Wednesday, April 02, 2008 - Posts
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Something we didn't mention in today's Deathwatch is a new Pennsylvania survey by Public Policy Polling that puts Obama barely ahead of Clinton, 45-43. (Read the PDF here.) That's within the 2.8 percent margin of error. What isn't statistically insignificant, however, is Obama's 28-point spike since the last PPP poll two and a half weeks ago.
As usual, remember that this is one poll, and could well be an outlier. But it re-raises the question of how much Clinton really needs to win by in order to "win" Pennsylvania. Mark Halperin puts the necessary margin at 10.5 percent. If true, then Obama's gap-closing is doing a lot more than tying it up. Normally the Clinton camp would be able to fix this with a little expectations management -- a simple shifting of the goal posts. But Pennsylvania was supposed to be Clinton country by a long shot, and it's going to be hard to make people forget that. Move the goal posts any further and you're in the bleachers.
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Hillary Clinton just released a new "3 a.m." ad, with a twist. This time, instead of some vaguely ominous national crisis, it's a vaguely ominous economic crisis. From the script:
But there’s a phone ringing in the White House and this time the crisis is economic. Home foreclosures mounting, markets teetering. John McCain just said the government shouldn’t take any real action on the housing crisis, he’d let the phone keep ringing. Hillary Clinton has a plan to protect our homes, create jobs. It’s 3 am, time for a president who’s ready.
At risk of sounding obnoxious, aren't the markets closed at 3 a.m.? Or maybe the crisis is happening in Japan?
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When it comes to seating Florida’s delegation, the DNC keeps saying
it’s going to come to a compromise that’s acceptable to both campaigns. “We all
agree that whatever the solution, it must have the support of both campaigns,”
said Howard Dean and Florida Democratic Chairwoman Karen Thurman in a joint
statement today. But is there really a scenario on which both campaigns are
going to agree?
I doubt it. The campaigns’ stances are simple. Everyone says
they want the delegations to be seated. But no one agrees on what that
means—how many delegates each candidate will get, whether to seat superdelegates
but not pledged delegates, or whether to treat Florida and Michigan equally. (Obama's absence from the Michigan ballot complicates things.) From Obama’s perspective, he won’t accept any scenario in which the
Florida and Michigan delegations affect the race.
Likewise, the Clinton
campaign won’t accept any scenario in which they don’t. That means the only way
they’ll come to a mutually acceptable compromise is if Obama’s delegate lead is
wide enough that seating the Florida and Michigan delegations
won’t help Hillary catch up. In other words, if Obama has his way, the
delegations will only get seated as long as they don’t matter. But then that
would tick Hillary off, taking the negotiations back to square one.
The DNC seems to think it can find a solution without taking
sides. I’m still not sure that’s possible. No one said Howard Dean’s job was
easy.
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One running theme of John McCain’s speeches is his youthful indiscretion. He made it the centerpiece of his speech today at Annapolis on day three of his autobiography tour:
In truth, my four years at the Naval Academy were not notable for exemplary virtue or academic achievement but, rather, for the impressive catalogue of demerits I managed to accumulate. By my reckoning, at the end of my second class year, I had marched enough extra duty to take me to Baltimore and back 17 times—which, if not a record, certainly ranks somewhere very near the top.
McCain has always been impressively candid about his youth. But in recent days, he hasn’t gone into detail. Speaking at his high school yesterday, he mentioned his “unruly passions” but left it at that. And no one has pushed him to reveal more.
Compare that to Barack Obama, whose admission in his memoir that he tried cocaine has produced reams of speculation. (The pinnacle would be the Times article accusing Obama of doing less drugs than he claims.) Why does Obama’s (relatively minor) youthful indiscretion merit so much more attention than McCain’s?
Two reasons: Because McCain's youth happened so long ago and because it’s been well-documented. On the first count, I’d guess this is one area where McCain’s age helps him. Whereas Obama’s youthful indiscretion occurred only 25 years ago, McCain’s wildest years are twice as far gone. (Then again, McCain's, er, indiscretions continued until he was Obama’s age.)
At the same time, plenty has been written on McCain’s past, often by McCain himself. Back in 1999, Slate’s Jacob Weisberg summarized the most colorful episodes in McCain’s campaign memoir, Faith of My Fathers:
There is, for instance the time McCain, on leave from the U.S. Naval Academy, went to visit his latest girlfriend in a classy suburb of Philadelphia. After knocking back a few too many at the train station, he collapsed drunk through the screen door of her parents' house. Or the time during his pilot training in Pensacola when he dated a stripper called "Marie, the Flame of Florida." Marie shocked the polite society of his married officer friends and their wives by pulling a switchblade out of her purse and cleaning her nails. Or, in a far more serious vein, the time when, as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, McCain attempted to hang himself with his shirt.
That last part highlights the third reason McCain’s misspent youth doesn’t dog him on the campaign trail: His redemption narrative. The years he spent as a POW in Hanoi—and the epiphanies he describes having had there—have not only supplanted his drinking habits and sex life as the key part of the McCain Story, they’ve made those earlier phases seem admirable. Everyone loves a redemption story, which is why McCain can be so honest about his past. Obama’s drug story is essentially, I did coke, then I stopped. For McCain, though, the early mess-ups are necessary to tell the story of his eventual self-discovery.
Indeed, McCain's screw-ups are central to his identity. He wouldn't cast himself as such an ethics hawk if it hadn't been for his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. The difficulty in admitting to more recent dalliances, however, is in convincing people that the past is really past.
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A high-profile Obama endorsement, a tightening race in Pennsylvania,
and a big March fundraising gap dock Hillary 0.4 points, taking her
down to 9.5 percent on the Clintometer.
The big news: Democratic national-security guru and former Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton is endorsing
Barack Obama. Hamilton's backing isn't expected to invigorate voters,
Kennedy-style (though you saw how that worked out). But as a member of
the 9/11 commission and co-chair of the vaunted Iraq Study Group, he'll
burnish Obama's foreign-policy credentials. (And maybe his old-folk
cred, too—Hamilton is 76.) Too bad he's not a superdelegate. However,
Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal, who also endorsed Obama today, is. ...
Read more at the Hillary Clinton Deathwatch.
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In yesterday’s Washington
Post, Bill Richardson offered
his best retort yet to James Carville’s comparison of Richardson to “Judas”:
Carville and others say that I owe President Clinton's wife
my endorsement because he gave me two jobs. Would someone who worked for
Carville then owe his wife, Mary Matalin, similar loyalty in her professional
pursuits? Do the people now attacking me recall that I ran for president,
albeit unsuccessfully, against Sen. Clinton? Was that also an act of disloyalty?
Bill Clinton reportedly flew
off the handle in a meeting with superdelegates last weekend when the subject of Richardson came up. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
“Five times to my face [Richardson] said that he would never do that,” a
red-faced, finger-pointing Clinton
erupted.
He should have said three. Then he would have had the Peter parallel, too.
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