Legitimacy = 2214

Via katiebird posting at The Confluence, Kevin Drum misframes the question facing the Democrats:

But is there really a sizable pool of Democrats in either state who are both (a) so committed to the party that they care about stuff like this and (b) so uncommitted to the party that they’re willing to either stay home or vote for John McCain in November? Or is the argument that activists will be so pissed off that they’ll refuse to man phone banks and knock on doors, thus scuttling Clinton/Obama’s ground game? I’m not sure I get the logic here.

The problem with the way this question is put is that it imposes a false equivalency on the reasons why the different groups of partisans accept or reject the opposing candidate. It assumes that the partisans will stay home or else vote maliciously if their personal favorite does not win.

What Drum overlooks is that a Democrat may care passionately about the legitimacy of the nominee selection process and, as a result of that commitment to democratic principles, may reject the person selected as nominee as having won that in an illegitimate manner.

This also looks away from the nature of the arguments that the different groups of partisans are making. Obamacans will not acknowledge the legitimacy of Hillary Clinton as a candidate. They describe her in obscene and derogatory terms, defame her as a human being, summon culturally loaded imagery to portray her, blatantly and crudely encourage misogynistic attacks on her, and dismiss her supporters as poor, uneducated, bigoted Archie Bunkers. They refuse to vote for the bitch, and have been stamping their little feet about this for years. They would say this regardless of who Hillary's opponent is. Their only formal reed to cling to is Dr. Dean and Donna Brazile said not to count Florida and Michigan, so nyah!

Hillary supporters point to the selection process itself. We point to the caucus system as suppressing participation and resulting in disproportion of voters to delegates in places like Wyoming vs. California. We argue that it makes no sense to refuse to count the votes of Michigan and Florida, two must-win states in the general. We say it would be best to revote those places so as to remove doubt as to the will of the voters. Our arguments would apply without modification if the situation were reversed. It doesn't matter how much we like our candidate or dislike her opponent, winning the votes is winning the votes. Our formal foundation is the principle of enfranchisement.

Let's see if I can put this into terms even Kevin the Determinedly Obtuse can grasp.

The rejection of Obama is not simply loyalty to a candidate, though the dedication to Hillary as a person increases with every ad hominem attack upon her. It is a rejection of the manner in which the nomination is being decided. I may not like my candidate losing, but if it is the outcome of the actual votes in the primaries, I have no formal or objective ground on which to oppose the nominee. If my candidate loses because ballots for her are simply not counted, then I have formal grounds for complaint. I do not have to allege any bad motives on the part of any actor to hold that position. It is a procedural question.

The issue at stake is legitimacy in the eyes of the voters. If the voters do not think a nominee has won that position through legitimate means, then that candidate will lose a percentage of votes, probably enough to cost him the margin of victory.

Pointing to Brazile's rules that Michigan and Florida votes not be counted ignores the fact that increasing numbers of voters do not regard that ruling as legitimate either. There are rules to allow the punishment to be rescinded, but these attempts are being thwarted by Obama in order to not have to stand up in front of those voters and be judged. More than the initial ruling, this refusal to agree to any remedy that empowers the voters to express their political will is causing potential voters to say "No, I won't vote for him under these conditions." There, again, is the different nature of the opposition. While there are Hillary supporters who will not vote for Obama under any circumstances due to the personal assaults he launched on her, there are other voters who will not vote for Obama unless he presents himself to the vote of all Democrats in the primary process. That second group of voters are amenable to having their minds changed by the simple expedient of counting the votes of Florida and Michigan.

If the votes in question can change the outcome of the contest, then those who voted but are not counted will view the outcome as illegitimate and rightly so. In this case, it would mean that the candidate who won the popular vote count and thus is the choice of the majority of the primary voters lost the nomination. A 48 state strategy has not been legitimate since Alaska and Hawaii joined the union.

Kevin misstates the problem in another way as well. By limiting the outraged voters to just Michigan and Florida ("a sizable pool of Democrats in either state"), he ignores the fact that the anger is nationwide because disenfranchising those two states takes away Hillary's national majority. If Hillary loses the nomination simply because Florida and Michigan are not allowed to count towards her delegate total, all of her supporters across the country have had their votes discounted. That would be just over 50% of all primary voters and, given exit polls, substantially more than 50% of Democrats. The express will of the voters in all of these states has been dismissed:

• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Florida
• Massachusetts
• Michigan
• Nevada
• New Hampshire
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• Ohio
• Rhode Island
• Texas
• Tennessee

Given current polling, it looks like Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia will also go strongly for Hillary. Indiana looks like it will be another win. She is competitive in North Carolina, though unlikely to win. That's a hell of a lot of voters all over the country who have every incentive not to view an Obama nomination as legitimate if he refuses to risk losing by putting the decision up for a vote.

And, in the end, that is where legitimacy is grounded in the US. While voters can roll their eyes and dismiss the mud-slinging, they want the votes to count. The fact that Obama will not face the voters may be dismissed by his partisans (Teh Rulz! Teh Rulz!), but it is what the uncommitted voters or those who kinda-sorta favor Hillary will make of it that will affect the general election outcome.

Elections are decided by the margins, sometimes by a few hundred votes. If a few hundred Democrats in key swing states decide that they can't vote for Obama because he cheated to get the nomination, there goes the White House.

Legitimacy = 2214 delegate votes. Florida and Michigan must be counted. I'm willing to see my candidate go for a revote in either of those states, even though she could very well lose in Michigan.

Why is Obama afraid of the voters? He has to face them at some point, and it would be better to do so now than wait until November.

Anglachel

Mountain Lion

A little Friday cat blogging to put everybody in the right frame of mind for the weekend. This is my cat playing mountain lion. She has found the highest perch in the house and is waiting for unsuspecting prey to wander by. This is in the master bedroom closet on top of the clothes storage boxes which are on top of the high shelf. How did she manage this? We don't know.

Anglachel

Feel Good Health Care

Paul Krugman, one of the few honest analysts remaining on the left, writes today about the candidates' stances on health care:

Yet the McCain health plan — actually a set of bullet points on the campaign’s Web site — is entirely based on blind faith that competition among private insurers will solve all problems.

As I’ve mentioned in past columns, the Veterans Health Administration is one of the few clear American success stories in the struggle to contain health care costs. Since it was reformed during the Clinton years, the V.A. has used the fact that it’s an integrated system — a system that takes long-term responsibility for its clients’ health — to deliver an impressive combination of high-quality care and low costs. It has also taken the lead in the use of information technology, which has both saved money and reduced medical errors.

Sure enough, Mr. McCain wants to privatize and, in effect, dismantle the V.A. Naturally, this destructive agenda comes wrapped in the flag: “America’s veterans have fought for our freedom,” says the McCain Web site. “We should give them freedom to choose to carry their V.A. dollars to a provider that gives them the timely care at high quality and in the best location.”

That’s a recipe for having healthy veterans drop out of the system, undermining its integrated nature and draining away resources.

Mr. McCain, then, is offering a completely wrongheaded approach to health care. But the way the campaign for the Democratic nomination has unfolded raises questions about how effective his eventual opponent will be in making that point.

Indeed, while Mrs. Edwards focused her criticism on Mr. McCain, she also made it clear that she prefers Hillary Clinton’s approach — “Sen. Clinton’s plan is a great plan” — to Barack Obama’s. The Clinton plan closely resembles the plan for universal coverage that John Edwards laid out more than a year ago. By contrast, Mr. Obama offers a watered-down plan that falls short of universality, and it would have higher costs per person covered.

Worse yet, Mr. Obama attacked his Democratic rivals’ health plans using conservative talking points about choice and the evil of having the government tell you what to do. That’s going to make it hard — if he is the nominee — to refute Mr. McCain when he makes similar arguments on behalf of such things as privatizing veterans’ care.

Voodoo Health Economics

The two key points here are that the current VA health system, which is both efficient and effective, came out of Bill Clinton's administration, and that Hillary Clinton's proposals for universal coverage is the best, most detailed one of any remaining candidate. We can call this the "Be Good" health care approach because it is focused on getting everyone cared for. Hillary actually wants you, personally, to stay healthy.

In contrast, both McCain and Obama offer a "Feel Good" health care approach, because they really don't give a shit about you. They want their constituents to feel good about some bullshit they call plans that we can only hope won't be enacted. McCain wants to feel good that he has kept the free market going and Obama wants to wave his hands in the direction of the idea of maybe possibly someday getting to the point where his "experts" can sit down and discuss the potential for something that could turn out to be health care for people who want coverage, can afford it, and are willing to pay for it. Which doesn't sound a fuck of a lot different than McCain's holy grail of free competition to me.

I walked around with a low grade infection in my lungs for four years, struggling to get through each flu season, playing a waiting game with the insurance companies so that they would treat my pre-existing condition. They would pay kinda sorta for stop-gap measures to treat the symptoms - like sinking a shunt in my chest and infusing me with bags of liquid anti-biotics to stop a blood infection - but would not agree to the surgery that would remove the damaged portion of lung. I have permanent damage as the constant infections and bouts of bronchitis left much of my right lung scarred. It's like having untreatable asthma. I wheeze and choke and cough, but there's nothing to treat, it's all just torn up air passages.

Good health insurance would have gotten me a faster diagnosis and helped put together a treatment plan that included treatment of symptoms before they became life threatening, lung surgery, and rehab.

My parents right now both have chronic health issues that require treatment, with my mother in the worst shape. I have a sibling who needs mental health care counseling and drug therapy to manage depression. My husband's family has similar stories.

One of the reason we older, less "hip" folks aren't impressed with The Precious is because of the aches in our hips, the deteriorating condition of our once youthful forms, and the frustration of dealing with an insurance system whose only desire seems to be to insure that our family's care is too little and comes too late. These are things that affect us materially every day.

We trust Hillary, who cares for her elderly mother and has supported her husband through major heart surgery. She is right there in the middle of all this with us. She has fought these battles before and returns, undaunted, to make it happen for us. She knows what she's talking about, has staked out significant ground, and is determined to add health insurance to the New Deal foundation.

I already live in Obama's world of health care for the lucky to be insured, and I don't feel good about it at all. I want a system where quality insurance is a matter of law, not luck.

Anglachel

Proving the Point

Remember my comments about the way the Clintons are protrayed by cartoonists? Well, here's what I got from Jeff Danziger this AM:

Low class, Bill is a dog, Hillary is smoking a corn-cob pipe, moonshine bottle on the porch, putting words in Chelsea's mouth to say that this is what her parents are like, that living with them is something terrible to be endured, family members you are ashamed to be seen with.

There is a very specific cultural narrative being told with this picture, one that the Washington DC elite (Dems, Repubs, Media Whores, etc.) have been pushing heavily since the day the Clintons set foot in Washington.

Anglachel

Party Animals

Clarification: A few people in comments seem to think I am advocating voting for The Precious should he get the nomination. You haven't been paying attention. I stand behind voting for Hillary for President whether I can fill in a circle on my ballot or if I have to write her in. Under no circumstances will I vote for either McCain or Obama and I hope that other Democrats (hell, Republicans and Independents, too) will do likewise. This post is about reclaiming the Party from the jerks who keep snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory.

My political theory writing is not going to happen in a hurry as there are too many things I still have to work out. It's back to more conventional political blogging for a while.

One of the more foolish phenomenons I am seeing in the blogosphere these days is the huffy declaration that if Hillary isn't the Democratic nominee, the poster will switch their party affilaition to Independent and vote McCain.

Bad move.

I have already made clear that a good Democrat does not vote Republican. What also needs to be clear is that we're talking about long term political power here. You may need to kick the shit out of some party bigwigs and rearrange the organization when they insist that you're a silly, girlie, racist who really shouldn't worry her pretty head about policy, but abandoning the party to these morons is not a politically strategic move.

Howard Dean is the big loser this year. If Obama cheats and bullies his way to the Democratic nomination, he will go down to a Dukakis level defeat in the general, and it's time to change the people at the top due to failure to perform. The price of forcing Golden Boy Barry on the Democrats when he did not win the Democratic vote is to be tossed out in the trash. Dean's inherent promise is his nominee will win the White House and sweep in a bigger Democratic majority. Deliver or move on.

If Hillary continues her fantastic climb in the polls and wins several blowout victories (especially when combined with The Precious being revealed for the weak GE candidate that he is), well, the delegate count gets closer, the super delegates start reevaluating who can really reward them, and we have a winner for the GE. Who then pomptly fires Dr. Dean's sorry ass and puts a different set of amoral bastards in charge of the party. (Hey, I love Hillary, but let's be real about the kind of people who are professional party power brokers.)

If you are disgusted by the political and ethical dead-end the old Northeast power elite , the corrupt Daley Chicago machine, and the idiotic enablers of the blogosphere are doing in this campaign, then the best reaction is to remain firmly attached to the party and support those officals who are not part of the CDS crowd. As long as that pack retains its grip on the party, we will be fated to an unending series of wimpy wonks who lose with such noble grace.

Stay on the mailing lists and send every request for cash back with a sweet comment that your money is going to Hillary (or another pro-Hillary candidate/organization of your choice) as long as the DNC refuses to count all Democratic voters. When you get phone calls for dollars, patiently explain that you will make a donation when the party leadership stops demonizing white working class voters and respects their contribution to the party, kthxby. Find out when your next local Democratic Party meeting is going to be and start attending. It might be aggravating while the Obamacan zombies are still shambling around, but they'll go away soon enough.

Parties are mechanisms for organizing people and making power persist over time. The reason the Republicans can dominate the political scene despite being a clear minority of the population is due in great part to party discipline. The only way to bring about political change is to command political power. The current Democratic leadership is entirely too comfortable with the rut they have settled into, and have shown themselves eager to be the punching bag for the Republicans as long as they can all be buddies after the Supreme Court nominations (thanks Leahy). They won't be dislodged if we leave them in charge.

Institutions, as I've blogged before, are the way we can sustain power over time. We are seeing the surface of what must be a tremendously wild power struggle in the depths of the party. This is a battle that has been going on since JFK and LBJ. It has to do with the fact that Obama was right in a very sad way about the Democratic Party having run out of ideas, namely, a solid idea of how to change the second act narrative of the party into something that does not denigrate its core constituents.

Hillary is asking us to look upon the way in which she endures the slings and arrows from all sides and consider what it means to never give up in the face of calumny, to fight fiercely for something tangible, and to always come back to the fight, for it will always be with us.

Anglachel

FAFBLOG!

FAFBLOG IS BACK!

And the world just got a lot weirder. In a good way.

Anglachel

Resentment

First off, thanks for the comments. Even Turtle's tangential rant on sexuality and family values has sparked several new ideas for me. Reading over these comments and discussing them with the spousal unit over dinner (Question - Do you say dinner or supper to describe the evening meal?) has made something gel in the way I have been trying to sort out what the hell "The South" is to the Democratic Party (past, present, future).

What came through on the comments was a clear strand of resentment against this ill-defined group of political actors and power brokers I labeled "the elite". There's definitely a class element there, even when a poster has him/herself has entered the professional classes. There is regionalism, with both Bubbas and Bunkers weighing in. Gender was everywhere, with the elites consistently cast as male (though not thereby masculine) and the resistence being firmly grounded in Rules of My Mother. Generalities and stereotypes abound, being a hazard of the blogospheric temptation to assert rather than demonstrate, but even these provide things to think about. Don't talk down to us, we're not stupid, we're not racist and we're not irrational. We aren't voting for Hillary because we don't understand all these big tough political decision thingies, because we're closeted white supremacists, or because we're voting with our vaginas.

There is an enormous theoretical write up to follow, which will take some time to organize and set down. Here's the gist:

The Democratic Party and "The South" are inextricably linked. There are a number of political narratives to explain this relationship, stories we tell ourselves about ourselves to understand not just who we are, but who we should be. In this electoral cycle, because of who has run, the Democratic Party is finding itself at the end of a certain narrative, the one that says the failure of the New Deal and the Great Society is to be laid at the feet of poor and working class whites who would prefer to be bigots than to live in a just society. It is a narrative of resentment.

The path to crafting a new narrative that rejects resentment and will allow Democrats to reclaim our Jacksonian mojo leads us through "The South".

Anglachel

Breathing Room

I go to work for one day and a massive debate breaks out in the comments. That'll teach me.

Great comments, great questions, great debates. I am going to have to take some time to read and think about what people have presented. One quick reply to some general confusion - this post was a straightforward thought experiment, me putting down things that have been coalescing for a while but still aren't quite there. I'm not prescribing anything and, strange as it may seem, I'm not really commenting on the current contest except as an instance of a larger and deeper political situation.

Please note that no one has the authority to say "Buzz off," on this blog except me. You post your thoughts, you take your lumps. That said, Chinaberry, I'm asking that you rein in your enthusiasm. Provide space for alternative views and topics not so interesting to yourself personally, and be gracious to the other guests here, just as Hillary would be.

Off to think some more.

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

Distilling Democratic Legitimacy - Updated

Bloggers who are not in the tank for Obama, even those who support him, are converging on the very real legitimacy crisis that the Obama campaign is forcing on the Democratic Party. I am not talking here so much about the party officials as many of them are complicit in this crisis, but about the Democratic Party as an organization necessary for succssful promotion and defense of liberal democracy as such in this country.

A party in power must have legitimacy in the eyes of the voters if it is to act. In order to perform its role, the party must achieve sustained electoral success over time and across geographic regions. It must be able to speak credibly as being authorized by the majority of citizens to enact policies, promote programs, draw up legislation, staff bureaucracies, and utilize public funds in ways that a significant minority of the population does not like. Legitimacy, and thus the authority to take action in the name of the public, must have formal grounds (all procedures have been followed) but it requires something more and somewhat ephemeral - the perception that the procedures were performed correctly and that the outcome is valid. While office can be taken on purely formal grounds, the lack of a consensus that the procedures are valid will obviate legitimacy.

In the current Democratic primary, the campaign fails on both formal and perceptual grounds. The exclusion of Michigan and Florida votes from the candidate vote counts is not legitimate because the rules allow remedies, including revotes, and because one candidate will not participate in attempts to remedy the situation. Thus, growing numbers of voters, particularly those in the disenfranchised states, are protesting that they will not accept as legitimate any nomination that excludes these states' votes.

Whether you support Hillary or Obama, the legitimacy of the Democratic presidential nominee as such is in grave danger:

• Opinion polls consistently show that the public regards the popular vote as the most legitimate measure of a candidate's victory. You win the vote, you win the election.
• Super Delegate votes are no longer sufficient to decide this contest.
• Obama and Clinton must meet the same two conditions: they must present themselves for judgment by the voters of Michigan and Florida and they must secure the popular vote. Hillary has met the former condition. Obama may have met the latter condition, but only through explicit exclusion of almost 10% of all primary voters.
• Should either fail to meet both conditions, even should that person secure the formal nomination, that nominee will not be regarded as legitimate by a significant portion of the electorate, both Democratic and non-Democratic. Thus, just getting the super delegates isn't enough.
• Clinton cannot win enough popular votes (barring some enormous upsets in the upcoming primaries) without Michigan and Florida to secure the nomination. Thus, she has every incentive to promote a resolution that is both in her favor and satifies legitimacy requirements.
• Obama is ahead in popular votes at present, but holds a statistically significant lead only because the vote counts from Michigan and Florida are not included. Despite having a lead in popular votes, he will not be seen as the legitimate nominee unless Michigan and Florida votes are counted/revoted and recounted. He is in a bind because the resolution that would ensure his legitimacy may also result in his defeat if the majority of voters do not choose him.

It is by no means certain that even if Hillary could secure the votes of Florida and Michigan and do so with their current vote distribution she would win the nomination. It is certain that Obama's nomination will be rejected as illegitimate unless he accepts the judgment of Florida and Michigan voters on whether he should be the nominee. To repeat, at this point neither of them can be a legitimate nominee on super delegate votes alone.

Arguing the rules does you no good in the general election if the outcome of adherence to those rules is rejection by the voters.

Updated - In response to CognitiveDissonance in the comments - Even if Hillary drops out, Obama has not met the conditions for legitimacy. When he refused to agree to a revote which would have remedied the situation, that is when he put himself in opposition to the voters of those states. If he "wins" the nomination by forcing her out before those states are counted, he loses the general. In short, Obama has dealt himself a nearly unwinnable hand. At the same time, the only winning strategy for Hillary is to pursue a revote and to decisively win them by at least the margin she won the first time around.

Anglachel

Words and Deeds

Something that pundits and bloggers who are tepidly supporting Obama claim (probabaly to cover up their increasing embarrassment at having made the wrong choice) is that there really isn't that much difference between the candidates, so why is everyone getting exercized about the choice of one over the other? We'll get the same results no matter which one is elected. A stronger version of this, addressing campaign tactics, is that if their positions were reversed, Hillary would be acting the same way Obama is doing, right down to obstructing voting in Michigan and Florida.

Neither of these claims are true.

At the beginning of the campaign, if you didn't ask too many questions, you could say that the top three Dem contenders had roughly equivalent policy stances. Paul Krugman said this, for example. Since then, because he has looked closely, he has retracted this statement and said that HRC and Edwards have strongly progressive platforms, while Obama has a decidedly weaker one. Thus, while it may be true that, on paper, all Dems have better prospective policies than any Republican (Why should this be something to praise? That's a hell of a low bar.) , it matters whose policy actually advances Democratic positions. This is what Krugman was saying before the campaign began, in The Conscience of a Liberal, where he pushed for the Dem nominee to take advantage of the falling fortunes of the Movement Conservatives to get universal health care passed. It is what he said in his Friday opinion column on the candidates' positions on the economy and managing the coming fiscal crisis. Thus, even in formal policy statements, there are significant differences between Hillary and Obama, and not to Obama's advantage. At best, his policies are wishy-washy, milquetoast, poorly done copies of Clinton and Edwards much more progressive papers.

Moving beyond formal policy papers to actual performance, both in his actual legislative performance and even more in his speechees, Obama shows he is not in the same league as Hillary. What on the surface appeared to be a decent legislative record in Illinois is now being shown to be a sham. He is lauded for a single speech given at a local rally before a strongly anti-war audience, and himself claims that this one public statement is a stronger indicator of his political judgment than anything else either he or Hilalry have ever said or done. That he has distanced himself from these words, that he is on public record saying he could very well have voted for AUMF, that his recorded votes on Iraq are identical to hers, that he has a history of ducking controversial votes, seeing which way public opinion is trending, then claiming that he would have voted this way or that, all of this undermines any claim to judgment and even more so to having political courage.

Then there are his many, many statements praising Republicans, trashing Democrats (especially the Clintons), and comparing himself to Reagan. He has said he will consider Republicans in his cabinet and has made recent statements about how marvelously bipartisan he will be in foreign policy. Great, he puts himself on the side of the guys behind Iran-Contra, death squads, circumventing rule of law and expanding the imperial presidency. That's so reassuring.

As for the canard that Hillary would be running the same campaign were she in Obama's place, uh, no. She was in Obama's place, the front runner, earlier on and she did not try to prevent primaries from happening. She did not create training camps to to teach outsiders how to interfere with caucuses and intimidate voters. She did not go around speaking of her opponent as a monster. She did not tell him to drop out because she had it all sewn up. She did not say he was only driven by a lust for power, even as we who watch are increasingly seeing how accurate a description of Obama that is. Not at all. She praised him and all of her opponents. She urges all Democrats to this day to stay with the party, regardless of nominee. She speaks respectfully of Obama as a person even as she criticizes his policies and statements. She pledges to support him as nominee should she not be the voters choice. In short, she is running a strong, pro-Democrat and pro-Hillary campaign.

While she did not strongly support revoting Michigan and Florida at the start, it was not merely that she was ahead in those states. It was because those states had already held objectively valid elections. Michigan's incomplete candidate slate was due to the acts of the candidates who removed themselves, not because they were blocked. The prohibition on campaigning in those states applied equally to all candidates, and Obama broke that rule in Florida with cable ad buys. At no time did she ever say these states should be included because I'm ahead and not including them would change the outcome of the race. At this time, Hillary is strongly demanding either to revote the states or else seat them. She is not blocking the count of their votes.

Obama is campaigning on disenfranchising voters, leaning on an equivocal rule to cover his ass. This is a substantive difference between these candidates - one wants to win election by counting the votes, even if it means doing over the voting, and the other wants to win by disenfranchising voters who might not vote for him. These are not differences of degrees, or matters of opinion. Hillary will take her chances with the voters and abide by their decisons. Obama demands that we not count votes unless they are votes for him. He is arguing that we should not allow these Democrats to participate in anything to do with the party unless it is certain they will not endanger his front-runner status. That they have a right to vote and he has no right to win eludes him.

And then there is all that experience stuff where she's been an actor on the national scene for two decades, knows her stuff inside and out and is putting together teams and programs to address the biggest challenges to the nation, while Obama hasn't even convened his own sub-committee, is taking the cast-offs from previous Democratic administrations, and having losers from previous campaigns bitch about how Hillary is such a meeeaaaannniiieee to him. And then there is that 20 year association with someone who preaches hated of this country.

Words and deeds matter.

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

Krugman Reads His Hillary

Paul Krugman, perhaps the last major columnist with both feet firmly in reality, has a post up today about the candidates. First, he reminds us that he was right about Bush from the start, when other people were wrong:

When George W. Bush first ran for the White House, political reporters assured us that he came across as a reasonable, moderate guy.

Yet those of us who looked at his policy proposals — big tax cuts for the rich and Social Security privatization — had a very different impression. And we were right.

The moral is that it’s important to take a hard look at what candidates say about policy. It’s true that past promises are no guarantee of future performance. But policy proposals offer a window into candidates’ political souls — a much better window, if you ask me, than a bunch of supposedly revealing anecdotes and out-of-context quotes.

Words are not just words. They matter because they will tell us what is buzzing around the inside of that person's brain. Krugman continues, handing out the hardest knocks to McCain, but not sparing the Democrats, either (my emphasis):

Which brings me to the latest big debate: how should we respond to the mortgage crisis? In the last few days John McCain, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have all weighed in. And their proposals arguably say a lot about the kind of president each would be.

Mr. McCain is often referred to as a “maverick” and a “moderate,” assessments based mainly on his engaging manner. But his speech on the economy was that of an orthodox, hard-line right-winger. ... These days, even free-market enthusiasts are talking about increased regulation of securities firms now that the Fed has shown that it will rush to their rescue if they get into trouble. But Mr. McCain is selling the same old snake oil, claiming that deregulation and tax cuts cure all ills.

Hillary Clinton’s speech could not have been more different.

True, Mrs. Clinton’s suggestion that she might convene a high-level commission, including Alan Greenspan — who bears a lot of responsibility for this crisis — had echoes of the excessively comfortable relationship her husband’s administration developed with the investment industry. But the substance of her policy proposals on mortgages, like that of her health care plan, suggests a strong progressive sensibility. ... Mrs. Clinton wants a modern version of the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, the New Deal institution that acquired the mortgages of people whose homes were worth less than their debts, then reduced payments to a level the homeowners could afford.

Finally, Barack Obama’s speech on the economy on Thursday followed the cautious pattern of his earlier statements on economic issues.

I was pleased that Mr. Obama came out strongly for broader financial regulation, which might help avert future crises. But his proposals for aid to the victims of the current crisis, though significant, are less sweeping than Mrs. Clinton’s: he wants to nudge private lenders into restructuring mortgages rather than having the government simply step in and get the job done.

Mr. Obama also continues to make permanent tax cuts — middle-class tax cuts, to be sure — a centerpiece of his economic plan. It’s not clear how he would pay both for these tax cuts and for initiatives like health care reform, so his tax-cut promises raise questions about how determined he really is to pursue a strongly progressive agenda.

Shorter Paul - McCain's a whacko, Hillary knows what's she's doing and is using the power of government to help ordinary people, and Obama is still trying to decide if he's a progressive or just playing one on the blogs.

Paul Krugman is not into currying favor with any administration. He has a day job as one of the most respected economists in the world, and is deeply concerned about ensuring that a progressive get elected. He was an Edwards supporter and I don't think he's happy that his preferred candidate has dropped out. However, he's also very clear that there is only one person left in the race who has a solidly progressive agenda. Now, if only the Blogger Boyz could get over their CDS long enough to be as honest as the person they all claim to admire.

Mr. McCain, we’re told, is a straight-talking maverick. But on domestic policy, he offers neither straight talk nor originality; instead, he panders shamelessly to right-wing ideologues.

Mrs. Clinton, we’re assured by sources right and left, tortures puppies and eats babies. But her policy proposals continue to be surprisingly bold and progressive.

Finally, Mr. Obama is widely portrayed, not least by himself, as a transformational figure who will usher in a new era. But his actual policy proposals, though liberal, tend to be cautious and relatively orthodox.

Krugman not so subtly slaps the elite punditocracy for their disparate treatment of Hillary, not even being willing to engage what this person offers the country on the merits of her positions and policies. I'm sure he will be assailed by the Blogger Boyz for being on a personal vendetta against The Precious for saying the simple truth.

It's the economy, stupid, and what the candidates have to say about how they will fix it.

Anglachel

Democrats on Every Day

A central claim of Obama and his cheering squad is that he would be the stronger general election candidate than Hillary because he would be more attractive to Independents and Republicans than she would be, and that elections are decided on the margins. The unspoken part of the claim is that all Democrats would vote for him without question.

It wasn't a bad argument, per se, and there was some plausibility to it. Independent voters are a notoriously fickle lot, prizing their faux "independence" above political effectiveness and noted more for impulse voting than for supporting a consistent platform. For every Obamacan you can find a Paultard. They don't tend to go for conventional candidates - witness the Independent vote for Ralph Nader over Al Gore. Given that Republicans are the party of racist bigots (Read your Krugman), it was not very palusible that he would draw a significant enough number of Republicans to have an electoral impact. I also thought Clinton was far more popular with the Democratic loyalists than anyone gave her credit for. A Gallup poll back in November (sorry, can't find link) showed that Hillary had a larger group of fully committed supporters than any other candidate. Even so, there were some persuasive points to the claim because of the apepal to Independents.

What was clear from the start of the Obama campaign was that he took the Democratic base for granted. He did not think there could be any defections from it that would make a difference, and so he hasn't spent much time asking for thier support. He has been courting not just weird left-leaning Independents, but aggressively going after right-leaners and Republicans. He has signaled that he won't push for universal health care, that he's willing to revisit Social Security and open it up for changes, that he will have Republicans as cabinet members and senior advisors. He is even refusing to count Florida votes as a way to prevent losing a tenuous lead among delegates. (Ahem...) Amid all the racism calumny thrown at Hillary, it's easy to forget the blatent sucking up to the rightwing in his Reno newspaper interview, bashing Bill Clinton, praising the Republicans as the party of ideas, and admiring Reagan. It is this behavior that makes regular Democrats feel taken for granted if not simply disdained. Whoever is the nominee gets the spoils, as it is assumed even today, so the trick was to pack the primaries with non-Democrats who were recruited to vote against Hillary.

The Democrat for a Day promotion really showed the true face of the Obama campaign. It began in Florida, explicitly trying to bring people in to vote against HRC, but to leverage their CDS in Obama's favor. It became significantly more crude in Nevada, where people were told to change party registration specifically to vote against Hillary. This brought about a backlash, but the measure has continued wherever there was a closed primary. It is being run in Pennsylvania right now, and it is clearly aimed at getting Republicans to cross over and vote their CDS. The key in all of this is the assurance that the party-switcher can easily go back to being a Republican, Liberatarian, Independent, etc., the minute the primary is over. These people were never intended to remain Democrats - they were Obamacans, unconnected to our party.

Party building is not done by gaming elections for a particular candidate (though gaming elections is something parties need to know how to do), it is about increasing voter identity with a party, because the party is what enables policies and programs to be enacted over time. Individuals do not manage governments, parties do, and the chilling effectiveness of the Republicans is due to the party apparatus that supports the candidates. The most simple, long lasting way to build party identification is by presenting and then delivering upon something the voter sees as being in their self-interest. This can be something as reprehensible as segregation, which moved millions of southern whites into the Republican column, or something as empowering as FDR's New Deal, which moved millions of AA's from "the party of Lincoln" to the Democrats.

The recent Gallup poll that is giving the Blogger Boyz the vapors over those evil, back-stabbing Hillary supporters actually puts to rest Obama's claim to be the stronger candidate in the general election. While people are framing this information as showing that HRC's supporters are "more divisive", what it actually shows is that voters of all kinds are more satisfied with HRC as the Democratic nominee than they are with Obama - including AA voters. If Hillary is the nominee more people will vote Democratic, including more Independents.

Contrary to the frothing, CDS-afflicted pundits, Hillary holds on to the constituencies most prone to defection within the Democratic Party (Regan Democrats, male voters) better than Obama and she will retain a higher number of Independents. These are the largest parts of the Demoratic electorate. While I have no doubt there are a non-trivial number of Obama supporters who will not vote for Hillary, especially after the pounding alleged leftists have been giving her, she starts by retaining larger portions of the parts of his constituencies likely to vote Democratic (and thus whose defections would erase possible gains among Independents), which means she has less ground to make up among Democrats themselves.

When this factored into the clear advantage she enjoys over him with states that can deliver the electoral votes, the general election argument no longer holds any water. The reason she does this is because she is running as a Democrat on every day, not simply an opportunist looking for a way to fiangle his way to a questionable nomination. Her devotion to the party, her willingness to fight for it just as strongly as she fights for herself, is what gives her supporters confidence that she in unafraid to take on the tough battles for us - universal health care, shoring up the economy, restoring the honor of our nation around the world, protecting civil liberties, and improving the lives of ordinary people.

Who knows? If Obama had not been so eager to fellate the corpse of Regan in exchange for a few cross-over primary votes, maybe Democrats would be more inclined to give him their votes in the general.

Anglachel