American Apparel, giant L.A.-based maker of mostly crappy t-shirts, has apparently sent an email to its employees  urging them to vote for McCain or Obama because Hillary has shown an insufficient "committment" to immigrant legalization ... P.S.: You mean a huge, rich company can send an email urging its captive audience of workers to vote for Obama, but if I spend $1,001 starting a Web site or handing out leaflets on the street for the same purpose I have to pay a lawyer to register with the federal government  as a "political committee"? ... Update: American Apparel's campaigning may be, you know, not so legal. ...11:31  A.M. link

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"It's all about the Giants winning," said Greg Packer, 44 ..." ... 1:38 A.M.

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Monday, February 4, 2008

After you've trolled the usual spots, this Ben Smith page is the best fix I've found (though Drudge found it first). ... 4:23 P.M.

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Mike Murphy, over the top! Gloating about the "anti-immigrant Bund." Close to a violation of the Hitler Rule, no? In my neighborhood that's who the Bund supported. ... Anyway, since Murphy's an informal McCain adviser, his rhetoric--he also throws around "nativist"--offers a good clue as to what the McCain camp really thinks on the immigration issue, despite McCain's recent claims that he "got the message" after the defeat of his mass-legalization bill. ... 'I'll secure the goddamned border if those racists want it' seems like a fair summary.** ...

**--A more cynical summary would be: 'I'll pretend to secure the goddamned border ...' ... 2:01 P.M. link

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(If a tree surges in the forest but everybody's already voted ...: In California, "half the ballots cast in the primary will be absentee ballots." I didn't realize the absentee proportion was that high. A big boost for Hillary given the recent Obama surge. ... Q: Does heavy, early absentee voting undermine the Drama Principle  or reinforce it? In this case, it's arguably making the race more exciting. ...  1:20 P.M.

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Clinton campaign announces new theme song! 1:01 P.M.

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Mickey's Single Issue Voter's Guide: Suppose you were a single issue voter, and your single issue was immigration. Specifically, you were opposed to legislation that combines some form of amnesty (legalization of existing illegal immigrants) with tougher border enforcement. If so, you would probably be pretty depressed right now--three of the four leading presidential candidates explicitly favor such "comprehensive" reform. The fourth, Mitt Romney is the least likely to win. And even he's suspected of being a closet comprehensivist.

But you still have to vote. Before you did, you'd want to ask: Which of the three pro-legalization candidates is least likely to accomplish their legislative goal? When you think about it this way, a clear and somewhat surprising ranking of top three emerges.

1) Hillary Clinton would probably be the best president for anti-comprehensivists. She's cautious. She's been burned by GOP opposition before (to her 1994 health plan). Is she really going attempt both health care reform and immigration reform in her first two years? Remember, Rahm Emmanuel's swing-state Democratic congressmen typically ran tough-on-illegals campaigns. They're squeamish about voting for "amnesty." If Hillary is president (meaning John McCain isn't president) the Republicans are likely to unite against a Democratic legalization plan. Meanwhile, Hillary's political adviser James Carville is on record suggesting that legalization, like welfare, is a potential election-loser. Hillary suppporter Paul Krugman seems one of those remaining economists who actually believe in supply and demand--i.e., that an increase in the supply of immigrant labor can drive down unskilled wages. And Hillary herself has made anti-illegals noises in the past, including reversing her endorsement of Gov. Spitzer's drivers license plan.

2) Barack Obama, on the other hand, may actually believe his standard-left immigration positons. He's shown an ability to bridge the partisan divide and get things done. All deeply troubling, in this case.. But at least he too would have a hard time getting both a health care  plan and immigration legislation through Congress against opposition from Republicans (McCain having lost).

3) President McCain would seem like a replay of George W. Bush. Bush couldn't get his "comprehensive" immigration plan through, even with a Democratic Congress. What would be different with McCain? Quite a bit. a) McCain's likely to be more popular, at least if Iraq continues to improve; b) The Democrats are likely to have bigger Congressional majorities; c) McCain might be able to claim voter validation of his long-standing pro-legalization views. Certainly the Republicans wouldn't be united against a McCain "comprehensive" bill. Unlike Clinton and Obama, McCain doesn't have ambitious New Dealish health legislation that would compete for his and Congress' time and energy.

True, it would still be difficult to pass a McCainish immigration plan--you can imagine the Democrats splitting just like Republicans when faced with something that might actually become law. McCain would have campaigned on his pledge to secure the borders--his current plan for a quickie assurance by "border state" governors might be too transparent a ploy (especially if the press was reporting a continuing flow of illegals). Nevertheless,,McCain seems clearly the worst of the three possibilities, from an anti-comprehensivist perspective.

I'm not saying voters should be single-issue voters. I'm not saying I'm going to vote for Hillary.  I'm just saying ...

P.S.: OK,, I'm not just just saying.  If I thought either Clinton or Obama would do a much better job on health care, that would be one thing. But both seem well-positioned to actually pass some big, broad health plan. An immigration plan, on the other hand, seems much iffier. It could pass or fail depending on who's president. And, unlike a health care plan, an immigration legalization bill is likely to have large, irreversible consequences. Misconceived health plans can be altered or repealed (remember "catastrophic insurance"?). But if a misconceived immigration amnesty  attracts millions of new illegal entrants who then have to be given citizenship--on top of the new citizens created by the amnesty itself--it won't just lower unskilled wages etc. It will profoundly alter the very electorate that will have to consider any future change of course.

In this context, single-issue voting could be a highly responsible course.

Vote Hillary. She won't get it done! ...  2:15 A.M. link

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Sunday, February 3, 2008

The Drama Principle:

Q: What do you get when you combine the Feiler Faster Thesis(voters are comfortable processing info quickly) with the Theory of the Two Electorates (the mass of voters who don't follow politics are less informed than they used to be and only tune in at the last minute) with the 50-50 Forever theory (elections will be close from here on out as competing parties and candidates continually adjust to please 51% of the voters--and the ideological and institutional barriers to this adjustment dissolve)?

A: You get elections that are a) close but b) might not look close three, two, or even one day before the vote. Typically, one candidate A will be ahead, but Candidate B will start surging, or A will start collapsing. with startling rapidity as the late-tuning electorate rushes to rapidly learn about the race just in time to vote. Candidate B will look like he or she is, yes, racing against the clock! But that could be deceptive. It could not be so much that voters are changing their minds from A to B--if B only had two more days B would win!--so much as that they are all making up their minds once and for all, in quite orderly fashion, but only doing this at the very end (if B had two more days it wouldn't make a difference).

Daily tracking polls that end on Monday might not be good enough in this situation. You'd need hourly tracking polls that start on Monday morning. ... We do seem to be seeing a lot of last minute surges and surprises lately, no? ... 2:55 P.M. link

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Friday, February 1, 2008

Cardinal Murphy has word of a poll showing Obama tied in ... California. Yikes. Is the Hispandering working? That would fit with the Skurnik "Two Electorates" theory--most Latino voters, like most other voters, tune in only for the last few days, and what theynow see is Obama talking about giving drivers' licenses to illegals. ...  3:55 P.M.

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The Annotated Pander: Barack Obama presented himself after Iowa as the candidate who "won't just tell you what you want to hear, but what you need to know."  But that was then.

Now, if you're a Latino voter, he'll just tell you what you want to hear. He's in the middle of a desperate Hispandering initiative, which culminated in this exchange last night, which I've annotated:

CUMMINGS: This is from Kim Millman (ph) from Burnsville, Minnesota. And she says, "there's been no acknowledgement by any of the presidential candidates of the negative economic impact of immigration on the African-American community. How do you propose to address the high unemployment rates and the declining wages in the African-American community that are related to the flood of immigrant labor?"

Senator Obama, you want to go first on that? And it's for both of you.

OBAMA: Well, let me first of all say that I have worked on the streets of Chicago as an organizer with people who have been laid off from steel plants, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, and, you know, all of them are feeling economically insecure right now, and they have been for many years. Before the latest round of immigrants showed up, you had huge unemployment rates among African-American youth.

And, so, I think to suggest somehow that the problem that we're seeing in inner-city unemployment, for example, is attributable to immigrants, I think, is a case of scapegoating that I do not believe in, I do not subscribe to. [1]

(APPLAUSE)

And this is where we do have a very real difference with the other party.

OBAMA: I believe that we can be a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants.

Now, there is no doubt that we have to get control of our borders. We can't have hundreds of thousands of people coming over to the United States without us having any idea who they are [2]

I also believe that we do have to crack down on those employers that are taking advantage of the situation, hiring folks who cannot complain about worker conditions, who aren't getting the minimum wage sometimes, or aren't getting overtime. We have to crack down on them. [3] I also believe we have to give a pathway to citizenship after they have paid a fine and learned English, to those who are already here, because if we don't, they will continue to undermine U.S. wages.

But let's understand more broadly that the economic problems that African-Americans are experiencing, whites are experienc[ing], blacks and Latinos are experiencing in this country are all rooted in the fact that we have had an economy out of balance. We've had tax cuts that went up instead of down. We have had a lack of investment in basic infrastructure in this country. Our education system is chronically underfunded.

(APPLAUSE)

And so, there are a whole host of reasons why we have not been generating the kinds of jobs that we are generating. We should not use immigration as a tactic to divide. Instead, we should pull the country together to get this economy back on track.

[1]: "Scapegoating" does for me what "timetable" apparently does for John McCain--it signals complete, maddening ideological disconnect. It's typically used by liberals--as it is here--in a doomed attempt to make a social problem highlighted by conservatives simply go away. You see it wasn't that welfare subsidized an isolated culture of non-work and broken families that produced poverty and crime--welfare recipients were just "scapegoats" for economic frustrations caused by a bad economy! And it's not that illegal immigration lowers unskilled wages  and makes it harder for blacks to escape that inner-city culture of poverty. That's "scapegoating" also. (African-Americans who complain about immigrants  must just be too foolish to figure that out.)

This isn't the language of a politician who wants to transcend partisan difference. This is the language of a politician who wants to wallow in partisan (and ideological) cant! Obama knows better, of course--he gave a very different answer at the time of the big immigration marches of May, 2006  [E.A.]:

It does appear that undocumented workers have a somewhat adverse effect in depressing the wages of low-skill workers, which is why in the African-American community, for example, there is some nervousness of about the number of undocumented workers that are coming into this country and whether they are systematically replacing or pushing out low-skill, low-wage black workers.

I doubt he's changed his mind. He's just pandering.

[2] Obama can't even bring himself to say that the problem of losing control of the borders is the number of illegal immigrants who come in. No, it's just that we don't know "who they are"! The suggestion to his target constituency is that he's happy with unlimited immigration as long as all those tens of millions of immigrants are identified. ...

[3] Most pathetically, he says he wants to crack down on employers who violate minimum wage laws, etc, but can't even bring himself to say he would crack down on employers because they hire illegals. Sanctions against such employers--even if they pay the minimum wage--are the conventional core of the "comprehensive" enforcement-for-amnesty deal. Often Democrats overeemphasize these sanctions as a way of bashing employers instead of immigrants and avoiding talk of a fence. But this week, apparently, mentioning the completely respectable Bush/McCain/Kennedy sanctions idea is too comprehensive for Obama. Risks upsetting some Latino voters. They don't "need to know," I guess. ...

Swoontime is over here at kf. ... 2:56 A.M. link

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Thursday, January 31, 2008

It sure sounded like a concession speech to me. ... Rush Limbaugh could have called on conservatives across the country to rally to Romney and stop McCain. He didn't. That seems like a big signal. ... 1:37 P.M. link

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Maybe you can figure out if McCain actually answered Janet Hook's question last night [E.A.] [Update: Transcript has been corrected. See below]:

HOOK:  Senator McCain, let me just take the issue to you, because you obviously have been very involved in it.  During this campaign, you, like your rivals, have been putting the first priority, heaviest emphasis on border security.  But your original immigration proposal back in 2006 was much broader and included a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants who were already here. 

What I'm wondering is -- and you seem to be downplaying that part.  At this point, if your original proposal came to a vote on the Senate floor, would you vote for it? 

MCCAIN:  It won't.  It won't.  That's why we went through the debate...

HOOK:  But if it did? 

MCCAIN:  No, I would not,[**] because we know what the situation is today.  The people want the border secured first.  And so to say that that would come to the floor of the Senate -- it won't.  We went through various amendments which prevented that ever -- that proposal.

But, look, we're all in agreement as to what we need to do.  Everybody knows it.  We can fight some more about it, about who wanted this or who wanted that.  But the fact is, we all know the American people want the border secured first. 

MCCAIN:  We will secure the borders first when I am president of the United States.  I know how to do that.  I come from a border state, where we know about building walls, and vehicle barriers, and sensors, and all of the things necessary. 

 I will have the border state governors certify the borders are secured.  And then we will move onto the other aspects of this issue, probably as importantly as tamper-proof biometric documents, which then, unless an employer hires someone with those documents, that employer will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  And that will cause a lot of people to leave voluntarily. 

There's 2 million people who are here who have committed crimes.  They have to be rounded up and deported. 

And we're all basically in agreement there are humanitarian situations.  It varies with how long they've been here, et cetera, et cetera.

We are all committed to carrying out the mandate of the American people, which is a national security issue, which is securing the borders.  That was part of the original proposal, but the American people didn't trust or have confidence in us that we would do it. 

So we now know we have to secure the borders first, and that is what needs to be done.  That's what I'll do as president of the United States. 

COOPER:  So I just want to confirm that you would not vote for your bill as it originally was? 

MCCAIN:  My bill will not be voted on; it will not be voted on. I will sit and work with Democrats and Republicans and with all people.  And we will have the principals securing the borders first. 

And then, if you want me to go through the description all over again, I would be glad to.  We will secure the borders first.  That's the responsibility and the priority of the American people. 

COOPER:  Actually, we're going to be taking a short break

At first I thought he'd answered "no," which would be one interpretation if the boldfaced words were punctuated "No. It would not ..." But on second and third thought it's pretty clear Anderson Cooper let McCain bully his questioner and escape without answering. It was a straightforward and relevant query: 'Would you still support the bill you spent much of your recent Senate career championing?'  ...

Update: It turns out he did answer "no," as the corrected transcript shows, but then followed it up with a lot of language suggesting he was simply denying the hypothetical--e.g. "No, I would not sign it simply because it would never come up."

P.S.: I don't quite understand why McCain can't just simply say, "No" without crabbily disputing the question.  (He could then give the same little talk about securing the borders, how he's gotten the message etc.) Unless, of course, the real answer is "Yes." ...

**Transcript corrected.I had originally posted CNN's transcript, which reports what McCain said as "No, it would not."  In fact, he said "No, I would not." You can view it here. Thanks to Ace of Spades. ... 1:17 A.M. link

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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

When is Rielle Hunter due? Soon, I should think. If her baby's first words are "I'm the grandson of a mill worker!" that will be a clue. ... Update: Comes now news that Edwards is dropping out.  That was sudden, no? It seems like only yesterday--because it was--that his Deputy Campaign Manager Jonathan Prince was quoted boasting to reporters that in the "worst case scenario" Edwards would control 20 to 25 percent of the delegates at the convention and would probably play a decisive role. ... Alert reader D.E. reports that the headline in his print edition of today's Los Angeles Times  is ""Edwards, onward  He's told skeptics before, he's in it 'for the long haul.'" ... More: Edwards was still sending out fundraising appeals Tuesday morning. ... 2:01 A.M.

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You can glimpse the rip in the Republican party in raw blog form over at The Corner. [Search for "lecture."] Should they rally against McCain to preserve their ideology, or rally around McCain, mainly for foreign policy reasons? I'm all for protracted civil war--but then I'm not a Republican. (I find it hard to believe that either of my party's likely candidates is going to snatch defeat from the jaws of satisfactory in Iraq). Still, you'd think that even a Republican would require McCain to pull more than 40% of the vote in at least one primary before deciding that he's the inevitable nominee. ... P.S.: Dick Morris argues that only McCain can beat Hillary. What if the nominee's Obama? And is the Latino vote really a Hillary weak spot, where pro-legalization McCain could make big inroads? I thought Latinos were, so far, on Hillary's side (in that other civil war). ... P.P.S.: Come to think of it, the Dual Civil Wars (orthodox vs. heretic in the GOP, brown vs. black on the Dem side) is a pretty good Neutral Story Line for the MSM. It beats "Is this any way to elect a president." ...  1:26 A.M.

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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

According to the exit poll, even while winning Florida, McCain still lost among Republicans. (Update: Now it shows him tied with Romney.**)  I didn't know that was possible in a "closed" primary. Yet it took the 17% percent of voters who identified themselves as "independent" put McCain over the top. ...

P.S.: Maybe the 17% were voters who think they are independents but haven't changed their party registration. More alarming is the phenomenon described in this news account  (subsequently highlighted by Drudge):

In northern Coral Springs, near the Sawgrass Expressway and Coral Ridge Drive, David Nirenberg arrived to vote as an independent. Nevertheless, he said poll workers insisted he choose a party ballot.

"He said to me, 'Are you Democrat or Republican?' I said, 'Neither, I am independent.' He said, 'Well, you have to pick one,''' Nirenberg said.

In Florida, only those who declare a party are allowed to cast a vote in that party's presidential primary.

Nirenberg said he tried to explain to the poll worker that he should not vote on a party ballot because of his "no party affiliation" status.

Nirenberg said a second poll worker was called over who agreed that independents should not use party ballots, but said they had received instructions to the contrary.

"He said, 'Ya know, that is kind of funny, but it was what we were told.' … I was shocked when they told me that." Nirenberg said he went ahead and voted for John McCain. [E.A.]

The Cristian Right at work? ...

**--Was originally reported as Romney 33, McCain 31 (on Fox and CNN) and "Romney by 2" (ABC).  ... 6:57 P.M. link

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Monday, January 28, 2008

"Mexico First" Update: Making a distinction I failed  to make, Mark Krikorian argues that it's possible, in theory, for someone to promote "amnesty and accelerated mass immigration" and yet still "support firm borders and patriotic assimilation."But McCain's "Hispanic Outreach Director" Juan Hernandez is not that someone. He

has spent years opposing the very legitimacy of America's borders and Americanization in the most public way possible.

Highlight reel here. ... P.S.: McCain's National Finance Co-Chair appears to be Jerrold Perenchio, who made a fortune with Univision and has been a major defender of failed bilingual education policies. The longer people speak Spanish and not English, after all, the more they watch Univision., right?... Out here in L.A. we also remember Perenchio's secret golf course! See Jill Stewart  [search for "poisons"] and the Surfrider Foundation. ...9:22 P.M. link

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Some behind-the-scenes evidence of what McCain really thinks about making sure that English remains the common language amid a flood of Spanish-speaking immigrants. Victor Davis Hanson take note. ... Update: Hanson doesn't want to hear any  

second-hand reports about what McCain purportedly said in Senate cloak rooms, or what is reported through anonymous sources about interviews he gave, or the legion of his other noted supposed sins ...

Hmm. Aren't second hand reports about what a pol says often the best evidence of what he actually thinks? Isn't that some of the evidence future historians will use--and if so, why shouldn't voters know it? Or are we to judge McCain and others only by the staged public announcements?  Finally, don't anonymous sources often have good reason to remain anonymous and yet provide good information? (The source in this case, remember, wasn't anonymous to the reporter who reported on the incident. Ramesh Ponnuru said it was a "Senate source whom I trust." The source was just not idenfitied to readers.) ...  6:59 P.M. link

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Anti-Swoon Medication: The Obama campaign is emphasizing his support for giving illegals drivers licenses, and more:

The Illinois senator is differentiating himself in three key areas: driver's licenses, a promise to take up immigration reform his first year in office, and his background as the son of an immigrant (his father was Kenyan) and a community organizer in Chicago.

Obama made the promise to Latino leaders to take up immigration reform in his first year after Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., chairman of the Democratic caucus, said his party might not raise the divisive issue again until the next president's second term, assuming a Democrat wins. [E.A.]

Of course, there's "taking up" and there's taking up. Is President Obama really going to spend his first-year capital attempting comprehensive immigration reform--putting all Emanuel's borderline House Dems on the spot, giving the GOP an issue for 2010--when he also has health care and possibly the econony to deal with? ...

P.S.: I'm grasping here! ...

P.P.S.: Obama's bold Hispandering makes me eager to defeat ...McCain! Given the likelihood that either Obama or Hillary will be in the White House in 2009, it would be good to have at least one party that isn't formally committeed to rapid legalization and can therefore act as a check on the Democratic candidates' impulses.  The only way to achieve that is to make it clear that, within the Republican party, self-righteous pro-legalization activism is a political loser. Beating McCain is the way to drive that message home. ...  4:11 P.M.

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McCain's "Mexico First" Aide: Is it fair to make an issue out of John McCain's "Hispanic Outreach Director" Juan Hernandez, a dual U.S.-Mexican citizen who was in the cabinet of the government of Mexico, seems to advocate the free flow of citizens over the border, and famously said of Mexican-Americans

 "I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think 'Mexico first." [E.A.]

kf says yes!

1) McCain seems to have conned a lot of Republicans into thinking he's transformed his position on immigration--for example, Victor Davis Hanson, author of "Mexifornia,"  who now writes about "McCain's won't-make-that-mistake-again changed views on closing the border." This even though it's obvious to anyone paying attention that McCain hasn't altered his support for legalization of illegals (once he's  declared the border "secure").  One reason we know this is because he's said it-- he said it again on Meet the Press yesterday, when asked if he'd sign the McCain-Kennedy "comprehensive" immigration bill as president if it came to his desk. Answer: "Yeah." If somebody like Hernandez, as McCain also said yesterday, "supports my policies and my proposals," it serves to emphasize that those policies may not have changed as much as cheap dates like Hanson seem to believe.  Hernandez's own Web site features an article describing him as "passionately" advocating legalization of "all Mexican workers in the U.S."  [What about McCain's statement that: "I will not allow anyone to receive Social Security or any other benefits because they have come here illegally and broken our laws"?--ed  Obvious BS. If he offers legalization to the "12 million" who are here they will clearly get benefits from having come here illegally--the benefit of being here legally, for one. Medicaid, Medicare, and public schooling for another. People who came here illegally would also immediately qualify for Social Security benefits as soon as they got the quickie "probationary" Z-visa under McCain's bill. The only way McCain's statement would make sense is if he was also planning to offer these benefits to everyone who didn't cross the border--i.e. the entire population of Mexico. ... Actually, that doesn't seem too far from Dr. Hernandez's philosophy. ... You don't think ...]

2. Hernandez's "Mexico first" comment isn't quite as bad as it initially seems. Here's the full Nightline back and forth:

(OC) Has the Mexican-American--and just Mexicans in America, that population--now become successful and wealthy enough to give back here that that becomes a piece of the puzzle?

Mr. HERNANDEZ: We are betting on that the Mexican-American population in the United States will become more and more like the Jewish community of the United States, like the Puerto Rican community of the United States, that they will think 'Mexico first,' and they will invest in Mexico. They've already been doing it--in--in--in--to a great extent.

AMOS: But that's family to family?

Mr. HERNANDEZ: Family to family. But now I want the third generation, the seventh generation, I want them all to think 'Mexico first.'

OK, so he says he wants Mexicans to think of Mexico the way Jews think of Israel. And maybe he's talking mainly about investment, not dual loyalty (though why shouldn't dual citizens have dual loyalties? Isn't that the point?). But would any Israeli emissary or American Jewish leader have the chutzpah to urge Americans to "think 'Israel First'"? I doubt it. And I doubt Dr. Hernandez has in mind a relationship of Mexico to the millions of Mexican Americans just over the border (a not-undisputed border, actually) that's the same as the relationship of Israel has with overseas Jewish diasporans.

3. Imagine if Hillary Clinton (or Barack Obama) had an aide who ran around saying such things. Would it cause a controversy? Ask Lani Guinier!

P.S.: Hot Air has posted a montage of Hernandez' TV appearances. Again, at first you think it's unfair--it undoubtedly is--but by the end he gives you the geniune creeps, having perfected a combination of Jeff Birnbaum's oleaginous faux-joviality and Tom Cruise's inexplicably wired commitment. ... P.P.S.: Here's his Web site home page. ...

More: See also Krikorian. ... 2:24 A.M. link

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Sunday, January 27, 2008

What's more dangerous than "a wounded guy with a lot of money"**? A desperate guy with a lot of self-righteousness! Paul Mirengoff makes the best case  for McCain's charge that Romney "wanted to set a date for withdrawal" from Iraq. It's still weak!*** (See also AP and Lowry  and Ponnuru.) McCain seems to believe his wartime heroism entitles him to an unlimited moral bank account that he can withdraw from whenever it's in his self-interest to do something dishonest.  Of course, sometime down the road when it helps advance his candidacy he may righteously apologize for having lied to advance his candidacy--and bask in the press' fawning over this "extraordinary act of contrition," the same way he did in 2000. ...

**--Quote is from Lindsey Graham. [What about him?--ed He's McCain with all the self-righteousness but none of the heroism.] 

***--Clarification: I'm not saying Mirengoff defended McCain, but rather that he went out of his way to give McCain the benefit of every doubt and still concluded it was a smear. ...  9:15 P.M. link

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This article--purporting to show that ideas of "massive economic benefits accruing to African-Americans in the '90s were largely an illusion"--has been at the top of Slate's "most-emailed" list for a while, which is scary because it's ... unpersuasive. Extremely unpersuasive!   Here's just one chart that would seem to refute it. (The chart shows the black poverty rate in an impressive plunge between 1993 to 2000, while the white rate declines only mildly. The underlying official numbers are here. See also  ... and also.). ... 1:56 P.M.

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About the Florida and Michigan delegations: On TV theyv'e been confidently talking about Hillary's call for seating the Michigan and Florida delegations  as if that will be her trump card at a contested convention. She'll almost certainly win the Florida vote next week, and she's already won in Michigan. But I don't see how the convention can fairly award Hillary the delegates from those states after the DNC got her competitors to pledge not to campaign in those states' primaries. Doesn't that discredit those primaries? Or should Obama and Edwards be punished because they obeyed their party? ... Maybe the convention should seat some Florida and Michigan delegates, but if so you'd think the party would make those states choose them anew through an actual contested election, caucus, or convention. ... What am I missing? ... [Tks. to reader D.J.] 1:14 A.M. link

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On the bright side: The Hillary campaign shakeup-- cruelly delayed by the unexpected victory in New Hampshire--may now be back on track. ... Suggested headline: "Quantum of Solis"! ... 12:46 A.M.

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They've lost Josh? TPM: "If the constitution allowed it, I'd happily have Clinton back. I'd happily have Hillary in his place. But I don't want them both." ... 12:40 A.M.

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Saturday, January 26, 2008

Key anti-identity-politics, anti-ghettoization passage in Obama's victory speech:

And what we've seen in these last weeks is that we're also up against forces that are not the fault of any one campaign, but feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation.  It's the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon.  A politics that tells us that we have to think, act, and even vote within the confines of the categories that supposedly define us.  The assumption that young people are apathetic.  The assumption that Republicans won't cross over.  The assumption that the wealthy care nothing for the poor, and that the poor don't vote. The assumption that African-Americans can't support the white candidate; whites can't support the African-American candidate ....

Works for me. ... [The passage works for you or the "assumption" works for you?--reader M. The passage. I'm being non-snarky. Perilously close to swooning!] ...  6:38 P.M. link

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Why does the crowd at Obama's victory rally just happen to look like a perfect, multiracial group of pleasant, idealistic, attractive Americans? I suspect it's because the crowd at Obama rallies typically is a perfect multiracial group of pleasant idealistic, attractive Americans. I've never been in a more benign-seeming group. They're clean! (And articulate!) Maybe a little edgeless. ... 6:28 P.M.

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Attempted Ghettoization: Now that Bill Clinton has explicitly belittled Obama's South Carolina victory by comparing it to Jesse Jackson's, how does Obama's share of the white vote compare with Jackson's in 1988? Obama got about a quarter (24%) of the white vote, according to exit polls. ... Was there even an exit poll of the 1988 caucuses? I can't find one. ... Update: Alert emailer L finds the following in a Christian Science Monitor story from March 17, 1988:

 Although Jackson's white support was significantly higher in South Carolina than in 1984 - it is estimated this year at between 5 and 10 percent of the voters - he has not made much headway with populist, blue-collar whites ... [E.A.]

24% vs. 5-10%. It looks as if Bill Clinton's comparison will not work to his wife's advantage. ... More: Tom Maguire asks the same question and gets the same answer, from an old New York Times story. The "5 percent to 10 percent" estimate of the white vote for Jackson seems to come from "party leaders." ... Maguire has several other useful comments. ... [Aren't you doing exactly what Charles Franklin recommended  and you pooh-poohed--looking at exit polls?--ed Yes. Maybe someone else can derive numbers from the actual hard county-by-county vote count.]

Question #2: Which campaign wants John Edwards out now? Obviously, Hillary wants him out of Southern states, but there are a lot more non-Southern states where he might split the "change" or "anti-Hillary" vote with Obama, no? ... P.S.: If you want Edwards gone, remember kf 's solution, which does not require investigating the Rielle Hunter mess!  It's to give Edwards' popular wife a talk show--something suitably influential and rewarding to do, post-campaign. ... Update: Dickerson makes a good point about Edwards--

If he stays in the race, he might want to rethink all that support he gave Hillary during the last debate. He defended her and attacked Obama, and all he got was an accusation [via robocall ] that he's a counterfeit home forecloser? 

4:05 P.M. link

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Undernews Alert--The Barrett Report's redacted pages? Clinton skeptics were disappointed when special counsel David Barrett's report didn't prove rampant Clintonian abuse of the IRS. (See here, search for "Kohoutek"). But some 120 pages of the reporthad been redacted. Did John Kerry endorse Obama rather than Clinton because he's seen what's in them?  Mark Goodman suggests as much. The obvious problem with this theory is that if, as Goodman admits, the redacted pages "can be exhumed on demand by any member of Congress," you'd think that at least one of the 535 members would be enough of a Hillary enemy to have  obtained and leaked  any sensational charges they contain by now. ... 1:53 P.M.

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Pre-S.C. Questions: 1)If Hillary comes in third in South Carolina, will Time's Mark Halperin still insist it was a stroke of genius for her to have "[f]orced Obama to spend an entire week in South Carolina while H. Clinton traveled to Super Tuesday states"? ... 2) Did anybody in those Super Tuesday states pay much attention to her? ... 3) If Edwards can steal the white male vote from her in South Carolina, what's to stop him from doing the same thing on Super Tuesday in states like Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee--even Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Idaho and Utah? ... 1:19 A.M.

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Friday, January 25, 2008

Won't Get Fooled Again? Zogby's poll right before the New Hampshire primary  showed Obama with a 13 point lead. ... Zogby's poll for Saturday's South Carolina primary shows Obama with a 13 point lead. And falling. I'm just sayin' ... P.S.: Remember, a "Bradley effect" is possible among black voters  as well as white voters. ...

Update--Would you lie to a robot? I would!  Mark Blumenthal analyzes the diverging (but not all that much) S.C. polls, including the Clemson poll with its huge (36%) undecided result. He's skeptical of a Bradley Effect, noting that if voters lie to polltakers when they say they're going to vote for the black candidate, you 'd expect them to tell the truth to automated polls:

If the Bradley/Wilder effect is operating, we would expect to see it on surveys that use live interviewers, but in this case, the lack of an interviewer seems to work in Obama's favor.

But are we sure this traditional expectation--voters are less likely to lie to robots--still holds? I used to think talking to a robotic phone answerer was pretty close to a "secret ballot"--what was the robot going to do to me, anyway? But machines do a whole lot these days--they track your musical tastes, follow your movements, raise or lower your credit ratings.  Now a robot can conceivably do a lot to me, at least in the paranoid part of my imagination activated when I get an unsolicited call. At best, it's probably generating a list to sell someone! I don't want it know my real innermost thoughts, including my political thoughts, especially my un-PC political thoughts. These days, I'd be much more paranoid about pushing a button that say "I'm voting against beloved minority candidate X" than telling a live operator the same thing. Sorry, Rasmussen! The traditional truth-revealing advantage of robo-calling may be the artifact of a transitional era in info-technology.

That means the classic "Bradley Effect"--whites telling pollsters they're going to vote for the black candidate but then doing something else on Election Day--could apply to both human and robotic pollsters. Maybe it applies worse to robo-pollers.  So if robo-polls favor Obama more than live polls, that could mean there is no Bradley effect--or it could mean there is one but we just can't rely on robotic polling to smoke it out. ...

See also, Charles Franklin:

I think the more compelling story of South Carolina will be the exit poll results. Obama has appealed to white voters in previous primaries and caucuses. The pre-election polls have found him getting as low as 10% of the white vote in South Carolina. The potential for racial polarization in this Southern state could damage his ability to transcend race as a basis of voting. Paradoxically, there has been speculation that Clinton can win the votes of black women, a result that could reduce polarization in the exit poll.

Of course, people can lie to exit pollsters too! If you're a black South Carolinian and want to help Hillary as much as you can, you'll walk into the booth, vote for her, then walk out and tell the exit poll person you voted for Obama. ... There may also be non-Machiavellian peer pressure in black precincts to tell the exit pollsters the same thing (which, perversely, might hurt Obama in tomorrow night's  press spin by making it look as if he received an ethnic bloc vote). In white areas similar pressure might enocourage voters to falsely tell exit pollsters they voted for Edwards or Clinton. ... I'm not sure we should pay so much attention to the exit polls! ... Presumably the real, actual official secret-ballot vote tally will reveal any bloc voting by white areas or black areas, no? ... 12:41 A.M.

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Thursday, January 24, 2008

Obama's Ghetto Escape-- Continued: I'm posting the following email from reader M, not to endorse it (or to criticize it) but just in case Obama supporters do not realize what their candidate is now up against:

I was liking Obama quite a bit until the militant black establishment came out for him.  Here's the thing... your primary identity is either American or hyphenated-American.  In other words, you can be American first, or you can be (example) Gay-American, African-American, WASP-American.

If you vote for someone because they share your hyphenated background, why should I believe that that some candidate will respect my needs on an equal basis with yours?  If Obama is the candidate of the Black-America establishment, he can't be the American candidate.

I don't like Hillary.  I don't like her medical plans and I don't like her past crime and gun plans.  But she is an American candidate.  Not a Gyno-American.  Just a coldly-effecient, and in my view mis-aimed, American candidate.

So bottom line: Yes, backlash has already happened.  By being the Black candidate rather than an American candidate, Obama is no longer in the running to be MY candidate.

Meanwhile, alert emailer L argues--

Look at the exit polls out of Nevada (the only state so far that has a significant minority pop.) and the problem Obama has is with white women, not whites in general. White women were the largest segment of  the voters (38%) and Hillary won them by 24 points, compared to just  6 points among white men.

Clinton Obama

white men 46% 40%

white women 55% 31%

non-white men 39% 55%

non-white women 43% 51%

I don't think that those women are voting for Hillary because he's black or they really like her. Just judging from the conversations I've had with women (who are mostly white) who are torn between Obama and Hillary, the "experience" question begins to take on gender and age aspects... Hillary is the better qualified woman who would be "passed over" for a younger, less experienced man. Race doesn't enter the equation.

How can Obama peel off some of those white women voters? I don't think repudiating race-based affirmative action does it. I think the only way he can do it is break the strong sense of identification that allows the above narrative to work, i.e. the strong link between how women perceive their own careers and how they perceive Hillary's candidacy. Right now they're one and the same.

The answer is one word: Oprah ...

Hmm. I'm not even sure Oprah is up to that task. Meanwhile it would be nice, if you were Obama, to win a majority of white men, no? A bold anti-race-preference move--assuming the hints he's dropped reflect his actual beliefs--might help him do that. Even a statement that this is the direction he thinks the nation should be moving would make a big difference, you'd expect. ... P.S.: John Rosenberg  argues I'm thinking wishfully. Follow his links for what Obama has said on the topic--it seems ambiguous and suggestive to me. ... Class-preference advocate Richard Kahlenberg also has high hopes for Obama. ... 5:50 P.M. link

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Anti-Purple?--Backfill: Chris Richardson's furious Monday farrago  attacking Hillary's reliance on her "menacing, purple-faced husband" makes Maureen Dowd seem like Julie Andrews! ... 5:19 P.M.

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Snakes on a Plane, II: WSJ on Bill Clinton and Ron Burkle. Bill is "negotiating" to wind down his interest in Burkle's investment firm. Does that mean Burkle has discretion to give up or not give up a few extra million? Remember that Burkle has large and varied holdings and is likely to have some regulatory business with the federal government over the next four years. ... On the other hand, focusing on economic conflicts--as if the Burkle-Clinton partnership were all about making millions--might be a distraction. With Clinton the general rule is not "follow the money."but "follow the nookie."**

**--Philip Weiss' formulation.   4:33 P.M.

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One for the Price of Two: Bill Clinton isn't a candidate for federal office. Does that mean rich people can spend unlimited amounts of money attacking him and his record (and spelling his last name in large capital letters) in the months before the election without running afoul of the campaign finance laws? RedState asks. ... 4:23 P.M.

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Gran Salida? Since the fall, L.A.'s Unified School District has cancelled plans to build 19 new schools and additions because the projected students haven't materialized. Enrollment is down 7 percent from 2003. The L.A. Times doesn't even mention a decline or reversal of immigrant flows as a possible cause, blaming only

years of declining birth rates and increasing housing prices that have pushed poor and working-class families out of many gentrified urban Los Angeles neighborhoods.

Hmm. Housing prices haven't really increased since last fall, have they? But there has been an anti-illegal crackdown (and a decline in construction jobs). Is the LAT so committed to its 'Latinos are the future' line that it's missing a major social and demographic development happening right under its nose? ... 1:00 A.M.

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Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Another paywall falls: The Atlantic's. ... 2:09 P.M.

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Josh Gerstein, reporting on immigration-related tension  at Mrs. Clinton's United Farm Workers rally:

Even at Mrs. Clinton's rally, there were signs of how volatile the immigration issue can be. Some of the farm workers, who toted signs saying, "America con Hillary," wore cowboy hats or baseball caps. Not all removed them during the pledge of allegiance.

"In this country, we take our hats off!" one woman sitting across the gym shouted loudly as the patriotic exercises concluded, well before the New York senator arrived.

12:59 P.M.

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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

How Obama Can Escape from the Ghetto: I thought Margaret Carlson was out on a very shaky limb a few years ago last Thursday when she wrote that Obama had

lost the essence of his candidacy as the first black man to run as himself. Once the race card is on the table, no matter who puts it there, it's impossible to put it back up anyone's sleeve. Obama may look back on the first two weeks of 2008 as the time when he lost the nomination to Clinton.

Now the idea that Obama has been "ghettoized" as the "black" candidate has become the accepted template for the campaign--even the point that a win in hotly contested South Carolina on Saturday is seen as actually hurting Obama  because (in Dick Morris' analysis)

[w]atching blacks block vote for Obama will trigger a white backlash that will help Hillary win Florida and to prevail the week after.

Here we thought we were getting the Mondale/Hart campaign of 1984--without Mondale's pleasantness or Hart's weirdness--and instead we get the Dukakis campaign of 1988, in which a slightly tedious, marginally likeable elite liberal established his mainstream (white) bona fides by running around the country thumping Jesse Jackson.

Worse, it's hard to see an easy way out of it for Obama, at least before the wave of primaries and caucuses on Feb. 5. He could try to make Hillary the pet candidate of Latinos  the way he's being cast as the pet candidate of blacks--but that would require a shift to the right on immigrant legalization that he doesn't seem willing to make. (I hope I'm wrong about that.**)

The more obvious move is to find a Sister Souljah--after Saturday--to stiff arm. The most promising candidate is not a person, but an idea: race-based affirmative action. Obama has already made noises about shifting to a class-based, race-blind system of preferences. What if he made that explicit? Wouldn't that shock hostile white voters into taking a second look at his candidacy? He'd renew his image as trans-race leader (and healer). The howls of criticism from the conventional civil-rights establishment--they'd flood the cable shows--would provide him with an army of Souljahs to hold off. If anyone noticed Hillary in the ensuing fuss, it would be to put her on the spot--she'd be the one defending mend-it-don't-end-it civil rights orthodoxy.

I can't think of a better plan. Can you?

P.S.: Abandoning race-based preferences would certainly solve Obama's Boldness Gap, as described by Dan Gerstein.

** Update: Obama's views on immigration, if not his actions, are more sensitive to anti-legalization arguments  than I'd expected. ... 6:54 P.M. link

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KBW10:44 A.M.

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Mounting evidence, from Charles Peters and Jonathan Cohn [$], that Barack Obama ("present" or not) was a highly effective--and "progressive"--state legislator. ... 2:31 A.M.

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Momentum Mori: Fred Barnes joins those noting that  "momentum" has run out of steam  in 2008:

The idea of momentum is that you generate support in subsequent primaries when you win one. Not this year. Fox News anchor Brit Hume now refers to "no-mentum." Obama won Iowa, then lost New Hampshire. John McCain won New Hampshire, then lost Michigan. And so on.

Indeed, this Saturday the press expects Obama to win South Carolina because the press assumes that Hillary's "momentum" from Nevada is virtually nonexistent. Likewise, Hillary's apparent strategy--lose next Saturday, win Super Tuesday--assumes that Obama won't get any Gary-Hart like momentum from South Carolina.

Let the record show that the Death of Momentum was entirely foretold at least  eight long years ago by the application of the Feiler Faster Thesis (voters comfortably process information quickly) coupled with what turned out to be the Skurnik Two-Electorate Theory (voters who don't follow politics don't tune in until the very end). As outlined in 2000, late-focusing voters tune in to what the press is saying in, say, the two days before their state's election, which is usually something different from what the press says in the two days after the previous state's election. Four days = no mo' mo.  Add in possible affirmative voter rebellion against what the press says--Huck's Hot! Barack Rock Star!--and it's overdetermined. ... P.S.: Another equation--

No Mo + Proportional Delegate Allocation + >2 contenders = Brokered Convention

With that possibility in mind, it's never to early to float the name of a possible out-of-the-blue compromise candidate. John O'Sullivan floats "telegenic" Gov. Sanford. ... 2:17 A.M. link

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Lexus Stimulus--Regressive but Effective: Rare Ellisblog post suggests an exceptionally Republican way to boost economic demand. But it's also exceptionally fast. ...1:59 A.M.

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The Reagan Coalition didn't die of natural causes: It's now steel-vault CW that the tripartite Reagan Coalition (national security conservatives, social conservatives, economic conservatives) has sundered. There's a tendency to portray this as some sort of inevitable process, a working-out of an ideological dialiectic. Hence Fred Thompson was just a fool to run on a Reaganite platform--the old coalition doesn't exist and can't exist. 

There is at least one sense in which the coalition was a victim of its own success: by successfully pursuing elimination of the welfare (AFDC) entitlement, the Gingrich Republicans removed a major reason for public distrust of liberal "affirmative government." But that merely meant the R.C. was fighting an increasingly unfavorable battle against Democrats who wanted the non-welfare welfare state to expand (i.e., to provide health care). It didn't mean the Coalition had fractured.

It took President Bush to accomplish the latter, through two willful decisions: a) the decision to invade Iraq and b) the decision to pursue an ambitious immigration reform that included mass legalization. The former decision discredited Republicans and cost them the support of conservative realists. The latter split businessmen and libertarians from both social and law-and-order conservatives. Neither decision was in any way inevitable. To explain them, the internal dialectic of the Bush family (effectively described in Jacob Weisberg's new book) is more useful than any grander diagram of political or social tensions. [But the business wing of the GOP would have been mad if Bush had opposed the immigrant legalization "reform"--ed. Bush didn't have to make a big issue of immigration at all. And it wouldn't have been one if he hadn't. A few stronger border-security measures to placate the base and the whole dilemma would easily have been kicked past his term in office. The real demand for "comprehensive reform" came from intellectuals, ethnic interests and political strategists who saw a transformative potential in winning the Latino vote. Like Iraq, it was a war of choice. In the event, it turned out businesses didn't care nearly as much about it as Karl Rove, John McCain and Tamar Jacoby. Bush was reduced to urging businessmen to lobby for his plan.]

The upshot is that the current lack of a "Reagan" candidate is a historical accident (unless you also want to blame Bush for failing to put in place an adequate successor).  Mitt Romney didn't have to be a Mormon. Fred Thompson--or someone like him--could have put the Coalition back together. Bush's damage turned out not to be irreperable: The war in Iraq is fading. Immigrant semi-amnesty can (and probably will) be postponed. That makes Thompson's failure all the greater, and all the more personal. As Byron York writes:

Last night I talked with Cyndi Mosteller, a strong social conservative who headed the Charleston County Republican Party from 2003 to 2007 and who supports McCain.  When I asked about Thompson, she said.  "He was the most anticipated candidate that I have ever seen.  So many people on the ground were ready to run the ball for him, and they showed up in strength, but he didn't really show up in strength.  I think that probably Thompson is more of a private person.  I don't really think he's cut out for the public run required of public office.  I think it's almost a personality thing; it's certainly not an ideological thing.  It's like the public energy and the will to run are a little bit lacking there."  Talk to other South Carolina conservatives, no matter who they supported, and you'll hear similar opinions.  Thompson had a huge opportunity here.

P.S.: After reading York's note, I'm finally ready to concede thatSlate's John Dickerson was way righter than I was when he argued that Thompson blew his best opportunity last year, when he wasn't ready for prime time in Iowa. ... 1:05 A.M. link

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Monday, January 21, 2008

So you have amnesty in that basket [E.A.]:

"if you have to earn your way to citizenship, that is not amnesty, and yet we're going to hear that over and over again from the critics of this bill"--Fred Barnes, Fox, March 25, 2006

"of course, it's not an amnesty"--Fred Barnes, Fox, May 16, 2006 (discussing Bush's immigration initiative)

Obama may be different from Clinton and Edwards in style and personality, but the three are ideological peas in a pod. They basically agree on health care (more government involvement), taxes (higher), immigration (amnesty in one form or another),--Fred Barnes, Weekly Standard, 1/28/08

Translation: It's only "amnesty" when Democrats propose it. ... 10:07 P.M.

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Sunday, January 20, 2008

Did I miss something, or did nothing very interesting happen at the big North American International Auto Show in Detroit? Judging from Autoblog's highlights, I didn't miss anything. ... P.S.: After staging a Hillary-style comeback, rear-drive cars appear to be suffering an Edwards-like collapse at General Motors. G.M. VP Robert Lutz blames the need for to meet fuel economy standards. But that's only because GM has foolishly positioned its rear-drive cars at the high-performance, gas-guzzling end of the market, no? ... Apparently GM is considering a small rear-drive chassis, but Lutz is noncommittal, noting:

"As a lightweight rear-wheel drive car that is going to add about 1MPG compared to an equivalent lightweight front-wheel drive car – we just have to sort of wait awhile and see where we are."

One MPG seems like not a lot to me--you'd think there would be plenty of ways to make up that penalty, and then some, while at the same time producing a small car that (like BMW's new 1-series) customers would be lining up to buy. ... 8:31 P.M.

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Saturday, January 19, 2008

Michael Graham throws some welcome cold water on the McCain victory, noting that in 2000 McCain got 42% against George W. Bush and the "entire Carroll Campbell machine." Today he got 33% "in a field where his top challengers—Romney and Giuliani—aren't even running." ... 10:46 P.M.

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It's going to get ugly in the South. By the time Hillary is through with Obama, voters will think his middle name is "Hussein"! ... 8:01 P.M.

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Here's a way McCain could get right with GOP conservatives and virtually guarantee his nomination: Promise that he won't press for his "comprehensive immigration reform" legislation during his first term. Instead, he could say he'll spend his initial four years securing the borders--which he now argues is a necessary precursor to a "comprehensve" legalization scheme. He could still remain committed to legalization after 2012. ... [But he's probably too old to have a second term--ed Makes the pledge even more appealing!] ... 7:37 P.M. link

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Undernews Alert: If the NYT was sitting on a McCain-lobbyist  story on the theory that McCain might get beaten anyway, that excuse is now gone, no? ... 7:30 P.M.

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Florida: Which candidate does Palm Beach's R. Limbaugh back? He hates McCain, right? It would either be Rudy or Romney, you'd think. ... 7:07 P.M.

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Acid tip? Tim Russert just suggested that Obama might appeal to blacks by attacking the Clintons over Bill's Sister Souljah putdown in 1992. Obama can't possibly be stupid enough to take Russert's tip. ... Souljah said, "If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people." Obama has plenty of other ways of appealing to blacks. ... 6:32 P.M.

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Did Thompson win it for McCain by siphoning off potential Huckabee votes? They just tried to make the case on Fox--and Edsall argues it here--but without a breakdown of the second choice of Thompson voters, I don't see how you can be sure. ... If it's true, that would make Thompson objectively pro-amnesty, to borrow Marxist jargon, despite his anti-amnesty views. The best way to strike a blow against "comprehensive immigration reform" was to punish McCain for promoting it, and Thompson may have prevented that. [Bitter?-ed. There's always Florida. McCain hasn't yet 'made the sale,' right? He's lost Polipundit!] 6:26 P.M.

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Fred Thompson gives a surprisingly good election-night speech** (about a month too late) and when they cut away to MSNBC the newsroom is filled with laughter--i.e. media types laughing at Thompson. They obviously expected Thompson to concede and felt snookered. Still, it was obnoxious. ... Update:fishbowlDC has the video. ...

**--Thompson's speech was better than McCain's arid victory pitch, for example. ... 5:21 P.M.

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Humiliation: John Edwards seems to have gotten about 4% of the vote ** in the Nevada caucuses, where he put in a not-inconsiderable effort. ... Is that a typo--or a message? ... It's  all the media's fault! ... Backfill: Edwards' now-embarrassing pre-caucus spin  here. Also "Edwards Can Win Nevada."  ...

P.S.: What would it take to get Edwards out? If he keeps polling at 4%, who cares? But if, like me, you suspect that his wife Elizabeth is the driving force behind his 'on to the convention' persistence--after all, why not keep traveling around the country getting attention?--there may be a solution: Give her a talk show! She's smart, she'ls likeable, she has a huge fan base, she's good on camera. She certainly wears better than her husband. And the networks need fresh content. Then John could cut whatever deal he wants to throw his rapidly-diminishing support behind one of the frontrunners. [Could he be the VP candidate again?--ed Don't think he vets.] ...

More: Edwards' astral support is collapsing. ...

**--This is apparently Edwards' total after application of Nevada's 15% viability rule. There seems to be no way of knowing his pre-viability showing. Update: In the "entrance poll" taken by the networks he got a bit less than 9%. ... 2:04 P.M. link

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Mickey's Stimulus Package: Congress thinks it might be able to approve the "fast-moving" stimulus package "within a month." A month! Wow. Neck-snapping speed! Of course the fear is that even with such lightning-like Congressional reflexes, the stimulus will come to late to cure a recession, if it's already underway (and instead will only add to inflation during a recovery). From Steve Chapman:

Peter Orszag, director of the Congressional Budget Office, told The Wall Street Journal, "Most of the stimulus options under consideration would be difficult to actually get out the door in the first half of 2008." By the time a program spreads its healing balm, we may find the recession has died a natural death -- or was never born.p

Is there a way to avoid this inevitable, usually-fatal, lag? I don't see why not. We've tried to cure the lag, for monetary policy, by granting the Federal Reserve authority to raise or lower interest rates instantaneously. Why not have a similar arrangement for fiscal policy? We'd create a Pump-priming authority--call it PPA for short--and give it the power to instantly raise or lower the Social Security and Medicare payroll tax by a few percentage points--from about 15% to 10%, for example--when necessary to avoid a recession. (These are sample numbers; economists would work out the real ones.)  The stimulus would immediately be injected into the economic bloodstream as withholding formulas adjusted to take a smaller tax bite from paychecks. No waiting a month for "fast-moving" Congressional action.

The catch, of course, would be that the PPA would have to make up the money by raising the tax rate above the normal level in economic good times. But that might have a salutary effect too--averting inflation by cooling down an overheated economy, much the way a Fed rate increase does.

Won't there be huge pressure on the PPA to keep priming the pump and never make up the shortfall? Sure--just as there's pressure on the Fed to keep cutting interest rates. But the Fed usually manages to resist those pressures, and you could design a PPA so it had a similar ability. (The usual technique involves appointing its members for fixed, overlapping terms, and bringing the weight of sober, prudent business opinion to bear on the President at appointment time.) Even elected officials--presidents, at least--would have an incentive to restrain irresponsible pro-stimulus impulses. They want to be seen as fighting unemployment, but they've also learned that inflation is electoral poison. And not only in the long run. Ask Jimmy Carter.

You could have the Fed itself be the PPA, though I assume there are arguments against giving too much power to one agency. Those are arguments we should maybe have, because what's "fast-moving" for Congress is too slow.

P.S.: I'm sure this is not a new idea. "Backfill" tk ... Backfill: Alert reader J.M. recommends this Alan Blinder paper. ... 1:31 P.M. link

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Ronald Reagan is praised by ... Bill Clinton (when he was in Obama's shoes). ... 3:26 A.M.

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Another country is complaining about an influx of Mexicans crossing its borders looking for work. That country is Mexico. From the Tucson Citizen:

Sonora - Arizona's southern neighbor, made up of mostly small towns - cannot handle the demand for housing, jobs and schools it will face as illegal Mexican workers here return to their hometowns without jobs or money.

12:39 A.M. link

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Friday, January 18, 2008

Compelling assessment of John Edwards from Russ Feingold:

The one that is the most problematic is (John) Edwards, who voted for the Patriot Act, campaigns against it. Voted for No Child Left Behind, campaigns against it. Voted for the China trade deal, campaigns against it. Voted for the Iraq war ...

MyDD is  temporarily stunned! ... 2:33 P.M.

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Thursday, January 17, 2008

'Bradley Effect' Update: Obama is ahead by 9 points over Hillary in the most recent Mason-Dixon poll of South Carolina voters. But can we trust voters to have told pollsters the truth--or are racial concerns (including the desire not to offend) leading them to give inaccurate answers?

a) Black 'Bradley' Voters? Noam Scheiber weighs in again  on the possiblity of such a "Bradley Effect" for black voters. It all depends on the race of the interviewer, he argues--suggesting that when the interviewer is black, some black voters may opt to (falsely) show racial solidarity, but that

when African-Americans are in the presence of whites, the greater social fear is being considered a "race man" ...

Debra Dickerson isn't buying that, and neither am I--though it's an empirical question that presumably could be resolved one way or another.

b)White 'Bradley' Voters? Meanwhile, Emailer Z, who knows his or her polls, argues the Mason-Dixon poll might not have such good news for Obama after all--given the more-often discussed tendency of white voters to occasionally mislead pollsters:

Here's how the Bradley Effect works:  A stranger calls you to ask how you intend to vote.  You do NOT intend to vote for the African American, but you don't want to get a lot of guff from this stranger about how you must be a racist if you won't vote for the African American.  So you answer, "Not sure."  In all the classic Bradley Effect elections (and NH fit the pattern), the polls got the vote for the African American about right, but OVERREPORTED not sure and UNDERREPORTED the other candidate's vote.

So when the brand new MSNBC-McClatchy-Mason Dixon poll in SC says there are twice as many undecided in the Dem race (15%) than in the GOP race (8%), you might suspect Bradley-ism in that poll.  So what looks like a 9-point Obama lead with a fat undecided might in fact portend a very close race, no? [E.A.]

4:49 P.M.

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Obama Church Update: He  defuses the Farrakhan issue, but not his church's misguided 'keep-it-real' guilt-tripping of successful blacks ("Disavowal of the Pursuit of 'Middleclassness'"). ... 4:12 P.M.

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Has the MSM lost its ability to hound candidates from the race? If McCain loses in 'make-or-break,' 'single elimination' South Carolina on Saturday, will he be forced to drop out? Probably not. For one thing, he has too many supporters in the press. They can't quit him! For another, as First Read suggests, the press may have lost its ability to hound a candidate out of the race--a long-term consequence of Hillary's bolt-from-the-blue victory in New Hampshire. It's not just that the candidates themselves see less reason to drop out after the press has pronounced them dead, though that's probably true. (The press pronounced Hillary dead, and look what happened.) It's that one of the important mechanisms of hounding-out--increasingly negative coverage that turns off your funders and embarrasses you with constituents back home--may have broken down. That would be because the press itself has lost confidence in its ability to declare a candidate 'over,' and funders would be less likely to believe the press if it did. ... I predict that even Edwards, if he loses in both Nevada and South Carolina, will continue to get respectful MSM treatment. ...

P.S.: Edwards is a special case, in part because he has no constituents back home to embarrass himself with. But even Rep. Duncan Hunter, who does have constituents but very few primary votes, is still in the race. Maybe the constituents don't care anymore if their elected official persists in a doomed, Kucinich-like White House campaign. Maybe Hunter's district is so gerrymandered he couldn't possibly embarrass himself enough to threaten his majority. [Seecorrection**] Or maybe running a doomed campaign isn't embarrassing anymore. It's like having a blog, but with buttons! And many more radio interviews. ...

P.P.S.: For a contrary view see John Ellis, who argues the networks will cut off coverage of candidates like Edwards for their own budgetary reasons--coverage is expensive--which will in turn starve Edwards of the MSM attention he needs to keep raising money, etc.. Ellis could be right! Edwards will be a test--I bet the networks and the big papers either revise their budgets, or keep someone part-time on him. Or else Edwards figures out low-cost, non-MSM, Internet-based ways to carry on. This test won't happen if Edwards, you know ... wins. But then they'll never get anyone to drop out. ...

**--Correction: Text originally referred to his "reelection." Hunter is not seeking reelection. But his son, who has the same name, is running for his seat. That presumably provides some reason for the elder Hunter not to embarrass himself. ... 11:41 A.M. link

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Obvious question for Hillary: "Just to tie up a loose end here, if 'no woman is illegal,'  then they should get drivers' licenses, right?" ... [Tks to reader P.S.] ... 10:11 A.M.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Isn't the press making a bit too much of Hillary losing the black vote in the Michigan Dem primary to "uncommitted" by a 26 to 70 margin? The Michigan primary had been declared meaningless by the Democratic National Committee, the press, and the candidates. If you were a Hillary-supporting black Democrat, why bother going to the polls? If you liked Obama, though, you might want to make a statement.  One would expect the vote to skew misleadingly towards Obama, no? 11:40 P.M.

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HuffPo blogger Chris Kelly mocks Ann Coulter's eulogy for her father. Classy. ... 11:18 P.M.

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Emailer X (or is it Y?)--who seems to know his GOPs--sends this usefully pithy analysis:

I don't think the importance of SC can be over-stated now.  If Huckabee wins, there will be panic in GOP circles.  If Romney wins, the base will be very uneasy.  If Thompson wins, everyone will be completely confused.  If McCain wins, the base will be very unhappy.  And Giuliani won't win. 

4:12 P.M.

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Zero-sum alert: NBC's estimable First Read on last night's debate--

All three candidates will feel good about this debate; Clinton seemed to come prepared with a "Nevada" plan; Edwards had a "I'm still relevant" plan, and Obama had a "I am presidential" plan. They may have all made progress. [E.A.]

I don't think so! The campaign is a zero-sum game--candidates can only make progress at other candidates' expense, and there are only so many votes you can steal from Dennis Kucinich. Maybe the debate was a wash, but it wasn't win-win-win. ... P.S.: I thought Hillary was back to being grating, especially when she insisted on taking the floor from Tim Russert in order to make the provocative point  that "We've got to do more to give families the tools and the support that they should have." She may have to cry again soon. ... Meanwhile, Obama's 'I'm not an operating officer' admission seems near-disastrous. a) Obama makes the presidency sound like a grand, slo-mo transformation of vision into legislation. But there are crisis requiring quick, coordinated action, and the type of leader who can act effectively in a crisis is likely to be a good "operating officer" rather than a visionary; b). Once you pass a law you have to implement it, which requires getting results out of the civil service departments. This would seem to be especially true of national health care.  The president who ignores the bureaucracy and focuses on 'vision' is apt to be defeated by that bureaucracy. c) Immersing yourself up to the elbows in the various departments is one way to find out the information that bureaucrats are unlikely to pass up the chain of command. ... I'm not saying Obama's model of the presidency can't work if he chooses the right "operating" officer to actually run his administration. I'm saying voters would be justified in preferring a president who was a good "operating officer." ... 2:53 P.M.

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We know what you did on bloggingheads last summer: David Corn mines his bloggingheads "diavlogs" with free-thinker Jim Pinkerton  for opinions that might embarrass the latter's new boss, GOP candidate Mike Huckabee. If I were Corn I'd have focused more on Pinkerton's Neil Youngish space plans rather than his unsubtle mosque-control notions. But you make the call. ... Update: You knew that it wouldn't take long after Pinkerton took over for the robots to arrive!  They'll do the jobs Americans won't do!  [via Corner] ... 1:36 P.M.

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Ezra Klein has a future at HuffPo's "Russert Watch": The ambitious whippersnapper adds to his electronic resume with a  subtle, Kemptonesque assessment of the Meet the Press host  that's unlikely to endear him to, say, Tom Brokaw. Chris Matthews, on the other hand, might take Klein out for a drink.. ...P.S.: Similarly, when I went to the press room at the St. Anselm's debate after sniping at Klein, I was worried I'd get grief from his fellow leftish whippersnappers. Turned out I was the most popular guy in the room! More popular than I usually am, anyway. ....They don't like him! They really don't like him! ... Update: Klein response here  ("I regret that it was made public ....")  . ... 1:01 P.M. link

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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Mark Blumenthal looks at the four polls that kept polling on the Monday before the New Hampshire primary and calls out Zogby, challenging him to release the rolling numbers to back up his seemingly conflicting statements before and after Hillary's surprise victory. (Zogby's final poll was gruesomely wrong.) ... 1:45 P.M.

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I'm not sure the Feiler-Skurnik Effect-- in which uninformed procrastinating voters make their decisions based on what they see in the last 24 hours of a campaign--applies to Republicans. But if it does this incident will damage Romney in Michigan, no?. ... P.S.: The late-decider issue gets discussed with Tom Brokaw on the On Point radio show. Brokaw maintains that last-minute voters aren't uninformed, at least in New Hampshire. But he would say that. ... Audio bonus: I get attacked by a pro-Edwards caller who doesn't like bloggers mentioning the lurking  Rielle Hunter love-child scandal! ... 10:31 A.M.

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Monday, January 14, 2008

If Kucinich is included in tomorrow's debate that's bad news for Edwards, no? The debate then looks less like a three-way fight and more like '2 contenders and 2 losers.' ... 9:46 P.M.

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E-mails we wish we hadn't ignored:

----- Original Message -----

From: Robert Wright

To: Mickey Kaus

Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2008 5:06 A.M.

Subject: Re: Working on feature on bloggingheads.tv]

have you noticed that the more post-debate voters a poll includes, the better hillary does? (even at a very fine-grained level; read bullet point #4 here:  http://www.pollster.com/blogs/poll_cnnwmurunh_new_hampshire_10.php) This probly doesn't signify a hillary victory, but I'm guessing Obama's margin of victory will be way lower than 10 percent, so she can claim to be the comeback kid.

I emailed back that any Hillary gains would likely be "swamped in a last-minute turnout surge." (Wright wasn't even in New Hampshire. What did he know?)  ... 5:56 P.M.

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Black Bradley Effect? Noam Scheiber has speculated that black voters might tell pollsters one thing and do another in the South Carolina primary, just as (it's theorized) white voters did in New Hampshire:

Is it possible that some black voters would tell pollsters they support Hillary (or that they're undecided) because they don't want to sound like they're  voting mainly out of racial solidarity, even though they actually intend to vote for Obama?

He could be right! But what if this black Bradley Effect operates in the other direction--black voters tell pollsters they are going to vote for Obama (because they feel that's expected of them) and then vote for Hillary or Edwards? In other words, they behave exactly like the white voters in the Standard Bradley Effect. That would take some of the sting out of the implicit charge of "racism" that always lurks underneath the Bradley Effect, no? ... Of the two possibilities, I'd guess the latter is more likely. Are African-Ameican voters really worried that they'll "sound like they're voting out of racial solidarity"?** I'd think fear of being considered a self-hater or Oreo (or practitioner of "middleclassness"!) looms larger in most black communities, unfortunately. But I don't know. ... P.S.: Of course, it's possible neither effect will materialize, and it's also possible they will cancel each other out. ...

**--Update: Debra Dickerson's argues, contra Scheiber, that telling a pollster you're going to vote for Obama is a "cost-free" way to indicate solidarity for black voters who are actually undecided. It might even be a consolation prize of sorts. ("I'd say I was voting for Obama when I know very well my mind's far from made up. I just want to give him a shout-out and let America know we're on the move.") ... 5:32 P.M.

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Undernews Alert: It's hard to believe that Obama's Afrocentric church--with its troubling attack on "the pursuit of middeclassness"--isn't going to be an issue in the campaign, soon. There are already wild, inflammatory emails circulating, apparently. ... Update: Here is the offical Obama response page. Excerpt:

"There is information on the Black Values System in the new member packet provided at Trinity, and the new member classes put the Black Values System in the historical context of the civil rights movement."

Hmm. It must be understood in "the historical context." That'll reassure nervous white voters! The Obama camp would seem to be severely underestimating its vulnerability on the church issue if it thinks lecturing people on the civil rights movement will solve this problem for them in the long run. ... 1:18 A.M.

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Friday, January 11, 2008

There isn't another contested Democratic primary for  9 more days? What are we supposed to do in the meantime? Can't they speed the process up? ... Voters don't tune in until the last 24 hours  anyway--so the last 24 hours might as well come sooner! ... 12:09.A.M.

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Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Only waterwork s works: Now he's crying.[via Lucianne] 2:36 A.M.

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I'm as flummoxed as everyone else, having gone along with the near-universal consensus that Obama would win. Mystery Pollster has his work cut out for him. But I'm confident that soon enough there will be so many powerful explanations for what now seems an out-of-the-blue event that it will appear to be overdetermined. It's important to memorialize this moment of utter stupefaction.

That said, here are four possible factors:

1. Bradley Effect: It seemed like a nice wonky little point when Polipundit speculated on the Reverse Bradley Effect--the idea that Iowa's public caucuses led Dem voters to demonstrate their lack of prejudice by caucusing for Obama. Now this is the CW of the hour. Polipundit wrote:

I suspect that Obama may have scored better than he would have in a secret-ballot election, and benefited from a Reverse Bradley Effect.

New Hampshire, of course, is a secret ballot election. Voters might have told pollsters one thing but done another in private.** New Hampshirites I ran into Tuesday night mentioned that the state was very late ratifying the MLK Holiday.

2. Lazio Effect. No ganging up on the girl! First, Edwards turns on her in the debate. Then Obama says she's merely "likeable enough." Then the press disparages her anger, mocks her campaign and gloats over its troubles. They made her cry! And then that mean macho John Edwards goes and says the crying makes her unfit to be president. (I was told voter leaving Edwards in the closing hours went disproportionately to Hillary, not Obama.)

3. Feiler/Skurnik Effect: What's stunning is the ferocity and speed with which Hillary's fortunes turned around in those final hours. Kf has a theory to explain that! Actually, two theories. The familiar Feiler Faster Thesis holds that voters are comfortable processing information at the vastly increased speed it can come at them. Jerry Skurnik's "Two Electorate" theory  holds that voters who don't follow politics are much less informed than they used to be, which causes polls to shift rapidly when they do inform themselves. Put these two together and you've got a vast uninformed pool of voters that only begins to make up its mind until the very last minute--after the last poll is taken, maybe--and then reaches its decision by furiously ingesting information at a Feileresque pace. In fact, the percent of voters who made up their minds at the very end in N.H. was unusually large. (Add convincing statistic here!)

Two implications of the Feiler/Skurnik combo: a)Momentum from the previous primary doesn't last. When the early primary dates were set, the CW held that the Iowa loser would never be able to stop the Iowa "wave" effect in the five days between the two primaries. It was too short a time. In fact, it wasn't short enough. A three day separation and maybe Obama would have won. As it was, by the time the uninformed voters tuned in on Sunday and Monday, Iowa was ancient history.***  b) Instead, these voters saw clips of Hillary having her emotional tearing up moment. In other words, the Feiler/Skurnik Effect magnifies the significance of any events that occur in the final day or two of the campaign. After yesterday's election, expect more of these events.

4) The Congestion Alert Effect: I remember when the Southern California transportation authorities installed a state-of-the-art series of electronic signs alongside the freeways to give motorists instantaneous warnings of traffic delays. The signs don't do that any more. Why? It turned out that when you warned drivers of congestion on Route A, they all took Route B, leading the latter to become congested instead of the former. Similarly, independent voters in N.H. were told by the press that the Democratic race was a done deal--so they voted in the closer, more exciting Republican race. Which made the Republican race not so close and the undid the deal in the Dem race. (Brendan Loy published this theory first.) [ via Insta]

5)Bonus CD-only Theory--The Orthodox Shul Effect: Alert emailer B.L. writes:

The independents broke the way worshipers do at an orthodox (anything) religious ceremony. The ladies went left and the lads went right (most female indies voted in the Dem primary; most male indies in the Repub).

In other words, it wasn't the lower number of independents voting in Democratic primary that hurt Obama, but which independents voted Dem. McCain's race sucked away precisely those independents most likely to vote for Obama--men (and also, we might speculate, relatively conservative women).

Backfill: Halperin has about 30 theories, including at least two of the above. ... Here's a Slate piece on the Bradley Effect. ... 

**--The Reverse Bradley Effect, in other words, meant that the Iowa results, which seemed to show that the regular ol' Bradley Effect wasn't operating, were deceptive. As this eerily prescient  post suggests:

If the Reverse Bradley Effect holds, then, Obama will do worse in New Hampshire than his Iowa triumph would lead you to expect, even if Hillary does nothing to change anyone's mind. ...

See, I knew it all along. [But you forgot it?--ed  No. I actually never knew it. Always thought Obama would win big]. ...

***--In this respect, New Hampshire was a replay of the 2000 Michigan GOP primary between Bush and McCain, in which Bush's momentum faded stunningly quickly. ... 1:10 A.M. link  

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Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Mark Blumenthal is liveblogging the N.H. poll results. (Most recent entries are at the bottom.) ... 5:48 P.M.

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Joe  Trippi explains John Edwards' brilliant strategy of losing Iowa and getting clobbered in New Hampshire.It's a huge load of BS! ... But why would Edwards drop out? What else does he have to do? And as long as Trippi keeps spinning these scenarios, he keeps getting paid, right? ... P.S.: A respected emailer defends Trippi--

"if his client wants to soldier on, what's he supposed to say?  "I know we can't win, but Edwards, the fool, wants to keep fighting?"  Trippi knows what they're up against.

It's still BS. It seems to me there is a way to soldier on that doesn't involve selling elaborate bogus scenarios. In 2004, I actually bought some of them! ... P.P.S.: Luckily, as of 9:12 Eastern, Edwards is the big loser tonight, because Hillary is emphatically not out of the race. ... 3:20 A.M. link

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McCain's 'Banana': Mark Krikorian on "amnesty" semantics:

The perennial controversy over what to call McCain's amnesty is silly. Every program in the world that has allowed illegal immigrants to stay has been called an "amnesty." McCain himself called it "amnesty" as recently as May 2003, when he told the Tucson Citizen "I think we can set up a program where amnesty is extended to a certain number of people who are eligible … Amnesty has to be an important part ..." But once the focus-group results were in, "amnesty" became a four-letter word. ...[snip]

Real Straight Talk would be to say "Sure, it's an amnesty, but we don't really have any choice" ...

P.S.: The McCain, post-focus-group argument is that it can't be "amnesty" if it has some requirements--e.g., to pay a fine, learn English, etc. But it turns out that Ronald Reagan's 1986 "comprehensive" reform, which he and everyone else called an "amnesty," had requirements too, including payment of fees. ...

It really is impressive that McCain still gets fawning reporters to call his bus the "Straight Talk Express" while his defense of his most significant recent domestc initiative depends entirely on the employment of cumbersome and obscuring PC euphemisms (e.g., "earned legalization," "comprehensive reform" "undocumented immigrants" ...sorry, make that  "Nonimmigrants in the United States Previously in Unlawful Status,"  etc.). That is, where it doesn't require outright untruths (i.e, that illegals would "not be in any way rewarded for illegal behavior"). The latter are, oddly, less annoying. At least they're straight lies. ...

If you care about the immigration issue, and oppose "amnesty" (or whatever you want to call it--"legalization," "regularization," or "banana" if you prefer), it's pretty important that McCain be defeated a) As a cautionary example to other pols, and b) to ensure that at least one party's candidates are skeptical of the merits of "comprehensive" reform. New Hampshire is the best place to do it. Go Mitt! ... 12:15 A.M. link

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The Anchoress predicted the cryin'  on January 2:

What I dread most in this political season is the "genuine" moment - and it is coming, soon, sometime between today and tomorrow, or tomorrow and New Hampshire - when Mrs. Clinton, in her ongoing effort to turn herself into whatever the polls says she must be, cries in public. It's going to be genuinely ghastly.

Eerie! [via The Corner] 1:12 A.M.

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Monday, January 7, 2008

The much anticipated train-wreck joint Bill and Hillary rally in Manchester was not a train wreck. The crowd wasn't huge--maybe 1000--but it was noisy. Bill just stood there and didn't talk. Hillary gave a long, impressively smooth stump speech that was oddly state-of-the-unionish in its inclusion of every policy initiative in her platform. Sort of the fantasy state of the union address she will probably never give! At least not in this election cycle. Aren't election eve speeches usually just short rousers? ... The other odd thing about Hillary's speech is that it contained virtually no reference to anything that has happened in the past weeks. No "we're behind in the polls but don't believe the polls," or "we're surging," or "they're saying dirty things about us" or "it's down to the wire--I'm counting on you," etc. She could have given virtually the same talk in New Hampshire two months ago. ...P.S.: She did add a bit of "future music by talking about all the great man-on-the-moonish things she'd help accomplish. That doesn't seem like a bad way to address her fabled  "change" vs. "past" problem--though it obviously isnt enough. ... At one point I couldn't tell whether the crowd was chanting "Hillary" or "Four More Years." ... P.P.S.: Hillary now pledges to "end" No Child Left Behind. Is that new? ...  10:29 P.M.

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Dana Milbank falls into the McCain bus swoon. McCain's "on a roll," you see. But what I've heard from reporters who've been to McCain's rallies is that the crowds are smaller and less enthusiastic than expected. .... If Romney pulls off a N.H. win after really only turning around in the Fox debate Sunday night, it will be a stunning confirmation of both the Feiler Faster Thesis  and Jerry Skurnik's theory  that because uninformed voters are more uninformed than ever they only learn enough to actually make up their minds very close to the Election Day. ... 10:07 P.M.

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Heading into Manchester, I heard a strong radio ad, excoriating the leading Republicans for being soft on illegal immigration, from ... Ron Paul. Is that the official libertarian position? ... P.S.: The ad said Paul doesn't want illegals to get Social Security benefits. I believe it! Does he want anybody to get Social Security benefits? ... P.S.: Objectively, as we Marxists say, this is an anti-McCain, therefore pro-Romney ad at this point, no? ... Update: John Tabin says, "There is no 'official libertarian position' on immigration," and charges Paul with ... well, read the item ... 3:54 P.M.

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'I'm just so upset that someone who's not ready from day one might lead our country': Crying!  Why didn't she think of that before? ... Update: Phony or not? Well, it seems studied, if effective. And Hillary does manage to work in her talking points. ("And we do it, each one of us, because we care about our country. But some of us are right and some of us are wrong. Some of us are ready and some of us are not, some of us know what we will do on day one and some of us haven't thought that through enough.") It's not like she dropped her facade. ... 11:10 A.M.

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Monday's Must-See Event--The Train Wreck Tour: The reporters I talk to are looking forward to the final pre-election joint Bill and Hillary Clinton rally Monday evening with the same lascivious delight you might encounter before a Britney Spears/Amy Winehouse double bill. Everyone expects it to be a gruesome night for the Clintons; their aides have been lashing out at the press uncharmingly. Anything could happen! ... 1:30 A.M. link

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Sunday, January 6, 2008

Sunday Fox debate: Romney won decisively over McCain in Luntz's undecided 'focus group.' Romney's attack on McCain's immigration plan sent the dial-meters into the stratosphere. ... Update: Though some of those Luntz focus-groupers seem a bit familiar, in a Greg Packeresque  kind of way. [Thanks to emailer W.B.] ... Not So Fast: I ran into Luntz at the Radisson, and he said he intentionally uses some people at more than one successive focus group, which lets him track their opinions over time. He concedes a downside, which is that when voters become part of his focus-grouping machine their thinking changes. He said the ratio was 20% repeats, 80% fresh faces. ... 6:41 P.M. link

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Straight Talk on Illegal Immigrants and Social Security: Mitt Romney's failure to hang "comprehensive immigration reform" around John McCain's neck in last night's debate  may have been the defining failure of Romney's candidacy. We'll see if he does better in the Fox debate that just started. [Update: He did, but maybe not better enough.]

It's been my impression that McCain has been locked by the realities of the issue into a tactic of gruff testy dissembling--e.g., saying that illegals he'd legalize would "not be in any way rewarded for illegal behavior" (of course they would--how many people around the world would like to pay a fine and come and live here legally?) or that they'd have to go to the "back of the line behind everybody else" (nope- they get to short-circuit the most important line, the line to get into the "citizenship" line).

One issue I wasn't clear on, though, was whether--or, more precisely, when, exactly-- illegals would have qualified for Social Security benefits once they were legalized under McCain's various "comprehensive" plans. Several MSM 'truth-checkers,' such as the NYT's Marc Santora, have claimed that McCain would let illegal immigrants get Social Security when they

come forward, pay fines, then wait their turn to become citizens ... but only after they are citizens.

That was clearly BS (citizenship isn't a requirement). But what was the truth? I emailed someone who actually knows the details, Mark Krikorian, and got back this response:

Citizenship is most assuredly NOT required to collect Social Security -- only legal status. There's actually two questions -- 1) can you collect benefits if you're illegal, and 2) can you accrue credits toward future Social Security benefits from illegal work. ... [snip]

[T]he Senate bill required that amnesty applicants (probationary Z visa
holders) be issued Social Security numbers "promptly." So, technically, McCain is right in saying that he's against letting illegals get Social Security checks, but that's just a dodge, since he'd legalize them all, *then* give then Social Security.

The answer to the second question is "maybe" -- illegals have in fact been able to use "unauthorized work," in the Social Security Administration's parlance, to count toward future benefits; see: http://www.cis.org/articles/2004/back904.html , scroll down to "SSA Law Inconsistent on Illegals".

But S1639 wouldn't have allowed that because of an amendment; see here http://www.numbersusa.com/hottopic/senateaction0507.html and scroll down most of the way down to "Hutchison SA 1415" which "Prohibits the granting of Social Security credit for wages earned by illegal aliens prior to their being granted amnesty under this bill" and passed by voice vote. Though, as Sessions Loophole thing points out, visa-overtsaying illegals who'd been issued a Social Security number when they arrived (as workers or students) *would* have been able to use the credits from wages they earned after they fell out of status (i.e., became illegal aliens) toward collecting future benefits.

McCain was even worse in 2006, when he voted against an amendment by Ensign to that year's successful amnesty bill that would have done the same thing as Hutchison's 2007 amendment. So, he says he's now aware that the people want enforcement first -- has he also learned that the people don't want illegal work counted toward Social Security? Because he was for that before he was against it.

McCain's comment here

I do not support nor would I ever support any services provided to someone who came to this country illegally, nor would I ever and have never supported Social Security benefits for people who are in this country illegally, that is absolutely false.

is simply a lie. The second part is a weasely, politician lie, because he'd amnesty the illegals first, then give them SS, but the first part is a normal unambiguous lie. In fact, as Sessions points out, even Z visa holders who would have been *rejected* for amnesty could have accrued credits toward future Social Security, because they would have had legitimate SSNs. And if there were no effort in the future to root out and arrest rejected Z-visa-holding applicants (as if!), then they'd have kept on working and accruing credits toward future SS benefits.

And no one even seems to have asked McCain whether he supports the Totalization Agreement with Mexico, which would count work in *Mexico* toward future SS benefits here, and is commonly seen as the next step after legalization. [E.A.]

In other words, illegals wouldn't have to pay fines and wait to become citizens to get Social Security. They'd qualify for Social Security almost immediately, as soon has they got their quickie "probationary" Z-visas. But most might not get credit for earlier work done here illegally, at least immediately. That depends on whether you're talking about the 2006 McCain or the 2007 McCain. ...  5:19 P.M. link

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Huck's Secret: I don't particularly like Huckabee--he's slick, and sells a bleeding heart approach--but his invocation of social equality in last night's debate  was moving, and would seem to provide a firm basis for going national:

In that sense of equality, the greatest principle is that every human being and every American is equal to each other. One person is not more equal because of his net worth or because of his I.Q. or because of his ancestry or last name.

That was a radical idea when those 56 signers put their names on that document, knowing that if their experiment in government didn't work, they were going to die for it.

Makes Fred Thompson's grumbled lawyerly mention of "constitutional principles"--"the checks and the balances, the separation of powers"-- seem kind of dessicated, no? ... Someone should write a book about how social equality needs to be the basis of American politics in an era of globalization and rising income inequality! ... 3 :26 P.M. link

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Big Pimpin' in N.H.: Gave three women a ride to their motel from the Radisson. Was pulled over by police who suspected we were ... part of America's growing service sector. Where is Ron Paul when you need him? ... 2:45 P.M. link

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I was surprised by all the talk in the debate spin room about Hillary's angry little speech after Edwards took Obama's side in the great "change" debate. The talkers assumed it was a potential Rick Lazio election-losing moment, an audience turnoff--a judgment echoed here and here  ("dogmatic ... angry ... vicious"). ... I was surprised because when it happened, I thought to myself, "pretty good response." I've seen it again-- here--and I  still don't get what's wrong with it. Unconvincing, maybe. Heated, yes. But not overheated or uncontrolled or unhinged. This isn't the sort of thing I usually say--but isn't Hillary's outburst exactly the sort of forceful putdown male candidates not only get away with, but are expected to come up with? ... Maybe have a high tolerance for confrontation. I thought Lazio won that debate. ...

P.S.: But if it's true that Hillary's the big loser tonight, is it possible that she'll actually get beaten for second in New Hampshire by Edwards? He's not that far behind in some polls. He was effective in the debate at the end, alas. ... If he does catch Hillary, he'll be very hard to get out of the race, even if he loses in South Carolina. Rielle Hunter could make it out of the undernews  after all. ... Update: First Read's Chuck Todd adds--

Clinton may now be the candidate who needs to get Obama in a one-on-one; Edwards and Richardson are now distractions and are complicating her ability to go after Obama; Obama, meanwhile, needs the extra candidates. 

Put these two thoughts together, and you reach the conclusion that Obama may soon want Hillary to stay in the race. ... Meanwhile, if Hillary now wants Edwards gone, and Sid Blumenthal's email is still functioning, that might give the Rielle Hunter story the MSM-busting oomph it needs. ... 1:21 A.M. link

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Friday, January 4, 2008

Is Ezra Klein young enough to be this pompous?

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence

Actually, pompous isnt really the word for this passage. There's a sort of hectoring naivete, as if Klein's too inexperienced to know that "call us back to our highest selves" is a drained cliche. And why do the whippernsappers always have to lecture? ... P.S.: The whole post isn't this bad. It's actually worse. And pompous! ... [via  Corner  and reader N.B.] ... 9:19 P.M. link

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Mo' Iowa: 1) Polipundit suggests Obama may have benefitted in Iowa from a "reverse Bradley effect.'  The open, public voting of the caucuses provided Democrats with

"a golden opportunity to show your next-door neighbors just how enlightened and progressive you are, by supporting the liberal black candidate."

On a secret ballot, Obama wouldn't do as well. If the Reverse Bradley Effect holds, then, Obama will do worse in New Hampshire than his Iowa triumph would lead you to expect, even if Hillary does nothing to change anyone's mind.  ...

2) I haven't heard any MSM pundit mention another possibility a Polipundit reader mentions: that Romney may have done worse than the polls indicated because the Republican caucuses did use a secret ballot--and people who wouldn't tell a pollster they weren't going to vote against a Mormon in fact voted against a Mormon. This is not a reverse Bradley Effect. It's the regular ol' straight Bradley Effect;

3) Wasn't the Iowa Dem outcome a vindication of the beleaguered Incumbent Rule, which holds that undecideds break overwhelming against an incumbent at the end. Hillary was the functional equivalent of an incumbent. [Thanks to alert reader K.B., who a) emailed it days before the vote and b) suggested that between Edwards was more of an "incumbent" than Obama, so the latter would have the edge among late-breaking anti-incumbent undecideds.]

4) Reader T.F. notes that Edwards did not improve on--or even match-- his 2004 Iowa performance.

In 2004, Edwards got 32% of the caucus in Iowa in a four-person field. 

In 2008, Edwards got 30% of the caucus in Iowa in a three-person field.

Richardson, Biden, et al might object to calling 2008's race a "three-person field," but you get the point. ... P.S. Defining Nonviability Down--The Union Leader's John DiStaso on Edwards and New Hampshire:

John Edwards? Should he finish a strong third — close to the second-place finisher — he's in good shape. But should he drop below Bill Richardson, which is unlikely but possible, he's in trouble.

Huh? If the result is Obama 42, Hillary 21 and Edwards 19, Edwards is in "good shape"? He has to lose to Bill Richardson to be in trouble?  ... Update:Politico's Josh Kraushaar has some standards  ("at least a strong second-place performance")! ...

5) Note that Richelieu, a McCain booster (even in the highly unlikely event that he's not Mike Murphy) predicted McCain would finish third with 17%--a "surging third." He came in fourth with 13%--a "disappointing 4th,"  wrote NBC's First Read, in an honest assessment you don't find many other places in the MSM. Somehow, the press never requires McCain to actually match the "comeback" hype it generates about him. ...

**--I once speculated that Harold Ford might benefit from a different kind of Reverse Bradley effect in his Tennessee senate race, in the form of conservative white voters who don't want to admit to their buddies or to pollsters that on the secret ballot they were going to vote for the black Democrat. I don't think this effect actually materialized, however. ... Update--Not so fast: Chris Richardson argues Ford did get a boost when many whites "voted for him because of his skin color." But wouldn't this show up in the pollls? Not entirely, apparently. The late preelection polls showed Ford an averge of 6 points behind--and he lost by only 3. ... 8:36 P.M. link

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Iowa: 1) Was Hillary lucky she finished third, by .28%, instead of second? Had she finished second, Edwards might have fallen out of the race, leaviing her to face Obama one-on-one, a confrontation she'd almost certainly lose right now. If she could subsidize Edwards' campaign at this point, she probably would. 2) Reading: John Ellis is surprisingly tough on Romney  for failing to "run as a Republican Gary Hart." Suddenly everyone wants to be Gary Hart (except Gary Hart). ... Peggy Noonan is bracingly vicious about Ed Rollins. ...Rachel Sklar notes an insufficiently remarked on Obama advantage:  The press is very cautious about going against him. ("[E]ven as I write this I feel the need to check and recheck to make sure I don't somehow say this wrong. Obama is that candidate — the one you are careful writing about. I don't think it's just me") ... 3) This is Mary Matalin "angry"? She must get angrier than that. 4) Des Moines Register pollster Ann Selzer, who correctly predicted the big turnout and the big Obama victory, may now become a near-mythic figure. As Mark Blumenthal put it before the vote:

If Ann Selzer had wanted to play it safe, she could have weighted her results by past caucus participation or party identification (or both) as many other pollsters do. Her results would have been in line with other polls, far less controversial and no one would have questioned her judgment. But she didn't do that. As an Iowa based survey researcher, she put her own reputation and that of her most important client on the line because she believes in her methods and trusts her results....

Hillary chief strategist Mark Penn, on the other hand, looks like a sad spinner. But he has bigger problems. ... 5) In what is becoming a tradition, the network "entrance" polls were apparently a debacle. ... 6) If Iowa had been an authentic real primary election, instead of a hard-to-attend caucus, would Obama's win have been bigger, or smaller? Bigger, no? ... 7) Best unchecked rumor of the evening: Did Edwards bring in Pat Caddell for advice toward the end? That would explain the anger! ... 12:37 A.M. link

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Thursday, January 3, 2008

Edwards aide Joe Trippi on RCP:

"Third place is going to be a big problem for anybody - we're not denying that - it'll be a big problem for us." 

Kinsley gaffe? 1:34 A.M.

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Just -in-time Blogging: Mark Blumenthal has an impressive number of useful things to say about Iowa polling in his exhaustive braindump. Note especially a) he casts aspersions on the Des Moines Register'stwo-day rolling trendline; b) but if Obama wins and the DMR poll is vindicated, many of the things other candidates' aides have said may take on a new meaning:

What if an influx of first-time caucus goers propels Obama to a modest victory margin? Given their spin yesterday, it will be quite a challenge for the other campaigns to shrug it off as an inconsequential result they saw coming all along. Now, if Obama wins with the help of a wave of caucus newcomers, it's not just a "win," it's an "unprecedented departure," a result "at odds with history," perhaps even a "revolution."

1:26 A.M. link

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Heed the Undernews!  Just a note to the tiny unrepresentative minority of Iowa voters who are going to participate in the Democratic caucus later today: If you want to vote for a Democrat who will actually make it to the White House, you have to think not only about their issue positions and their rhetorical skills and their personality but also about the scandals that might surface, even distasteful scandals you'd rather dismiss. This concern would be a subset of the oft-mentioned "electability" issue. You obviously don't want to pick someone the GOPs might blow out of the water in late August, right after he or she gets the nomination.

If you read this blog you know I think John Edwards is facing an unaddressed (or insufficiently addressed) potential scandal in the person of Rielle Hunter, about whom the National Enquirer has made some sensational allegations and about whom the Edwards camp has behaved very strangely. (Relevant denials included in the second Enquirer link.)  I'm not worried that this scandal will surface in August after the convention. I think the scandal will surface in a matter of days or weeks should Edwards win in Iowa. Right now the MSM is giving him a pass because--hey, why bring it up and hurt his wife if he's going to lose anyway. 

Because he's gotten a pass, Edwards has had weeks to figure out the best way to defuse any press coverage--or, if any of the accusations prove to be accurate, how to play them, The worry, then, is that Edwards might stave off a scandal effectively enough to get the nomination from the sympathetic party faithful, but be a far weaker general election candidate for it.

(I admit, I also think he'd be a terrible president. He can give an effective, heart-tugging closing argument. If governing were a trial, he'd be a good bet--though he did manage to lose a debate with Dick Cheney in 2004. But is there any evidence he actually knows how to run a large, bureaucratic organization? Some of his ideas, like his fake-tough  plan to demand that congressmen give up their own health plan if they don't support his universal plan, suggest he either doesn't know where the federal government's pressure points are or else he's cynically trying to fool equally clueless voters. I vote for 'cynical fooling,' but either way, the idea that President Edwards will actually be able to enact a big national health insurance plan seems a little far-fetched to me--even compared to the also-inexperienced Obama and the mal-experienced Mrs. Clinton.. If Edwards does somehow talk his way into the White House, I think the public will see through him--and he'll be ineffective--within six months..  ... 

But even if you disagree with this analysis, Rielle Hunter is a potential problem to consider! Please read the Enquirer story and decide if you think the semi-official pro-Edwards line about who is the father, etc. seems convincing to you, despite it's contradictions. I don't trust the Enquirer, but they've gotten some big stories right in the past.)

I have faith that you will make the right decision. ... Actually, no. I have zero faith that you will make the right decision. You thought Kerry was electable!  Iowa caucusers have a track record as miserable judges of political horseflesh. I'm counting on New Hampshire, a real primary where more than a super-motivated minority actually does the deciding. ... 12:08 A.M. link

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Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Why are "Thompson campaign ... sources" stabbing him in the back by telling reporters he may drop out ... just as a poll (OK, Zogby, still) shows him surging a bit in Iowa? Is currying favor with reporters that important? ... P.S.: I've always been suspicious of some Thompson "advisers." George W. Bush wasn't wrong about everything. ...

Update: Thompson responds to the story ("made up out of whole cloth"), as does his aide Rich Galen. See also Lowry ("I know Jonathan Martin and Mike Allen and they don't make things up.") ... 11:07 P.M.

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Maybe  Obama is the black Gary Hart after all: Marc Ambinder--

** Obama's closing argument is more audacious than it seems; it's an end-run around the established interests of the Democratic Party. He is angering -- often deliberately -- some of the party's core constituencies; Markos "Daily Kos" Moulitsas and my Atlantic colleague, Matt Yglesias, have both (sort of) withdrawn their endorsements of Obama because of his penchant for allegedly using right-wing talking points to smear his Democratic rivals.

Oh no. He might lose Yglesias! ...

P.S.:  There he goes echoing Republican talking points again --To his credit, Yglesias argues, contra Krugman:

I don't see any need for liberal pundits to get in the business of denying that labor unions are, in fact, "special interests." Indeed, it's impossible to understand the dynamics of American politics without acknowledging them to be special interests. They're special interests who sometimes take the "wrong" side of policy debates when what's "right" for the country is "wrong" for the sector in which they work.

I think the problem with unions--or, more precisely, with legalistic, work-rule-generating Wagner Act unions--is rather more general than this. But even Yglesias' concession is enough to condemn, say, the sacred cow Davis-Bacon Act, which effectively requires union wages for government construction projects.  (What's "right" for the country is that it be as inexpensive for the government to build something as it is for private industry. That's "wrong" for construction unions, who want the law to artificially boost wages in the government-construction sector above what the private market pays. Who should win?) Not to mention the teachers' unions. (What's "right" for the country is that mediocre teachers can be fired as easily as you'd cut a mediocre tight end from a football squad. What's right for the NEA is ...) ...  4:23 P.M. link

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I'm reluctant to write skeptically about the NYT's David Leonhardt--I owe him one, having failed to answer his reasonable response to a criticism of several years ago. (All in good time!) His contrast between Hillary Clinton's domestic policy approach ("narrowly tailored government policies, like focused tax cuts," relying on rational economic incentives) and Obama's (broader, "simpler" programs that acknowledge people don't act rationally) seems highly useful.

But I don't see how the great health care "mandates" debate fits this typology very well Isn't it Hillary who is proposing the broad, simple program: 'Everybody has to buy insurance!' And isn't this mandate at least somewhat similar to Obama's semi-mandatory ("opt out") employer-deduction savings plan in that it acknowledges people, if left to their own devices, won't do something that might in fact be good for them or at least for society,** even if given a seemingly sufficient incentive? Won't Obama need lots of little complex subsidies to enable people to afford the insurance he won't require them to buy? And if  he actually adds a penalty for those who buy insurance later, when they get sick, isn't he relying on the "idea that people respond rationally to financial incentives"?

That said, Leonhardt does make Hillary's vision seem dreary ("She has proposed new tax credits for savings, tuition, health care, elder care and renewable energy use. ...") Her husband's best moments as president weren't his little targeted tax breaks but his big, simple notions: "Make Work Pay," "End Welfare As We Know It," "Save Social Security First." ...

Update: Yglesias makes a similar point. ...

**--You could argue that mandating health insurance is designed to get young, healthy people to do something that might not really be in their rational economic self-interest, namely pay for health insurance they probably won't need. But you could also argue that the social interest in having a decent rate of savings is greater than the interest in any poor individual in putting aside money he or she could really use now. My college professor, Stephen Marglin, speculated that individuals would never voluntarily save enough to meet a society's investment needs. If I remember right either the savings had to be extracted artificially (e.g. involuntarily) or else the economic growth had to be so rapid that individuals saved simply because it took them a while to learn how to spend all their money. ... 1:02 A.M.

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Tuesday, January 1, 2008

On Samizdata, Paul Marks offers a fairly common defense of Fred Thompson:

Fred Thompson is in the middle of a 40 town Iowa tour - so he is hardly lazy. And he does go on television shows - thus dealing with critics, such as myself, who attacked him for not going on enough shows. But what sort of person would enjoy all this?

A lunatic.

I dunno. Sounds kinda fun to me! Being rushed from interview to interview, where reporters (who may not know a whole lot less about government than you do) hang on your every nuance, jot down each pensee? Waging an underdog campaign against unfair, flimsy media expectations? Occupying the center of attention wherever you go? Having an eager staff devoted to making you, you, you look good. Sounds like a the world's greatest book tour, only better. You don't need an emperor's ego to enjoy that sort of thing, or even a blogger's ego. A normal attorney's or reporter's or college professor's ego should do. ... There may be reasons why sane people are discouraged from running for president--e.g., fundraising, holding lower office--but the horrible experience of campaigning in Iowa for a month wouldn't seem to be among them. ... [via Instapundit] 10:17 P.M.

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To show he's not an Iowa-only candidate, self-described "angry and confrontational"  candidate Edwards releases a  list of his "leaders and advisors" in Feb. 5 primary states."[T]he list is not exactly overwhelming," says CBS's David Miller. Maybe Edwards will beat him up! ... [via Huffpo] 12:50 A.M. link

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Monday, December 31, 2007

I want to like Fred Thompson--or, rather, I like him and want to see him as a potential effective President. But I zoned out at around the 7:00 mark of his 17-minute closing "message to Iowa voters".  ... 17 minutes worked for "Sister Ray." It works for a convention speech. Maybe it works at a time of national crisis. It doesn't work staring at a camera and broadcasting on the web a few days before an election. ... At the least, if you're going to talk that long you can't read from a text. ... 11:25 P.M. link

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Do I detect a tacit   media conspiracy to make the Iowa caucuses inconclusive, and even irrelevant? I'm for that! ... P.S.: It's like the moment in mafia stories when the cops just get tired of the mobsters they've been corruptly cooperating with for years and decide it's time to kill them. ... The Iowa caucuses--shot while trying to escape. ... **

Update: The conspiracy to dismiss Iowa will be harder to maintain if the final Des Moines Register poll--showing non-trivial Huckabee and Obama leads--proves an accurate predictor. But the poll was taken from last Thursday through last Sunday. Hasn't there been a lot of ongoing movement since then? Tom Bevan at RCP notes the trends  in the poll's two-day rolling averages--which show both Obama and Edwards moving up, Clinton moving down. ...

More: What did the DMR poll show in 2004? It "turned out to be quite predictive, notes Michael Crowley. It had Kerry leading and Edwards surging, which was the actual result. But in 2004 it came out only a day before the caucuses--not three days before. (Correction: The actual polling in 2004 was finished on the Friday before a Tuesday election--same interval as this year,  Mark Blumenthal notes. The 2004 poll was just released closer to the vote.)... Plus this year's poll seems to assume that an awful lot of independents are going to turn out and vote in the Dem caucus (especially for Obama). Ambinder: "Obama's internal polling does not show this high a proportion of independents choosing to caucus."  ...

Update: Blumenthal and his commenters  thoroughly masticate the issues surrounding the DMR poll, with bonus anti-Zogby sniping! ... Note also the anti-Burkle-like paranoia surrounding the ownership of polling outfit Opinion Research by Clinton supporter Vinod Gupta. As the NYT put it back in July:

[Some critical  investors] have also questioned Mr. Gupta's decision to pay a substantial premium last December to acquire the Opinion Research Corporation, which has done opinion surveys for CNN since April 2006. In January, CNN began using Opinion Research for its presidential polling, leading conservative bloggers to ask if Mr. Gupta, as a Clinton supporter, should have influence over CNN's polling.

Mr. Gupta called Opinion Research "a natural fit" for his business, adding that he had no involvement with its polling operations. A review of its poll results over the last six months found them mostly in line with other campaign surveys. [E.A.]

Not any more! Opinion Research's poll is the only one of the three recent polls to show Clinton winning. The third poll, from Insider Advantage, shows Edwards winning handily once the second choices of the "non-viable" candidates are counted. Insider Advantage polled Friday and Saturday--ending a day earlier than DMR. But I don't know why that would work against Edwards. ...

**--It's possible that the Hillary camp is spinning reporters in the Iowa-decides-nothing direction--always a possibility when Adam Nagourney is involved! But at this point, given the uncertainy, all the Democratic candidates would probably happily contract for an inconclusive outcome that would let hem all go on to New Hampshire. Maybe they're all spinning the anti-Iowa story--a happy confluence of short-term individual and long-term national interest. ... 6:58 P.M. link

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Quien es mas ... ? Edsall says Edwards' new tough-guy posing is stealing male caucusers away from Obama. ... P.S.: Hey, Edwards is looking more macho  than we'd thought! ...  3:24 P.M. link

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Press pros on the ground (excitable Joe Klein,, Marc Cooper, the First Read crew) are convinced Huckabee's press conference today--in which he announced he was pulling a negative campaign spot and then showed it to the press anyway--was so disastrous as to be Dean-screamish. Like Jonathan Martin, I'm not so sure. Huckabee's transparently trying to have it both ways--but it's not clear why he won't have it both ways. Transparently cynical  arrangements seem to be working well this year! At least with Iowans.... P.S.: This seems like the MSM jumping in in order to discover for itself that Huckabee is imploding after he has already been taken down by Romney's attack spots. ...

Update-Now That's Contrarianism: Chris Beam thinks Huckabee might actually have been sincere. ...

More: Rachel Sklar  suggests it was a "masterstroke," not a meltdown. ...  2:00 P.M. link

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Kf Hero of the Day: Gov. Strickland of Ohio, who commits a classic Kinsley gaffe, foolishly telling the truth about Iowa ... and about New Hampshire.

In an interview with The Dispatch last week, Strickland said the Iowa caucuses make "no sense." He called the GOP and Democratic caucuses "hugely undemocratic," because the process "excludes so many people." Anyone who happens to be working or is sick or too old to get out for a few hours Thursday night won't be able to participate, Strickland said.

"I'd like to see both parties say, 'We're going to bring this to an end,'" Strickland said, adding that he has no problem with the New Hampshire primary Jan. 8, because "at least it's an election." [E.A.]

Letting the presidential nominee be picked by the Iowa caucusers is like letting your antiwar tactics be picked by the last people left at the end of a 4-hour SDS meeting in 1970. The result: the leftist radicals win! [But you were all leftist radicals. It was an SDS meeting--ed Oh, right.  I mean, the most committed partisans who have nothing better to do with their time win! In Iowa these people are proven fools, remember.]

Update: John Fund notes that Iowa's silly process is not an accident.

The caucuses are run by the state parties, and unlike primary or general elections aren't regulated by the government. They were designed as an insiders' game to attract party activists, donors and political junkies and give them a disproportionate influence in the process. In other words, they are designed not to be overly democratic

Fund's piece also has gives good headline! ... 1:11 A.M. link

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Sunday, December 30, 2007

He Dieted for Our Sins--Or Did He? Republican Undernews! Did Huckabee go  bariatric?Plutarch makes the (surprisingly non-weak) case  with photos and graphs. ... P.S.: The Arkansas ex-governor's dramatic weight loss is to his campaign what Edwards' loyalty to his sick wife is to the latter's campaign. In each case, there are undernews suspicions. In each case, these suspicions are likely to become overnews--i.e. news--if (as is very possible) the candidate in question emerges victorious from Iowa. In each case, apparently, the suspicions could be dissipated by the presentation of routine medical evidence. [How with Edwards? Just between us--ed Aternity-pay Est-tay] ...

Backfill: Jonah Goldbeg has one argument against bariatricity. ... Powerline commenters debate here. ... Another Huck defense here. ...  8:26 P.M. link

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From Shrill to Shill! It looks like that pro-Edwards "527" group defended by Paul Krugman as a "labor 527" and a "527 run by labor unions" actually got about a third of its money  "in a single check from an entity linked to Rachel Mellon, the widow of Paul Mellon, who inherited his share of the great American fortunes." ...

P.S.: Obama's point in attacking Edwards  on the 527 issue was, of course, not that it was wrong to accept union help but the transparent phoniness of Edwards boasting "I support public financing of federal elections"--and saying "these [527] groups should not be a part of the political process"--when this one is run by his former campaign manager and obviously set up to help his campaign. ... 

P.P.S.: Edwards seems to be good at these elaborate charades! [What are you thinking of?--ed Oh, nothing.] ...

Update: Overlawyered raises another question  about the Mellon contribution.

Related anti-Krugmania: Steve Smith reads FDR's Madison Square Garden speech and finds some "Obamaesque" passages Krugman must have missed. ... See also Jon Alter, on--among other things--Krugman's convenient ex cathedra  assertion that a populist candidate would do better than a more moderate candidate in the general election (something Krugman supports with on surveys of debate-watching   Democrats). ... 1:20 A.M. link

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Saturday, December 29, 2007

Mark Halperin's "The Page" has suddenly become indispensable if you're trying to follow the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries. ... I guess that was his plan all along! P.S.: NBC's excellent First Read is also one of the few sites that's posting enough to cover the rapid developments. But they're trying to do it all themselves. Halperin's playing Drudge, which is much more efficient. ... 8:13 P.M.

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Does MSM mean "Media Saves McCain"? Howie Kurtz goes to bat against Romney's anti-McCain ad with a defense that's much more misleading than any ad I've seen:

Romney's description of McCain's failed immigration bill -- which was backed by President Bush -- is so selective as to be misleading. The measure would have allowed illegal immigrants to seek legal status only if they first returned to their country of origin and paid a fine, and it was coupled with stricter border enforcement -- key elements omitted by the ad. Romney called a similar bipartisan effort "reasonable" in 2006. It is not true that McCain backed Social Security for illegals; a Senate amendment would have allowed payment of past benefits only after immigrants obtained legal status. [E.A.]

The provision requiring a return "to their country of origin"--the so-called "touchback" plan--was in fact not part of the reform that McCain has righteously championed for years. It was added at the last minute, as the bill was sliding down the tubes, in a desperate attempt to attract conservative votes. (The bill failed anyway two days later.) The provision was also a fraud, but that's almost beside the point. ...

Why don't reporters like WaPo's Kurtz** and NYT's Santora--both of whom have now peddled correction-worthy pro-McCain misinformation--stop pretending they are enforcing truth or fairness and just face the perhaps-subconscious motive that's evident to nearly everyone: They liked McCain's failed immigration reform, or they like McCain, or they like their own acceptance into the comfortable bipartisan "comprehensive" consensus, and they instinctively for the ways to defend him against what they assume must be crude, yahooesque attacks from the right?

**--Have I mentioned that Howard Kurtz has the biggest conflict of interest in the business? Not lately! ... 7:54 P.M.

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Is Gen. Petraeus Killing Kos? Even though there's a big election on, Daily Kos traffic peaked in August, and has been trending down ever since, according to this forthright Onemadson post  (noted by Geraghty and  Instapundit). ... Hmm. I don't think the cause is "candidate wars." I was at a very nice left-wing party over the holidays and the youthful antiwar types were saying that traffic was down on all the left-wing sites because of ... Iraq. ... That's not what I said. It's what they said. ... Iraq just isn't as salient now that it doesn't seem to be spiraling into apocalypse. ... P.S.: Was the left-wing blogosphere always mainly about Iraq? ... P.P.S.: Of course, some right-wing sites seem to be experiencing a mild decline since August also. Maybe the whole blogosphere was about Iraq! ...

Update: Maguire does some actual research, and discovers that "the big lefty sites ...peaked in April (Atrios, MY DD, C&L) or February (Firedoglake); the righty sites peaked in October (Instapundit, Ms. Malkin) or March (Powerline)." He speculates that the left sites are simply coming down off an anomalous spike in traffic caused by the Feb./March Libby trial. But the "surge" explanation also fits that timetable, as a commenter notes. ... 1:01 A.M.

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Friday, December 28, 2007

Truthchecking the MSM's Truthcheckers: The New York Times' Marc Santora  declares Romney's anti-McCain ad "selective or worse, misleading" on immgration:

For instance, Mr. Romney claims Mr. McCain "even voted to allow illegals to collect Social Security."

The more complicated reality is that Mr. McCain supported legislation that would allow illegal immigrants who come forward, pay fines, then wait their turn to become citizens the chance to collect Social Security — but only after they are citizens.

Santora has to be wrong. ... [pause for Googling] ... He is. Under McCain's bill, legal immigrants wouldn't collect Social Security "only after they are citizens." They would collect Social Security after they had become legal.  In fact, illegal immigrants apparently don't even have to become citizens now,  under current law--if they're legalized, they can collect Social Security, even for work they performed here when they were illegal.

The distinction between "citizen" and "legal" is important, because it's easier to become a legal worker than it is to "wait" and become a full-fledged citizen. And McCain's "comprehensive immigration reform" would have legalized millions of current illegals fairly quickly. Hence, it would ... how to put it? ... "allow illegals to collect Social Security." Romney's charge seems basically accurate.** The New York Times seems "selective or worse, misleading." ... P.S.: Actually, no. It's not "selective." Or merely "misleading." Make that "misinformed or worse, spun by the McCain camp." ...

Update: Note that McCain's response to Romney's charge has largely avoided an actual defense of McCain's position, focusing instead on Romney's flaws. See here, here, here, and here.

**--It's reasonably clear from the context of the ad that Romney is saying that McCain would let illegals collect Social Security by giving them amnesty, not by allowing them to remain illegal and collect Social Security. But you be the judge. ...[via Ambinder] 7:19 P.M. link

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The Feiler Faster Thesis  suggests that by next Thursday the Benazir Bhutto tragedy will loom shockingly small in Iowa. ... 4:45 P.M.

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It's CW that Hillary Clinton "would rather ... come in fourth"** in Iowa if John Edwards finishes first than come in a close second to Barack Obama. (Or maybe even than coming in a close first to Obama.) For Hillary, it's all about getting rid of Obama. But what about for Obama? Which of these two scenarios would he prefer?

Obama--35

Edwards--33

Clinton--25

or

Clinton-35

Obama--33

Edwards-25

It's close, no? Getting rid of Edwards--making it a Hillary vs. Obama race--seems very important to Obama. If he comes in a competitive second to Hillary, on the other hand, will the press really declare that Hillary's delivered a "knockout punch" and go home? I doubt it. They'll want to set up an epic two-person battle. ...

Update: Edsall says "the least attractive outcome for Obama would be to see Hillary win Iowa on January 3." Really? Even if Edwards finished third (something that admittedly looks unlikely as of this posting on 12/31)? ...

**Chris Matthews, 12/26 ... 4:40 P.M.

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Tariq Ali on Benazir Bhutto: Written before her death.  Quite nasty. I don't trust him.** For all I know he may now regret writing it. But there is a lot here to chew on, especially the intrigues surrounding her brother Murtaza. Compare with John Burns' NYT obituary. ...

Update: Here's a post-assassination piece  by Ali.

**--Reflexive anti-Americanism would be the charge against Ali. For example, would U.S. non-interference in neighboring Afghanistan really end "instability" in Kabul and "the tribal areas betwen the two countries" in a way that didn't simply empower Al Qaeda? ... 12:28 A.M.

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Wednesday, December 26, 2007

One Hed Fits All: Are you impressed with a drop in home values of 6.6% over a year? It doesn't seem like such a big correction, given the dramatic run-up in prices over the last decade or so. ... And don't declining prices make housing more... what's the word? ... affordable?** ... This evening NBC Nightly News billboarded a "housing CRISIS." (Link available here.) I thought a "housing crisis" was when people couldn't find housing, not when it got cheaper. (NBC's expert: "It's very, very difficult to find any silver lining." No it's not.) ...

P.S.:Instapundit suggests  that the press may (in the words of a reader) "scupper Main Street confidence" in the economy when all it really wants to do is scupper the Republicans. You'd think the Fed or someone would address this structural issue by creating a reliable way for reporters to sabotage Republicans directly, without having to go through the intermediate stage in which they drag the entire economy down too. Sort of an earned "path to partisanship": For every sensible, non-hysterical story about the economy's perturbations under a GOP president, Dem-leaning reporters get to apply an anti-GOP double standard in a non-economic story. ...

**--Update: "Affordable housing," and "housing crisis," as traditionally used by critics on the left, includes rental housing. If the credit crunch prevents people from buying houses, and those houses are sitting around unsold, they'll be rented, no? Which will tend to drive rents lower. Am I missing something? (This is a response to Bill Quick  and others). ...

More:   Quick responds that rents in San Francisco are going up, as people who can't get a mortgage to buy a home crowd into the rental market. Hey, the same thing happens in my neighborhood!. But it's a short-term (and maybe localized) effect, no? Speculators who own houses have an interest in renting them rather than leaving them vacant--even at bargain rents. I would very much doubt it if rents are rising in overbuilt South Florida, for example. .. [pause to Google] ... Yep.:

Depressed housing market is good news for renters 

Glut of property makes it cheaper than buying home

Harriet Johnson Brackey/Personal finance

December 9, 2007

What a good time it is in South Florida for renters.

Rent is falling and renters have their pick of places to live: Apartments, condominiums, apartments that used to be condos that have gone back to apartments. Not to mention single-family homes for rent from accidental landlords. ...[snip]

Research from Axiometrics, a Dallas firm that studies major apartment markets around the country, shows that rents in Fort Lauderdale in the third quarter of this year are down by 2.2 percent compared with last year. In Palm Beach County, the decline is 7.8 percent and in Miami-Dade County rents are off by 0.7 percent.

"In a lot of the overbuilt markets, it's better to be a renter than an owner," said Axiometrics President Ron Johnsey.

Again, I'm not saying the credit crunch isn't a problem. I'm not saying that a lot of middle class Americans haven't bet a lot on the continued rise in their homes' value, or that if they take a big hit the resulting slowdown in their spending might not tip the whole economy into a recession. (But it might not!) I'm saying that during the runup in housing prices the air was filled with complaints from the left that the rich were bidding up the value of housing, which was becoming unaffordable for ordinary Americans whose wages were rising only slowly, etc.. Now that this process is unwinding, some of this affordability problem is presumably being corrected. I'm amazed Quick resists this point. He must own. ...

Corner reactions here. ... 7:57 P.M. link

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Is illegal immigration like crime in New York: They said it could never be reduced, until it was? More evidence that even the mild efforts at border control are having an impact.

a) The Gran Salida continues, reports Reuters, although the story offers no hard numbers (just a reported "spike" at a Mexcian consulate).  Instapundit notes that one non-enforcement explanation--a shift in exchange rates--doesn't appear to hold water.

b) And they don't keep on coming: Meanwhile, the LAT reports on a decline in incoming illegal immigration, and the paper has some numbers. ... Mexicans who say they plan to seek work abroad: down by a third. ... Border arrests: down by 20%. ... Most significantly:

The growth rate of the U.S. Mexican-born population has dropped by nearly half to 4.2% in 2007 from about 8% in 2005 and 2006, according to an analysis of census data by the Pew Hispanic Center. [E.A.]

That seems pretty dramatic. True, there's a debate about how much of the drop is due to stepped-up enforcement and how much to a decline in construction work.  The official PC position appears to be that enforcement can't possibly have anything to do with it.** Still, the drop suggests that border control efforts may have at least as much effect on shaping the future electorate in the long run as attempts by Republicans to win over Mexican-Americans by pursuing McCainesque semi-amnesty proposals.  [But illegals don't vote-ed. Their U.S.-born children do. Plus, fewer illegals = less demand for semi-amnesty, no? Which makes it less likely that a whole new group of previously illegal Latino immigrants will ever become voters. Pandering to this now-smaller group of potential future voters in turn bcomes less appealing.]

.**--you see "the border buildup has encouraged more illegal immigrants to employ professional smugglers, whose success rate is higher than that of individuals, according to Wayne Cornelius, director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego." OK, but doesn't the cost of hiring a professional itself deter illegal immigration? And are the pros getting less successful--and more expensive? ... 7:21 P.M. link

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How grudging  and testy is Bob Wright's acceptance of the surge's relative success? (And he wasn't even against it.)  ... 1:58 P.M.

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Undernews Underanalysis: Still impressive, near-total lack of MSM pickup of the National Enquirer's Edwards scandal allegations.** My guess regarding MSM thinking is 1) Nobody wants to hurt Elizabeth Edwards and 2) Everybody figures that if John Edwards loses in Iowa, there's no reason to mention the story. It will go away and nobody will have to cover it.  ... If Edwards wins Iowa, however, that calculus would presumably change.

P.S..: Were the story to break out in the MSM before Iowa, the Edwards camp might react by allowing his popular wife make an impassioned plea for her husband, against sleaze, etc., which would generate considerable sympathy. His support in the caucuses could well go up in the short run. If you don't want Edwards to win--as  I don't--it may be best at this point if the story stays undernews until January 4. Which puts me in the same page as the MSM, I think.

In other words, under this theory the worst outcome for Edwards is if the Enquirer account slowly seeps into voter consciousness, but doesn't become known enough for Edwards to be able to profit by making a big deal of it in public (which would have the downside of bringing it to more or less every voter's attention).  ... That assumes Edwards remains in contention. Should he fall significantly behind in the polls, then making a big deal out of it becomes a plausible Hail Mary gambit. ...

P.P.S.--Mickey's Assignment Desk: Are the issues of the Enquirer making it to the supermarket stands in Iowa? If anyone's there and can check, I'd love to know. ...

**-- Relevant denials are included in the Enquirer story. See also Edwards' denial ("made up") in this Rush & Molloy column. ... 3:01 A.M. link

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AARGH! Cardinal "Mike" Richelieu casts aspersions on an ARG Iowa poll ("looks off because it near-certainly is"). ... Barack Obama better hope that this more recent ARG poll is off. It has him plunging into third place in the caucuses. ...

Update: Mystery Pollster on ARG--

[T]he problem in trying to assess the ARG poll is that we know so little about it. Does ARG make call-backs to unavailable respondents? What was the sample composition on any ARG Iowa survey this year in terms of age and education level, and was this one suddenly different? Did ARG weight the results by age or education this time, and if so, by how much? We are in the dark on all of these questions. ...

See also: Jay Cost, who offers more reasons for caution but not dismissal. ... 1:38 A.M.

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Monday, December 24, 2007

Mick Shand, one of the few survivors of the "Great Escape"-- the last man to make it out of the tunnel--has died at age 92. ... P.S.: The book was better than the movie. ... 12:43 P.M.