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

Democratic Blind Spots

At this point in the primary campaign, there isn't a lot of doubt about what the primary contests themselves will hold. Hillary has a chance to pull a slight upset in Oregon, as rural voters and a growing number of voters in the greater Portland area are leaning towards her. I'm also curious to see what the Montana primary margins end up looking like. Other than those two details, the rest of the campaign is Obama getting his arrogance handed to him by the voters.

I will simply repeat what I've been saying for weeks now: Hillary = nominee = victory; Obama = nominee = defeat. Neither candidate has enough pledged delegates to get to 2209 votes without super delegates, so it is up to the SDs to decide the fate of the party in this electoral cycle. The nominee isn't the person with the most at a certain point in time, it is the person who first hits 2209.

What does interest me greatly is watching the modern day "Best and Brightest" come totally unhinged over Hillary's candidacy. No, really, this is a fascinating sociological study that is confirming themes and thoughts I've been writing about since long before this particular campaign. It has to do with the fault lines in the Democratic coalition as such and the difficulty the two major strands - Stevensonian and Truman/Jacksonian - have trying to keep the coalition together. It's all further complicated because of the way in which non-white ethnic groups brought into the coalition since the New Deal do not fit neatly onto what is fundamentally an argument among the "whites" about class privilege and distribution of socio-economic power.

I was sent a link to an article written by Sen. Jim Webb about the Scots-Irish in America and the way in which the current Democratic Party is failing to appeal to this group. It is a short piece that does not candy coat anything. Here are key paragraphs, but be sure to read the whole thing:

The Scots-Irish comprised a large percentage of Reagan Democrats, and contributed heavily to the "red state" votes that gave Mr. Bush the presidency in 2000. The areas with the highest Scots-Irish populations include New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, northern Florida, Mississippi, Arkansas, northern Louisiana, Missouri, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, southern Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and parts of California, particularly Bakersfield. The "factory belt," especially around Detroit, also has a strong Scots-Irish mix. ...

The Democrats lost their affinity with the Scots-Irish during the Civil Rights era, when -- because it was the dominant culture in the South -- its "redneck" idiosyncrasies provided an easy target during their shift toward minorities as the foundation of their national electoral strategy. Their long-term problem in having done so is twofold. First, it hampers their efforts to carry almost any Southern state. And second, the Scots-Irish culture has strong impact outside the South. This is especially strong in many battleground states. It is no accident that many political observers call the central region in Pennsylvania "Northern Alabama." Scots-Irish traditions play heavily in New Hampshire -- the only New England state that Mr. Bush carried in 2000. Large numbers of Scots-Irish settled in the southern regions of Ohio (called "Northern Kentucky"), Indiana and Illinois. They were among the principal groups to settle Missouri and Colorado. They migrated heavily to the industrial areas in Michigan, which is one reason that George Wallace, ran so strongly in that state in 1968 and 1972. ...

In fact, the greatest realignment in modern politics would take place rather quickly if the right national leader found a way to bring the Scots-Irish and African Americans to the same table, and so to redefine a formula that has consciously set them apart for the past two centuries.

Secret GOP Weapon: The Scots-Irish Vote
WSJ, October 19, 2004

These words are very different than what we have been hearing lately from the Left punditocracy, yet they are exactly what does need to happen for the Democrats to solidify the promise contained in their large and disparate coalition. The states listed by Sen. Webb include the most crucial swing states. It also shows a fundamental relationship between the Bunkers of the north and the Bubbas of the south, namely in the presence of this ethnic group in the different geographical regions.

As a reminder, my three major themes on Left politics that I try to write about are:

1. The tension between liberal democracy and more radical modes in the conduct of Left politics.
2. The way "The South" works in the Left's political imagination, and how that mitigates against coalitions.
3. With reference to current affairs, what is the effect of the netroots (if any) on the conduct of Left politics.

That ongoing analysis will be my focus from here on out. As I see it, there is a serious power struggle going on within the party to retain control within the old guard Northern tier faction to prevent the rise of a border-state power center that looks to ally the Southwest (Hispanic) with swing state working class voters for a voting block not beholden to Teddy Kennedy & Co.

Anglachel

Percentages, Preferences and Defections, Oh My!

Bringiton (BIO) over on Corrente has posted an excellent article for those of the blogosphere who are unclear on Electoral College math. There are a few great charts there that demonstrate the allocation of supporters by Electoral College - and shows that Hillary won majorities in states with the most EC votes.

What does primary strength show? It is a representation of what is motivating the Democrats and Democratic leaning voters of a specific geographical location. Combined with exit polling and other surveys, you can make some educated projections of how a particular subset of voters is likely to vote in the general. The key that is being left out of the analysis in most situations is what is the balance between Democrat and Republican within a given geographical area?

Here's an example.

If 65% of Democrats in state X vote for candidate #1, this is a clear indication that they are motivated (a social scientist doesn't really care why they are motivated, only that they are) by whatever candidate #1 presents to them. The 35% who were not motivated by candidate #1 may or may not be sufficiently motivated by candidate #1 and/or party affiliation to provide a vote in the next round of elections. Again, we're not really concerned with why, only that an unknown percentage of that 35% will probably defect from candidate #1.

The degree of the defection is something that must take into account why a voter will persist in a preference even when the preference is no longer a low-barrier choice (i.e., on a ballot vs. a write-in). A preference is what is expressed through a direct choice (a conclusive preference) or through the absence of a choice (an inconclusive preference). Thus, someone who did not vote for candidate #1 in the first round can vote for that candidate on the second round, cast a vote for a different candidate on the ballot (low barrier), write in the name of a candidate not on the ballot (high barrier), or else refrain from expressing a preference at all (leaving ballot blank or not casting a ballot). The impact of a defection is made greater if the defection is defection to the opposition, rather than simply withholding support from Candidate #1.

If 55% of all voters in state X are Democrats, then there is a statistical advantage, and the threat of defection from the 35% is reduced in importance - the winning candidate can afford to lose people. With a majority advantage, the strategy for that state can turn to trying to sway unaffiliated and loosely affiliated voters who would otherwise vote Republican. How effective those appeals will be are uncertain and are not monolithic - an effective appeal to one group of swing voters may be ineffective with another.

However, if 55% of all likely voters in state X are Republican, then threats of defection are magnified in importance because now there are two vote deficits to make up. The majority strategy I described above kicks into operation for the Republicans as the majority.

Let’s put some numbers behind this. This is exaggerated in order to demonstrate the concept of relative advantage. I am not trying to represent the effect of converting non-voters into voters:

100, 000 Democrats in state X
Candidate 1 = 65,000
Candidate 2 = 35,000

If Democrats are 55% of all voters (I'm rounding to whole numbers):
Total voters = 181,818
Dems = 100,000
Reps = 81,818
Advantage = 18,182

Thus, candidate #1 would have to lose almost 52% of the first round voters who did not express a preference for them in order to have that defection erase the second round voting advantage. That is an unlikely figure in most elections, even highly divided contests. Defections of double digits are always troublesome.

If Democrats are 45% of all voters:
Total voters = 222,222
Dems = 100,000
Reps = 122,222
Disadvantage = 22,222

Okay, we're talking a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. In this case, any defection from the 35% of first round voters magnifies the existing electoral disadvantage, even if it is single digit defections. Put another way - you can't afford any defections in a state where you aren't the majority, which is why states that are strongly dominated by one party are bad places to invest political resources because there always are defections from your own side. Only if dominance in the other geographic zones is overwhelming can you afford to expend resources, and even then it is usually done so for future strategic advantage.

The short story is that when a party enjoys a strong statistical advantage over another within a state, then the level of defections by the other party does not matter very much because the dominant party's defections won't make a difference. Conversely, the strength of the subordinate party's candidate is also diminished because even low defection rates will not overcome the numerical advantage. Thus, winning a primary in a state where your party is in the minority is not an electoral advantage, even in a landslide win, because that does not change the relative strength of your party in comparison to the dominant party.

The point of a swing state is that neither party enjoys a strong advantage over the other, and thus defections are magnified for each side. In those cases, it matters that the candidate who won the primary is the nominee because of the reduced likelihood of intra-party defection, and because of way in which a winner represents the motivations of voters in that region and may thus attract voters from the opposition whose motivations are most similar to the motivations of their own supporters.

Huh? OK, let me try an example. If the motivation of the voters in state X is the desire to see the economy stabilized, then a candidate who is judged as someone who can stabilize the economy can get the votes from their own party and might be able to peel away similarly motivated voters from the other party if their own candidate is not convincing them on that issue. A swing state becomes swingable only if you are already contesting from a position of strength and can minimize your own defections.

This is at base why Obama is not able to make his primary support - which is roughly equivalent to Hillary's - morph into general election strength. His electoral support comes disproportionately from states where the Republicans are in a clear majority or from swing states where the motivations of his supporters diverge significantly from the motivations of Republican participants and thus he is at a disadvantage for pulling over voters. Trying to make up both the electoral advantage of Republicans and to overcome what looks like an increasing problem with intra-party defection is not a good situation to be in. As I pointed out in yesterday's post, claims that support to overcome both of these vote deficits will come from heretofore non-participating "new" voters doesn't pass the sniff test.Being the preferred candidate of party strongholds increases general election viability because of a reduced likelihood of party defections.

Being the preferred candidate of your party in opposition strongholds carries little advantage unless you can demonstrate (through primary votes) that you can cause significant defections from the other party. Being the preferred candidate of your party in swing states is important because of the ability to motivate greater defections from the opposition while holding on to your own base.

At the end, the question comes down to who will have the least defections from the Democrats while attracting the greatest defections from the Republicans.

Anglachel

Note: Post edited to remove typos and add another sentence to the paragraph discussing types of preferences.

What if No One Comes to the Revolution?

So I've been reading that the Sippy-Kup Kidz (those who cart around their kups of kool-aide and suck on them constantly lest the buzz fade and reality intrude) have been crowing about what a superdoublewidefantastic party organization The Precious has built, how it's cool and digital and virtual and full of lots and lots of bloggers and money. They are especially touting his new voter registration drive efforts and how this will power him to victory in the future.

All of which makes me go so where were those voters in Indiana? Pensylvania? Even in North Carolina, where he should have had a much better showing if his registration drives had been as effective as claimed? Jeralyn points out that Obama did worse in North Carolina than in Virginia. His efforts didn't make a difference for him in Ohio, Texas, Massachusetts or California, come to think of it.

The fact is that the contest this year as such, not just Obama, is bringing out a huge number of voters, and half of them are voting for Hillary. Obama is not drawing a statistically significant larger number of people to the polls and he is not increasing his margins among Hillary's constituency. They are turning out in droves to vote for her.

So what about the millions of new voters who are signing up? Evidently, they are either voting approximately equally for The Precious and for Hillary, or else they are not any larger of a group than is already voting for Hillary.

This brings up an interesting point (well, interesting to a poli sci major, anyway), which is to what degree does Obama's failure to expand his base constituency as the primaries go on indicate that he has maxed his vote? The fundamental problem with Obama's candidacy, the one he has faced from the start, is that his coalition is both compact and loyal. Its borders are sharply drawn. They are to one side of the political spectrum and thus are not likely to defect towards the other political side, though they may defect somewhat into fringe groups. In the case of AA voters, this is not a gain of potential defectors, though there would definitely be an increase in the proportion of voters. The upper and upper-middle class white vote that will stay with the Democrats are also not a gain from Republican side. There may be a marginal increase in the percentage of under 30 voters from this class, but this gain is likely to be offset by the loss of older voters who feel rejected by their party. Independents who are already to the left will tend to favor him, but those who are rightward-leaning are no longer supporting him in significant numbers. His advantage with Republican-identified swing voters is also diminishing.

What is disconcerting is the overt rejection by the Obama faction of specifically working class voters who, as Larry Bartels has documented, make up one of the most loyal voting constituencies in the Democratic camp. This is a voting block that has consistently been shoved to the side by both of the major parties when it comes to policies, and which can be won over with direct and tangible pocketbook issues. Though usually portrayed as "white" because that is the largest ethnic group in that class, the working class is increasingly made up of people from all corner of the world, Latin Americans, East and South Asians and Middle-easterners.

My argument is not that Obama would only get the number of votes in the GE that he got in the primary. Turnout is always higher in the general, though the extraordinarily high turnout in this year's primaries do not automatically translate into a comparably higher level in the general. The bulk of interested Democrats may already have turned out. For example, Kerry got 2,938,000 votes in Pennsylvania in 2004, and the primary turn out this time was 2,306,600 (I'm rounding), a difference of just over 630,000.

The difficulty is that he is stuck with a rigid and isolated base and does not appear able to expand it proportionally in any significant way. The failure to attract the vote of the majority of likely GE voters is a serious problem, and even more so when 60+% of them say they won't accept you under any circumstances. I don't think that will hold, but if even a quarter of those voters stick to their guns, that's a loss of @125,000 votes out of every million.

The Obama campaign (not just the supporters) has made clear that they regard much of the Democratic Party with contempt. This is different than beating up on your opponent, which everyone understands as part of electoral politics (LBJ and rumors of carnal relations with pigs comes to mind...), but the cardinal rule of politics is you do. Not. Diss. The. Voters. EVER. Why? Because they have what you need - votes. His voter registration drives are failing to provide him with decisive victories in the primaries which is a strong indication that those votes just aren't there for him. Claims that he somehow has this multi-million strong army of voters being held in reserve for the GE doesn't pass the sniff test. He needs them NOW, and they aren't there.

Democrats win or lose elections based on the strength of working class turn out, and the working class is literally being told to stay home. With every insult and put-down, it becomes more likely that they might just do that.

If it is only the saints marching in to the voting booths in November, we are all in for some revelations.

Anglachel

Revolution of the Saints

I watch the mass psychosis that has overtaken half of my party and I am left stupefied. While I have had a cynical view of the netroots for several years, what I see now so thoroughly surpasses the worst I had imagined that I am struggling to come up with ways to comprehend the dissolution of what should have been a solidly unified party.

I've spoken in earlier posts about the split between the Stevensonian and Truman contingents in the party, the class splits and the way in which the working class has been demonized as the source of the party's failures, as much philosophical as electoral. The difficulty Yankee liberals have with "The South" is part of the problem as well. I think that misogyny is the solvent that has allowed much of the elite resentment to come out in the open because it is a form of bigotry that is acceptable to voice directly.

What I'm seeing is an amplified, exaggerated perversion of the lessons, biases and attitudes I encountered in my very liberal college education, things that resonate with me in strange ways, playing on the way I learned to see the world as divided into evil whites, good whites and the oppressed Others we good whites had to free from the evil whites. And now, according to my class - and I don't know what other class I could possibly belong to, given my ethnic makeup, education, profession and acculturation - I am one of the evil whites in the world. The themes I have been writing about for years are coalescing into a weird reality.

This is philosophical revolution, one that is at its heart anti-democratic and anti-political. It is rising from a deep well of, for lack of a better term, Yankee Puritanism, something that has fueled great things and without which we would not have this country, democracy or even Democrats. I reach for religious language and examples to explain this, even as a large number of this contingent are functional atheists. At its root, we are looking at the separatism inherent in much Protestant political thought and causes. Instead of confronting difference and coming to an accord, the saints wish to banish the fallen from the world and thus make the world more perfect.

There is a religious element to the Obama campaign, and it takes the form of distinguishing oneself from the fallen political world. It is different than simply "running against Washington" which can be a very pragmatic kind of operation, but is openly hostile to the very purpose of politics, which is to compare, contest and compromise in order to balance interests and needs. From this campaign we have literally heard language of "coming to Obama" and of having faith in the One. There was never much attempt to persuade voters to support the candidate and less with each day that passes. We are exhorted to simply acknowledge truth and surrender to this leader. Step back from the campaign and the leitmotif becomes clear, revealing the fundamentally chiliastic nature of the claim. It is charisma in the oldest sense of following a leader because he has been anointed. This is not simply or merely cynical posturing. This campaign's followers really believe that there is nothing more needed than to be faithful to the messianic leader.

Hillary, in stark contrast, is ministerial in her approach. This is a job, it is the most demanding job in the world, and here are her credentials and body of work to demonstrate that she is the most competent and capable to fulfill the needs of the position. Minister in this sense would be both political and religious - someone who tends to the needs and concerns of the beloved community. It's hands on, sleeves rolled up, get dirty helping raise the barn or negotiate that treaty. Power is present and necessary, wielded for the sake of others, which requires her to explain in as much detail as you want to hear exactly how she will use the authority granted to her. It is straight up attention to material interests.

What I see rising from the other side is clearly of two kinds. Half of Obama's support is simply racial identity voting. The other half is from the faction of the party that is significantly insulated from the stark world of need and want. There is a love of the other-worldly where the beauty of the idea and the ideal matters more than the base. The political "base" is seen as base - low, uncouth, adulterated, impure, unworthy. They are not among the saved and the saints. I honestly cannot remember a previous time when so many people in the party were reviled for doing nothing except vote for a conventional candidate. These are not Naderites or Wallace supporters. They are middle-of-the-road solid Democrats who voted Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale, Carter, Carter, and so on down the line. The contempt of the saints for the fallen has always been there, but is emerging without a filter or much in the way of self-consciousness this time. The code we learned to speak in our liberal arts colleges falls to the wayside, and I read claims of being rid of the old evil "white working class" (What of us who are not that thing? What of those of us who are?) in a final conflict to end all conflicts and there will be a purified party to which will flock millions of new, young, untainted followers, ready to be led into the land of Goshen.

As Madison wrote in Federalist 10, the end of political contestation means the end of freedom.

The concrete has no place in Obama's campaign narrative. Speaking too much about material benefit pulls you down into the weeds and you are no longer shiny and new and unifying. You take on interests which incur expectations and interfere with the abstract pursuit of the ideal, a government cleansed of politics, run according to bipartisan, technocratic and efficient methods. Kind of like the 50s, but without all that civil rights and women's rights stuff.

In Obama's speeches and claims, there is the structure of the great humanistic appeals of the 50s and 60s, the form of rhetoric that elicits certain kinds of feelings, and the ideas that inspire people to rise above particularity. But what is missing are the foundations that would provide the justification and ground for what is otherwise an exercise in ego-gratification. Oh, look at me transported by the wonderful grandness of the yak-yak! The reason why the words of MLK and LBJ could move us not just to emotion but to action was because they were fully embedded in the grime of life, the tangible things that we don't notice until we are deprived of them - where can I sit when I am tired, where can I eat when I am hungry, may I slake my thirst at this fountain or use this restroom to relieve myself? Can I open a bank account in my own name? May I visit my partner in the hospital?

Instead of seeking to make ideals of unity and benefit for all concrete, contempt has been mobilized. Those who say "Show me what you've got," are reviled as racist, stupid, retrograde, besmirched and fallen. We don't need no stinkin' working class! We will get new and shiny young voters to replace you, untouched by your peculiar love of solid wages, health care and Hillary. Why would the Democrats want to cast off the heart and soul of the New Deal coalition? Where does the animus come from? These people are acting out a separatist fantasy and make up one half of Obama's support.

I speak of what I know very well. Cultural liberals really do tend to think that people who fit the profile of Clinton voters don't have deeply held principles and are not capable of forming complex opinions of the world, little more than dupes of puppet masters like Karl Rove. They act from false consciousness, not from the rich inner life that the properly educated and worldly claim as their own. The dedication and commitment of Clinton voters is denied because those hicks can't really believe anything, and thus the saints need not take into consideration the desires of the fallen as real, let alone legitimate.

As Chris Bowers put it:

Cultural Shift: Out with Bubbas, up with Creatives: There should be a major cultural shift in the party, where the southern Dems and Liebercrat elite will be largely replaced by rising creative class types. Obama has all the markers of a creative class background, from his community organizing, to his Unitarianism, to being an academic, to living in Hyde Park to shopping at Whole Foods and drinking PBR. These will be the type of people running the Democratic Party now, and it will be a big cultural shift from the white working class focus of earlier decades. Given the demographics of the blogosphere, in all likelihood, this is a socioeconomic and cultural demographic into which you fit. Culturally, the Democratic Party will feel pretty normal to netroots types. It will consistently send out cultural signals designed to appeal primarily to the creative class instead of rich donors and the white working class.

We are watching nothing less than a revolution of the party saints against the tainted and fallen dregs who frighten them.

Anglachel

What Have They Ever Done for Us?

I listen to the whining and navel gazing among the idiot blogger class about how horrible the Clintons are and how they haven't ever, never, no way, not a chance, ever done anything good for the country, and this is what keeps running through my brain:

REG: They've bled us white, the bastards. They've taken everything we had, and not just from us, from our fathers, and from our fathers' fathers.

LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers.

REG: Yeah.

LORETTA: And from our fathers' fathers' fathers' fathers.

REG: Yeah. All right, Stan. Don't labour the point. And what have they ever given us in return?!

XERXES: The aqueduct?

REG: What?

XERXES: The aqueduct.

REG: Oh. Yeah, yeah. They did give us that. Uh, that's true. Yeah.

COMMANDO #3: And the sanitation.

LORETTA: Oh, yeah, the sanitation, Reg. Remember what the city used to be like?

REG: Yeah. All right. I'll grant you the aqueduct and the sanitation are two things that the Romans have done.

MATTHIAS: And the roads.

REG: Well, yeah. Obviously the roads. I mean, the roads go without saying, don't they? But apart from the sanitation, the aqueduct, and the roads--

COMMANDO: Irrigation.

XERXES: Medicine.

COMMANDOS: Huh? Heh? Huh...

COMMANDO #2: Education.

COMMANDOS: Ohh...

REG: Yeah, yeah. All right. Fair enough.

COMMANDO #1: And the wine.

COMMANDOS: Oh, yes. Yeah...

FRANCIS: Yeah. Yeah, that's something we'd really miss, Reg, if the Romans left. Huh.

COMMANDO: Public baths.

LORETTA: And it's safe to walk in the streets at night now, Reg.

FRANCIS: Yeah, they certainly know how to keep order. Let's face it. They're the only ones who could in a place like this.

COMMANDOS: Hehh, heh. Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh.

REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

XERXES: Brought peace.

REG: Oh. Peace?

Anglachel

Stalemate

I'm watching the Indiana results carefully, though I'm pretty confident Hillary will win. I also think the margin in North Carolina will narrow, given the counties that have not yet reported in.

The exit polls in each state reflect the condition of the Democratic primary electorate - Obama gets a super-majority of AA votes which makes up for his weakness with other voters. The "youth" turnout was not that big. The trend that spells out the party's fate in November continues to hold, which is that Hillary is consistently winning white males votes. These are the people who are most likely to defect to McCain in November, and they are already indicating that they don't much care for Obama.

It has come down to race, though not in the way the Blogger Boyz want to admit. It is about the wine track candidate getting a boost from AA voters, not any surge of anti-black racism on the part of working class voters. There may be some white backlash against Obama now, but that is a direct result of the way his campaign hs dissed working class voters by painting them as racists, as well as his own dirty laundry beginning to be aired.

The wine track candidate has been a consistently losing bet for the party since Stevenson. Kennedy barely eked out a victory (and there are reasons to believe he didn't win the vote), and Jimmy Carter was simply an anomaly, though it is telling that he was center-left southern technocrat. Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry were more centrist than the competition, but they hewed to the Yankee technocratic line rather than try to connect to the increasingly disaffected working class. Gore won the popular vote but lost the election because he tried to be more Bill Bradly than Bill Clinton. The "hardcore" wine track competitors - Dean, Bradley, Hart, Tsongas, Brown, Teddy Kennedy - were never seriously competitive even in the primaries because they simply did not appeal to people for whom politics was more than an intellectual enterprise. Candidates who make voters feel both vulnerable and stupid just aren't going to go very far.

There are two reasons why the hardcore winetrack candidate is winning this year. What Obama did to the situation was unify the AA vote behind a single candidate by virtue of his race. Obama is winning because he is black. Aside from that one quality, he would have been polling down with Dennis Kucinich in the primaries. The other reason is because Hillary Clinton is running. If Hillary had not been in the lineup, all the party power brokers would have been behind Edwards and Obama would have been offered a VP slot. He offers nothing of substance on pocketbook issues, doesn't appeal to working class voters in the slightest, and is carrying more incendiary political baggage than you can shake a stick at. Were it not for his AA support, he would not be competitive.

Before anyone spouts off in the comments, let me make it clear that I don't consider AA support of Obama to be pernicious. Electorally frustrating, yes, but, unlike the Hillary Haters who want to attribute the worst possible motives to her supporters, I don't think that is so of the majority Obama's black supporters. They see an opportunity to vote for a candidate who reflects them, and they will do so, no matter the odds. Given my unwavering support of Hillary despite the long nomination odds, I can't really cry foul on someone else's supporters who feel just as strongly as I do. Obama's campaign is certainly doing pernicious race-baiting, but mostly to initimidate critics and shame wavering white voters. I don't think it's earning him more than a few slivers of votes from the AA community, and is probably costing him more votes on the whole when white attrition is counted against black gains.

The problem, of course, is that Obama is having less and less appeal beyond his unique coalition as time goes on. His political baggage is pure gold for Republican ratfucking operations as we already see in their attacks on politicians who endorsed him. He has insulted the working class voters (who are not just white) the party must hold to defeat the Republicans over and over again, his class snobbery on display with some new gaffe almost every week.

So, what now? Local variations will give supporters on either side arguments about relative strength, but the larger picture is that Obama is losing 60% of white voters within his own party, let alone across parties. His scorched earth campaign to claim white racism as the sole and overwhelming cause of his losses puts the party between the Devil and the deep blue sea. He has alienated voters of all ethnicities by forcing the campaign into a black/white racial divide, angering Democrats who are voting against his lack of substantive policies, not his skin color (in truth, at this point, the only things about him that appeal to me are his skin color and his proposed Cuba policy), and antagonizing AAs with his claim that white politicians are conspiring to deny him the nomination, which will make a significant number stay home if he is not the nominee. The political question for me is whether, should he lose the nomination, will he support Hillary? If he does, Democrats win. If he doesn't, Democrats lose.

The party is at a stalemate now. Neither candidate will win with just pledged delegates. Super delegates will break it in favor of one candidate or the other.

Do we want to win in November or not?

Anglachel

Not Liberal, Not Left

Something that I keep running into on the blogs is the idea that because The Precious rubs elbows with a semi-Black Nationalist (Wright) and a former terrorist (Ayers) that he is somehow "far left" and/or that the DNC, because of its favoritism, has somehow been infiltrated by the old 60s anarchic Left.

Balderdash.

Obama is an opportunist. Beginning and end of story. As I pointed out in Radical Chic, the problem with Obama and far too many of the isolated and insular "intellectuals" of the Left is that they lack any marginal judgment on what these people stand for, instead excusing Wright's reductionistic rhetoric as a justified reaction against "the man" and, more chillingly, romantacize the terrorism of Ayers and Dohrn as somehow justified because they were, yup, fighting "the man." News to liberal snobs - we have met "the man" and He is Us. The Man was exactly the Best and Brightest shiny, squeaky clean out of college smart guys who had all the answers and didn't need any questions and rushed us into Vietnam. In short, they were the A-List Blogger Boyz of their day.

I actually do have sympathy for much of Wright's line of argumentation because this country has deliberately and maliciously stripped African Americans of their wealth, their rights and their humanity until very recently in the republic's history and there is a hell of a long way to go to redress the wrongs visited upon that group. There is no such excuse for the privileged white kids who decided to murder people for shits and giggles, and who are protected by some incredibly stupid academics and bleeding heart liberals who seem to think that Ayers' determination to butcher his fellow citizens is ennobled by his puerile spouting of mangled Marx. He is the moral equivalent of Charles Manson, people, just less bugfuck insane and with a rich daddy to bail him out of jail. He capitalizes on his cachet of dissing the establishment - though he is as thoroughly part of the acedemic establishment as any other no-account talentless prof with tenure.

But back to Obama. No, I don't think Golden Boy Barry shares any concrete views with either of the crackpots. He simply used them as stepping stones within the rarified environment of the University of Chicago political neighborhood. His lack of any stance that might possibly hint of a core principle, let alone political radicalism, pretty much crosses that out. As with his supporters, Obama is into feel-good politics that make gestures in the right directions, not anything that causes a restructuring of basic socio-economic relationships. This is what the Yankee moralists have always done, from the abolistionists right down to those tut-tutting about white flight from urban public schools. One nation for me and another for thee. I fret about the price of arugula and sneer at those who worry about the price of gasoline.

(For Turtle - arugula, also known as "rocket", is a very interesting salad green. It has a strong, peppery flavor and a little goes a long way. It's a traditional "weed" eaten by the poor, like dandelions, collards and kale. I had never tasted it until I moved to New York City for a while and the local Korean grocer sold it by the bunch. Yum. It is not so easy to find, even out here in California, one of the world's most diverse growing regions, but Trader Joe's has a decent bagged version of it for cheap. (I can hear Brad Delong fainting in horror that I buy my arugula in bags...) If you can find it for a decent price, give it a try. Don't let the snobs turn you off a tasty and traditional peasant green.)

What I'm trying to get to here is the simple proposition that there is nothing particularly radical or even political about Obama. He's out to claim some prize because he thinks he's entitled to it and not because he has an agenda to enact or a vision to pursue. There just isn't anything more than the message. He is not a liberal, let alone a radical. Further, the political extremists who have dug their claws into him are not Left, no matter what the Right may say. They don't want any part of the liberal democratic project or any other institution building philosophy. They are permanent adolescents, in perpetual rebellion against "the rules" without developing a comparable answer to the very real problems of power, exploitation, sustainable economies, and human rights that liberal democrats have honed over centuries of thought and practice.

It's not what Obama will do that bothers me. It is what he will fail to do for the party and the nation that makes me reject him.

Anglachel

Accusations and Actions

What I want to ask the A-List Blogger Boyz who are all so sure that Hillary is such a racist and her supporters are such racists and the only reason their Precious can lose is because of the evil racists out there who just aren't ready for a black president, who are looking for a reason to vote against Obama is this:

Where do you send your kids to school?

WKJM, you live in New York City. Will you be sending your son Sam and your baby-on-the-way to NYC public schools? Kos, where does your daughter go to school? You don't need to name the exact location, but is it public or private? What is the racial mix? What is the socio-economic mix?

Hannah Arendt, my favorite political theorist, has been excoriated as a racist for pointing out that integration and post-racial sociality is not such a big deal when the person being integrated is already part of your socio-economic class, remains a numerical minority within your enclave, and is no threat to your social standing or economic power. When these conditions are not met, integration becomes exponentially more difficult. Call it the "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" syndrome.

It is also the case that the higher up the socio-economic ladder you are, the more ability you have to opt out of conditions where you and your family would be placed in conflict with people who are not like yourself. Part of it is just snob appeal. I have a relative who complains that she didn't like going into Trader Joe's to buy Kashi brand cereal because it wasn't a "nice" place to shop and atttracted all kinds of unpleasant people, and was relieved that some boutique grocer in her area had begun to carry it. (And, yes, she's a San Fransisco liberal.) This kind of behavior is obnoxious snobbery (It's also just dumb - Trader's is great! Yay for Two-buck Chuck!), but it points to the ways in which subtle markers, like where you buy your breakfast cereal and whether you make salads from arugula, serve to demarcate the right from the wrong kinds of people.

When it comes to schooling and creating a path to wealth and socio-economic success for their kids, people don't tend to be too subtle.

If you can afford to buy a house in La Jolla rather than San Diego, your kids will go to a public school that is an academic powerhouse, and sends many students off to the Ivy Leagues and the top public research universities. Most of these kids are from "creative class" families, and more than a few are the sproglets of University of Califonia, San Diego professors and administrators. And, if you don't like the public school, there are two similarly advantaged private schools right in town.

If you are in the San Diego Unified District, your kid probably sits in a classroom of 35-40 students, a significant number of whom are ESL, coming from as many ethnic backgrounds as you can shake a stick at, and performing at varying levels of academic ability. I have a few friends who teach in this school district. In some areas of the region, there may be gang activity. These kids ride large yellow buses or even City buses for up to an hour each way to get where they are going. There are some target schools, and one has received an education grant from Microsoft to beef up the computer infrastructure. I ride the City bus downtown some days to do work with customers and I sit with these kids and listen to them talk in seven languages (that I can identify). These are the kids who skipped school - the older ones at least - to help organize rallies in San Diego opposing oppressive immigration law. They're good kids, as good as any I went to school with.

What, WKJM, Kos, you mean you wouldn't want to put your kids into that wonderful, diverse, polyglot, culturally dynamic situation? Why ever not?

You wouldn't be racist, would you?

Anglachel

Paint, Camera, Action!

Since nothing new is going to happen until Tuesday, I've been ignoring politics the last few days in favor of doing stuff around the new house.

The sunroom is almost done, and there is now a place for the spousal unit's guitars. The room has great accoustics. A "shoe" has to be installed, which is the little strip of wood that covers the edge of the flooring and backs up to the baseboard. Because of the way this house was constructed, the baseboard you see in the picture is cement, not wood. Then we have some book cases to put in here.

The tile floor in the masterbath has been installed. We need a little more tile to finish the room, but the darn stuff is on backorder. We purposefully went with very colorful ceramic tile rather then the usual 12" squares of tumbled travertine marble as this is more in the period style. The toilet and shower enclosures have arched on the entries as was common in houses of this period.

To hold all our pots and pans, we went to IKEA and got one of their stupidly named but incredibly functional tables to serve as storage and work area in the pantry. The wooden butcher block cart has been with us for almost twenty years, since we hauled it home from a Lecter's in the back of of a New York City cab and assembled it in our tiny third floor walk-up in Little Italy. The stainless steel number is the IKEA find. Good grief but that puppy was heavy to haul home!

And here is my newly painted study! My camera is kind of crappy, so the colors are skewed. The walls are in between salmon and melon, and aren't nearly as orange as they look here. The ceiling is more a peach than pink color.

Here's the hallway. The linen closet is original, though newly painted, and we got period style reproduction amethyst colored glass knobs annd handles for it. We even got the same kind of latches for the doors as was in the original. They are still made.

The last picture I posted of the bathroom, the medicine cabinet wasn't installed and the lights were upsidedown. Also, the trim needed to be finished. We're making progress. The cabinet is original. The painter stripped 12 pounds of old paint off it.

Anglachel

The Whiteness of the Whale

When historians and political scientists look back at this election, they will not primarily be concerned with who won. The phenomenon to be explained will be the unhinged attacks upon Hillary Clinton from the Left. See eRiposte's write up here for another discussion of this phenomenon. The war being waged against Hillary from the Left goes far beyond the immediate campaign contest – the primary has become the vehicle through which the Left’s hatred of the Clintons can be expressed in a unified manner. That the Right should hate the Clintons is unsurprising, but what can possibly explain the fury of the Left with Bill and Hillary Clinton?

There is nothing in the political acts or policies of either of these people sufficient to explain this reaction. If the segment of the Left assaulting the Clintons was merely the disaffected and inchoate fringes, people with a single issue that no one except their own preferred candidate can satisfy, or obsessed with ethical purity to such a degree that they will not accept that politics are necessary and every political act is looked at as an example of corruption, then there would be an explanation. Cranks tend to glom onto celebrities as objects of adoration or hatred. But the people objecting most strenuously to the Clintons are politically indistinguishable from them. The alleged political sins of Bill and Hillary are shared by other politicians who are not subject to the scorched earth assaults the Clintons endure. Among the power brokers, the attackers are often colleagues, appointees and protégés. At a policy or philosophical level, these are differences of degree, not of kind.

It is a phenomenon uniquely demarcated by class. Upper-middle and upper class professionals with significant amounts of college education are the overwhelming majority of the people launching broadsides against the Clintons. It has a distinct geographical structure as well, being more likely to appear north of the Mason-Dixon than south of it.

It differs this election cycle than when Bill ran for President in that it is voiced more openly and because the vitriol is being poured onto Hillary Clinton voters as well as on the candidate herself. The attack upon rank and file supporters is, I think, the major way in which CDS on the Left differs from that on the Right. I cannot name a time in all the past presidential elections I can remember (1976 being the oldest) that entire blocks of voters were so thoroughly condemned for their candidate choice. It is a battle within the party, not against external foes, and it is about class. Or, rather, it is about a fantasy of class and culpability.

It is not a mistake that racism is the charge being thrown at Hillary, despite the utter insanity of the claim, despite Obama admitting in the Nevada debate that, yes, his campaign was deliberately spreading the lie that she and her campaign were engaging in racist attacks. In the liberal imagination, racism is the marker of “white trash”, itself shorthand for the organization of the white world into the superior educated class and the inferior hicks. All southerners are hicks, even the educated ones. All southerners are simply Trent Lott, George Wallace and Strom Thurmond rolled into one. All “uneducated” (i.e., lacking at least a BA or BS from a notable school) white northerners are “Bunkers”. Anyone appealing to such people is a not-so-closeted racist, and their entire agenda is to reinstitute Jim Crow, if not return to slavery.

Why this psychotic and self-defeating projection onto the working class? It is the deep guilt of the liberal upper class that we know, every last miserable one of us, that our privilege is due to centuries of white supremacy and to the informal, unspoken, but pervasive advantage our skin color and behavioral patterns gives us in this society. It is our Moby Dick, the whale we pursue obsessively through political seas, frantic to have material proof that we are innocent of the crimes of our nation.

The Democratic Party was the party of slavery and civil war in the 19th century. It was the party of Jim Crow in the early 20th century. The New Deal set it on the path to renouncing that legacy through the mid-part of the last century, and it was a brutal passage. Instead of reimagining the South and what it could become, the Northeast elite who had taken over the leadership simply renounced it – you will be like us or you can get out. When desegregation came to the Northeast and the Midwest, the contempt for “The South” was transferred easily to the working class ethnic whites who resisted this change. Archie Bunker became an eternal truth rather than a thought exercise, a denunciation of the unchangeable cretin in front of the TV instead of a call to reflect on how we become what we are and how, despite ourselves, we can find our common humanity. Most of all, the determined demonization of working class whites, especially those with Southern connections, allows the upper class elites to turn a blind eye to the way in which they are the biggest beneficiaries of the centuries of racism in the nation. There is a growing group within the liberal elite who wishes to jettison “The South” entirely, leaving the working class immiserated and isolated, rather than face up to the obligation of the party to complete the task before it. That task is to create the conditions under which racism is no longer something that can be exploited for electoral gain or needed as a survival tactic in deteriorating and demeaning socio-economic conditions.

The violent rejection of the Clintons on the Left is a rejection of “The South” and the working class by the Stevensonian elite, who see the success of Bill the “Bubba” as both a threat to their power and a repudiation of their policies and actions since 1968. They want to see themselves as simultaneously co-victims with AAs of white supremacy and also as the moral(istic) saviors of the oppressed, redeeming their part of the white population from the sin of racism. (Read the incomparable Bob Somerby’s write up of this phenomenon in his latest post.) Bill Clinton provided a different vision of how to move the party and nation forward, one that refused demonization, and this shook them to their ineffective foundations. The Clintons unsettle the comfortable arrangement between the northeastern elite and the southern revanchists (the Democrats and the Republicans having exchanged those roles since the New Deal), insisting on the need to materially improve the lives of the bulk of the nation and not sit around waving a moralistic finger at people who like to shoot guns and go to church every Sunday.

The assault on the Clintons has no basis in policy or political philosophy. It is an attack on uppity white trash who dares to succeed in the world without assimilating into the ruling elite, and for the added insult of being adored by the nation precisely for their common connections. The only thing I can compare to the single-minded determination of the liberal elite to destroy the Clintons regardless of the collateral damage to party and nation is George W. Bush’s obsession with talking out Saddam Hussein, though lacking even the level of justification collected for that vendetta.

Reading the increasingly unhinged and incoherent ravings of the elite against Hillary Clinton, the calls for her murder, the fabricated videos “proving” the racism of her campaign and associates, the hysterical screams that she must get out now before she inflicts more damage on the party, and the assertions that anyone who votes for this candidate is nothing but a racist, I am reminded of one of the great descriptions of obsession ever set down:

I, Ishmael, was one of that crew; my shouts had gone up with the rest; my oath had been welded with theirs; and stronger I shouted, and more did I hammer and clinch my oath, because of the dread in my soul. A wild, mystical, sympathetical feeling was in me; Ahab's quenchless feud seemed mine. With greedy ears I learned the history of that murderous monster against whom I and all the others had taken our oaths of violence and revenge. …

Small reason was there to doubt, then, that ever since that almost fatal encounter, Ahab had cherished a wild vindictiveness against the whale, all the more fell for that in his frantic morbidness he at last came to identify with him, not only all his bodily woes, but all his intellectual and spiritual exasperations. The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung. That intangible malignity which has been from the beginning; to whose dominion even the modern Christians ascribe one-half of the worlds; which the ancient Ophites of the east reverenced in their statue devil;- Ahab did not fall down and worship it like them; but deliriously transferring its idea to the abhorred white whale, he pitted himself, all mutilated, against it. All that most maddens and torments; all that stirs up the lees of things; all truth with malice in it; all that cracks the sinews and cakes the brain; all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. …

How it was that they so aboundingly responded to the old man's ire- by what evil magic their souls were possessed, that at times his hate seemed almost theirs; the White Whale as much their insufferable foe as his; how all this came to be- what the White Whale was to them, or how to their unconscious understandings, also, in some dim, unsuspected way, he might have seemed the gliding great demon of the seas of life,- all this to explain, would be to dive deeper than Ishmael can go. The subterranean miner that works in us all, how can one tell whither leads his shaft by the ever shifting, muffled sound of his pick? Who does not feel the irresistible arm drag? What skiff in tow of a seventy-four can stand still? For one, I gave myself up to the abandonment of the time and the place; but while yet all a-rush to encounter the whale, could see naught in that brute but the deadliest ill.

Ch. 41 - Moby Dick

And we all remember how that story ended.

Anglachel

New Math

The chants of “The delegate count! She can’t beat the delegate count!” get more frantic by the minute, mostly because they become less relevant to the General Election outcome with every new revelation about The Precious. Obamacans think they can win with simple math, 1 + 1 + a whole bunch of people we don’t count and – Yay! --- we have our candidate. They refuse to acknowledge that a presidential election is more akin to an algebraic equation, with variables and unknowns getting factored in when you least expect it.

One of the questions Hillary answered in the Indianapolis Star interview was a math question, and she gave it a proper algebraic answer. (Our girl’s good with numbers, after all.) When asked about Obama’s allegedly insurmountable pledged delegate count lead, Hillary responded in two ways: first that she is ahead in popular vote count because she won Florida and Michigan and, second, that voters regarded vote counts as the basis of legitimacy, and the remaining primary states darn well wanted to have their votes counted. She emphasized the legitimacy of the Florida vote in particular and then threw down the political math challenge to the Obamacans. Are you really going to try to pick the nominee without counting Florida and Michigan? How do you think you can get the necessary Electoral College votes from them in November if you don’t allow them their primary votes now?

With every poll, every interview, every primary, it becomes clear that Hillary is the strongest Democratic candidate, the person who actually is going to attract a significant number of the moderate, old-line “Rockefeller” Republicans’ vote. So, what is up with this game of political chicken? Can’t Dr. Dean count? What is the gamesmanship going on here?

1. Florida and Michigan must be seated with full voting privileges. It is GE suicide if they aren’t. This does not automatically give Hillary the nomination, but she takes back the position of front runner if they are counted before the other primaries are done. It changes the calculations of the voters, and the Obamacans are desperate to prevent that from happening.
2. To have them seated and be allowed to vote and have Obama be the nominee, The Precious must win 2214 delegates (BTD says 2209) before the convention to prevent Florida and Michigan from affecting the outcome. This might also include counting his delegates from Florida on the presumption they will be seated.
3. This is not going to happen, especially after this week’s news.
4. As long as Obama cannot win 2214 without Florida and Michigan, the pressure continues to mount to include them precisely because they will and should affect the outcome. It’s called voting for those of you unsure on the concept of democracy.
5. Deans dilemma is he has three outcomes, none of which are acceptable:
• Refuse to seat Florida and Michigan, pray Obama can edge up to 2025, and declare him the winner because FL & MI broke the rules. As I said back in March, this truncated nomination will not be seen as legitimate by the voters. Those two states will go red in the GE.
• Seat those states and take the risk that the super delegates will bolt en masse to Hillary, eviscerating claims of Obama’s support and inevitability. It will also send the party to victory in November.
• Force Hillary out of the race so that Obama is the only one left standing and the remaining voting can be called off. This will also result in a GE loss, but it would avoid a convention fight, or so Dr. Dean hopes. This is the only strategy left with a prayer for The Precious, and is why we see such bellowing and threats aimed at Hillary.

So, why? At this point, I’m not sure there is any way for Dean to get himself out of this mess, and he’s probably decided he might as well be shot for a sheep as a lamb. But what was the original calculation that has ended up with deficits in the balance sheet and red ink everywhere? There is no way to know for certain, but I think the idea was that any Democrat was going to win the general, so it was the best time to run a relatively weak candidate. I also think the original plan was that Edwards would be the front runner, handily neutralizing Clinton and then we would have an Edwards/Obama ticket. When you look at the early polling, however, a funny thing happened on the way to the elite coronation – Hillary was (and remains) the most popular among Democrats. Edwards was not different enough for him to get any traction. The leadership threw its weight behind Obama in order to take down Clinton and preserve their power. With the full force of the Stevensonian wing and the MSM, it was almost enough.

Hillary fought back as only a Clinton can, refusing to succumb to the pressure. Now Obama, an insubstantial candidate at the best of times, is demonstrating the fallacy of Dean’s original calculation. The Precious can’t get the numbers to win the election, and looks likely to fall short with the nomination as well.

So, why does Dean persist in this course, to the detriment of the party? We may never know, but he should have known better when it came to Michigan and Florida. He knows how to do the math. He should have made his candidate stand up and take the risk to demonstrate before it was too late whether he could win in a direct election. The fully legitimate primary votes of those states are necessary to finishing the equation of a Democratic win in November.

If a candidate will not stand up for those states in the primary, how can the party expect those states to stand up for the candidate in November?

It just doesn’t add up.
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

Millstone

I make no bones that I am a completely committed Clinton partisan, more strongly for her with every passing day and new attack. I'm also a committed Democrat, firmly entrenched on the liberal side of the political divide. The implosion of the Obama campaign saddens me because of the loss of what could have been a political figure as fully transformative as what we originally glimpsed in this person. The last few days of news for Obama mark the end of his political career. I think he still has an even chance to take the party's nomination, but that is the end of his rise.

I have been discussing Obama's campaign with the spousal unit the last few days, reflecting on what I wrote in Blowback Ahead, and we've pondered just what we have been watching unfold over the last year. Hubby does not believe that Obama (or most of his top campaign advisors) really believe he's losing votes due to racism or that working class white voters are doing anything except voting their class interest, and thinks it's not very productive to try to discern deep philosophical stances from the cut throat world of campaign politics. It is enough to note that we can see claims of racism being deployed as a deliberate strategy, an utterly cynical exploitation of CDS (Hillary will do anything to win!) in a way that no one else is situated to do, and which would not have been to the advantage of any other candidate.

From a political analysis standpoint, I concede the argument, though I find there is evidence of certain class prejudices on Obama's part that cannot help but put forth derogatory socio-economic stereotypes simply because nice liberal creative class, humanities educated people like Obama, the Blogger Boyz, most of the Democratic Party leadership and legions of symbolic analysts like me have had that message drummed into our heads for all of our lives. "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons. " (Blazing Saddles)

That wasn't the interesting part of the discussion. What is the coalition that Obama has put together? A doughnut of the Democratic Party. One part of the ring is the extreme liberal (and not so liberal) intellectual elites and to the other is the African American community - the high priests of the party and the most tenacious and loyal of the rank and file. This is a substantial coalition, with a plurality of votes. As I said in Radical Politics, though I am impatient with my own political faction, the Stevensonians, there is no way to have a modern, effective liberal party unless you have all the players in the coalition - technocrats, working class, populists, all ethnicities, and quite a range of political temperaments. You can't have anti-democrats. Thus, every candidate running for the Democratic Party nomination needs to run as a coalition builder.

Obama originally positioned himself as the ultimate coalition builder, one who could not just unite the party, but also bring over left-leaning Republicans and Independents. While it is easy to be cynical about such things, I take this as the expression of his best impulses and inclinations, and grant him the same initial acceptance that I would want for my own candidate. I am sincere that we need to see the loss of this promise - the promise made by the candidate and the political promise embodied in him - as something tragic for the Democratic Party.

What happened to the potential on display at the 2004 convention? A decision both explicable and execrable - to accuse another Democrat of being racist. With that claim, Obama placed himself in a box that is becoming a coffin for more than just his campaign. His coalition was never enough to secure him the nomination unless he turned out super majorities within those groups. He did not have to do much with the wine track voters who enjoyed their fauxgressive rejection of Hillary, enthralled with the talking heads and blogger insider gossip. But with the AA vote, the challenge for Obama was to overcome Hillary's substantial appeal to that group. This was uniquely a problem with Hillary, as none of the other candidates enjoyed that kind of support. The weapon he chose was to smear the Clintons as racists.

Who would have thought this would be the tool employed, given the early themes of the Obama campaign? It wasn't just warm-fuzzies and unity ponies. The spousal unit was an early Obama supporter, and thought there was something really valuable to way in which Obama used a rhetoric of struggle and completion to recast race relations and the Democratic task of fulfilling the dream. I have seen it put cynically (hell, I have put it cynically myself) that Obama was just promising the (mostly white) comfortable class of the party that he wouldn't insist on looking at those nasty claims of justice if they would just elect a black dude and redeem their souls. Sure, we could, but it is better, and perhaps sustains a spark of hope in the savage rhetoric of the last few weeks, to see him as sincerely arguing the role of Joshua as our proper charge. In this reading, we have a narrative of struggle that succeeded, we have made it over the hump, we are walking into the promised land. The sacrifices of Moses are to be honored in the fulfillment of his task, and that we gratefully and joyously celebrate what we have achieved. The worst is past, we have come through the wilderness, and we will not lose our people again.

To have remained within that argument, even in the absence of more substantive and wonky offerings, would have provided a powerful and necessary force to the Democrats' claim upon the body politic. It would have built up the coalition by insisting on its common cause. The older arguments about race, as exemplified by the preaching of people like Wright, would have been rejected without being demonized. As Maya Angelou said a decade and more before - our passage has been paid for.

Instead, he chose a high stakes political strategy to maximize his constituent turnout in an attempt to remove his chief rival with a devastating and unanticipated blow, and has ended up more firmly enmeshed in one of the most divisive rhetorical modes imaginable on the left. The price Obama is paying for having reached for crude racial politics is to be joined at the hip to Wright and others like him. The speech Obama gave after the first big revelations about Wright was his last attempt to reclaim that original rhetoric, and it failed because there were no deeds to back up his words. Without deeds, there is nothing upon which to moor the call for transcendence. Today, in his brief, weary appeal to what he has written for 20 years, Obama merely ended up highlighting the shortcoming of that appeal - writing and talking are fine, but at some point you must act and embody your words. It would have meant rejecting the rhetoric of resentment presented by Wright. It would have meant refusing to use politics in that mode to build up margins. He is paying for launching the racism attacks because now he has no ground on which to stand to defend himself against older modes of race thinking and their corrosive, divisive politics. The longer the race goes on, the more he is caught in the net.

Obama is a smart man. Why did he not see this outcome? The hubby and I agreed - because there is nothing beneath the rhetoric upon which to ground it. Jesse Jackson, twenty years ago, could see and know what would happen with that language. He also knew that you had to stand for something, even when that something gave some people the heebie-jeebies. Jackson had an agenda of domestic social justice and equality and a radical transvaluation of values in foreign policy. Agree or disagree, there was never a doubt what Jackson stood for. His coalition was AAs and non-AA working class voters.

In political terms, Obama made a risky bet that has not paid off. He deliberately went negative in a way no Democrat in recent times would think to do. The New Hampshire and Nevada wins had almost ended the bump from Iowa, and something shocking had to be done, something powerful enough that it could throw Clinton out of the race before she built up momentum. Using the best state he had, Obama went for a super majority of AA votes and he got it. It was not enough.

How could he not project what the effect of that move would be on Clinton's coalition, that they would rally to her (as they had in New Hampshire) and that undecideds would break in favor of her? A very bad political miscalculation. If she could be removed quickly and not provide pushback to the argument, the strategy could be dropped and sent down the memory hole. Had it not been for CDS, it is doubtful the strategy would have been attempted. Without CDS, there was no possibility of it succeeding.

Once begun, the strategy could not be abandoned because of white attrition. Masked somewhat by the red state caucus votes and the lack of critical stories on Obama himself, it reemerged with a vengeance in Ohio and Texas, making it imperative that the campaign struggle to retain every AA vote to overcome working class backlash, which meant expanding the argument from his opponent to his opponent's supporters as well. The longer the campaign goes on, the more this strategy hurts Obama.

This raises a certain irony that for decades, the AA vote has been taken for granted by the party, simply swept up by the winner as just reward for being the nominee. This time, it is the infamous Reagan Democrats who are being taken as a given. Obama's arrogant claim that he would (of course) get all of Hillary's voters while she probably couldn't get his was originally a reference to the independents and Republican crossovers who were allegedly going to defect by droves, allowing Obama to position himself to the right of Clinton. And, now, he is fighting to retain his biggest voting block by trying to poison the ground that lies between him and the rest of the party. Sadly, I do not feel confident that AAs will simply vote Democratic, regardless of the nominee, not after this campaign.

What should have been his great strength, the coalition of wine track Dems and AA Dems, has turned into a millstone, with Obama's circle of support forcing him underwater due to their growing derision for and fear of the rest of the party - women, working class, Hispanics, elderly. The tragedy, even more for the party than for Obama, is that he might have been able to do precisely what he had originally claimed had he been able to transcend his own biases and actually do as he said he would, eschewing racking up margins and becoming the deed of his own ideals. What that would have taken would have been a willingness to risk a loss in order to win something larger than himself.

To be a Democrat, not an Obamacan.

Anglachel