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Last week we surveyed the proposed scenarios for fixing the Michigan/Florida mess. Two of the four solutions involved costly Florida revotes. But now the chairman of the state Democratic Party tells us they’ve decided not to hold a revote. With that, the Florida Dems have simultaneously screwed Hillary Clinton and guaranteed their own irrelevance. Here's how.
Clinton’s situation is dire. She’s now trailing Obama by about 159 pledged delegates, according to NBC. Even if she scores a big win in Pennsylvania—say it nets her an extremely generous 40 delegates—that’s still not going to be enough to catch up. (Obligatory Slate Delegate Calculator plug.) Her candidacy therefore rests on whether she can persuade superdelegates to overturn Obama’s pledged-delegate lead. But since Feb. 5, Obama has won 47 superdelegates, and Clinton has lost seven. The chances that superdelegates will have an epiphany and swing to Clinton seem awfully low. Her one trump card, however, was the prospect of winning the popular vote. If Florida had revoted and she won a huge victory that propelled her past Obama in the popular vote—itself a skewed number—she might have persuaded superdelegates to swing her way. (Obama leads by roughly 700,000 in the popular vote, but that would have dropped to about 400,000 with Florida’s Jan. 29 results factored in, according to Real Clear Politics.) But now a popular-vote victory is as far out of reach for her as Obama’s pledged-delegate lead.
Meanwhile, Florida has left itself only a handful of scenarios, all unsatisfying: 1) Split the pledged delegates 50-50, 2) Allocate the delegates proportionally based on the Jan. 29th vote, or 3) Allocate them proportionally but halve the number, à la the GOP. In each these scenarios, Florida doesn’t really matter—at least not in any way but a symbolic one. In the first case, the 50-50 split won’t affect the pledged-delegate gap, which means those pledged delegates might as well not be there. In the last two cases, the delegates will be seated at the convention only if Obama, who now controls the convention’s credentials committee, allows them. And he’ll allow them only if he’s far enough ahead that their votes won’t make up the difference. So the chances are that Florida will attend the convention, but only because including its delegates is no longer a threat to Obama.
Maybe that’s why the Obama campaign was comfortable issuing this statement late today: “We hope that all parties can agree on a fair seating of the Florida delegates so that Florida can participate in the Democratic Convention.”
Clinton's campaign, for its part, is understandably irked: “Today’s announcement brings us no closer to counting the votes of the nearly 1.7 million people who voted in January. We hope the Obama campaign shares our belief that Florida’s voters must be counted and cannot be disenfranchised.” Ah, the "D" word. Expect to hear a lot more of that in the coming weeks.
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This morning, the New York Times ran a Bill Kristol column whose entire bloated argument balanced on a tenuous, factually incorrect fulcrum. Kristol claims that Obama can’t pretend he didn’t know his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was a controversial firebrand because Obama was in church when Wright started mouthing off. Kristol originally cited reporting that claimed Obama was at church on July 22, when Wright said the United States of White America was oppressing blacks.
Kristol and the Times have since issued an apology and a correction, but this was an especially preventable offense. Slate’s Map the Candidates tool shows Obama spent the day in Florida, fruitlessly addressing Latinos in Miami.
But the Times didn’t even have to steer their browsers to Slate’s waters. Their own candidate tracker shows that Obama was far from Chicago that day, as well. Kristol relied on reporting from conservative news site NewsMax.com, which is sticking by their story. Last we checked, the Times didn’t rely on reporting from biased outlets like NewsMax. Kristol might, but the Times doesn’t.
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In a race where identity politics is everywhere, you’d think Barack Obama would put more emphasis on his Irish heritage today. See above. (Update 12:45 a.m.: Obama's campaign sends word that he wore a green tie to a dinner with the Irish Women's Society in Scranton this evening.)
Last year, geneologists traced his lineage back to one Fulmuth Kearney, who sailed from Ireland to New York in 1850. (Various Irish counties claim to be his place of origin.) But it turned out his roots are Irish Protestant, not Catholic. On a day when both candidates are trying to boost their cred among Catholics in time for the primary in Pennsylvania, it might be unwise to remind everyone that his ancestors were on the other side.
Still, that didn’t stop his campaign from creating St. Paddy’s-themed Obama buttons. Nor did it stop the folks at Barely Political from creating a fake attack ad alleging that Obama is a leprechaun.
P.S.—That reminds me, Obama already has his own ice cream flavor. Seems about time for an Obama-themed drink, no? How about the "Irish Car Obama"?
Update 5:19 p.m.: A helpful reader points out that Obama does in fact have a drink named after him: A cheap Kenyan beer called Senator Keg.
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In her Iraq speech today in Washington, D.C., Hillary Clinton told the same story that comedian Sinbad mocked last week:
[T]here was a saying around the White House that if a place was too small, too poor, or too dangerous, the president couldn't go, so send the First Lady. That’s where we went.
I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.
We eagerly await Sinbad’s rebuttal. But until then, Newsweek’s Michael Hirsh reports yet another counter-narrative:
Clinton has seemed to exaggerate the danger she faced when, for example, she went to war-ravaged Bosnia in 1996. Campaigning in Iowa, she claimed she "ran" off the tarmac to avoid sniper fire. But Maj. Gen. William Nash, the commander of U.S. forces in Bosnia at the time, tells NEWSWEEK he was not aware "there was any threat of sniper fire." Nor was there any rush when her cargo plane landed.
Hrm, so has anyone confirmed Clinton's account?
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Today the Boston Globe seems to confirm rumors that Republicans voted for Hillary Clinton in Ohio, Texas, and Mississippi to undermine Barack Obama’s candidacy.
In Ohio and Texas on March 4, Republicans comprised 9 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, more than twice the average GOP share of the turnout in the earlier contests where exit polling was conducted. Clinton ran about even with Obama among Republicans in both states, a far more favorable showing among GOP voters than in the early races.
In Mississippi, her support among Republican voters (who comprised about 13 percent of voters) was a mind-boggling 75 percent.
There’s been plenty of skepticism about the “Rush effect.” It’s hard to find proof of tactical voting, since there are no data for how many Republicans normally cross over when their nomination is secure. Plus, there’s no way to know why Republicans voted for Clinton. Ambinder points out that if more GOP women crossed over than GOP men, that might undermine the Rush surge theory.
But regardless of the rationale, the GOP drift toward Clinton undermines Obama’s self-cultivated reputation as a uniter. Obama says he wants to create “Obama Republicans” in the mold of “Reagan Democrats”—but it’s Clinton Republicans (like Ann Coulter) who appear to have made the difference in Texas. (Clinton won about 119,000 Republican votes there, and she beat Obama by 101,000.) That said, Obama has retained his lead among independents.
There’s no way to conclusively measure the Limbaugh factor in the last few contests, but here’s a tip for Pennsylvania: Exit pollsters should ask Republicans whether Rush Limbaugh influenced their decision. Seriously. Barring that, they should at least ask GOP Hillary supporters what they think of her.
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For Barack Obama, Iowa just keeps on giving. First they handed him a decisive victory in the Democratic caucus in January. Then at this weekend’s district conventions, they gave him a second win in which he netted another nine pledged delegates, bringing his state total to 25. And with two more rounds of voting to go—one in April and one in June—he essentially gets four headlines for the price of one.
Obama’s gain comes at the expense of John Edwards, who lost eight delegates (so much for loyalty), and Clinton, who lost one. Perhaps talking smack about the caucus process wasn’t the wisest move.
Just for perspective: Clinton netted nine delegates in Ohio. Obama’s victories in Wyoming and Mississippi erased her gains from Ohio and Texas. Now Iowa 2.0 puts him in the post-March 5 lead and brings the total pledged delegate count to 1,409 and 1,250, by NBC’s count.
So, could the same thing happen in other caucus states? Clinton won the first round of Nevada voting (despite Obama winning more delegates), but Obama appeared to make gains in some counties in the second round of voting in February. (We won’t know statewide totals until Clark County, whose convention descended into chaos, holds a redo.) Other caucus states—Kansas, Nebraska, Washington, Maine, and others—hold second rounds of voting, which could give Obama intermittent delegate bounces.
I imagine this is what the rest of the Democratic contest will look like. There won’t be a knockout blow; just a series of small victories that will slowly bleed one candidate or another—but probably one in particular—of delegates. There are still potential game-changers, like a scandal that swings the superdelegates or a lopsided solution to the Florida and Michigan debacles. But chances are the race is going to drag on painfully until one candidate gives in to the math. If Hillary thinks she hates caucuses now, wait till they’re all done voting.