand, Obama might win PA. 260/278 and the Dems lose. I personally think he won't hold Pennsylvania, and the electoral outcome will be 239/299. Toss in a Michigan loss due to Romney on the Rep ticket and it is 222/316.

Why do I think he loses the states above that Hillary wins? Look at the counties he loses in those states (use the NYTimes site, good county maps). Put the maps togther and you see that he loses the Appalachian counties and the rural white vote. These states, the border swing states, are where he is weakest, weaker than either Hillary or McCain. He was not popular in the Ohio counties where Kerry lost the last election and where Bill and Hillary are popular. He lost the rural white vote in Missouri to Hillary and would lose it again to McCain. Ditto Tennessee. Kentucky will be like Tennessee and southern Ohio. West Virginia is smack dab in the center of that region that isn't that into him - if he isn't popular in Ohio, western Virgina and Tennessee, he won't have any strength in WV.

In short, Obama wins the same states as John Kerry in 2004, plus New Mexico, while Hillary wins all of those states, plus most of what Bill won in his two elections.

That is how the electoral math works out. A super-double-plus-bad economy knocks the wind out of St. John's sails, and people tune out the right wing noise machine on Hillary because yadda-yadda, they've heard it all before. If anything, they get offended on her behalf. No new dirt, no claims of anti-Americanism, no questioning of her loyalty to the nation, plus she will pull the Hispanic vote in, plus she stands to bring out a lot of cross-over female Republican votes. The Democratic core has already voted to support her, even in the contests she has lost.

Obama gets bupkiss outside of the die-hard party loyalists, plus he has to deal with significant defections from angry Hillary voters who will not regard his nomination as legitimate, plus he has to deal with the specter of Rev. Wright (and now we know why the Republicans have been pushing his nomination so hard, don't we?). Hillary supporter protest voters could be as high as 15%, well over the margin of victory in swing states where the bulk of them are located.

In a one-day, 50-state election, Hillary wins all the Dem base and expands it back into Clinton territory. And that's a good thing.

Anglachel