Monday, May 05, 2008 - Posts
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In the board game Risk, if you control Australia, you control the entire game. (As our boy Hurley reminded us recently.) You get an extra few armies every turn, you can amass a three-country-wide firewall across Southeast Asia, and it provides a point-of-deployment for all of your troops. In this Democratic race, the delegate math is Australia. If you control the delegate narrative, you also control the conventional-wisdom-spouting media, who can energize or enervate your campaign. It gives you a few extra points in the polls, builds an arithmetic firewall that can't be busted through, and is a rallying cry for all of your surrogates.
So, it comes as no surprise that Barack Obama is doing everything he can to make sure people know his delegate lead is nearly insurmountable. But he's taken it one step too far with his Web site's latest delegate tracker. On it, the campaign represents the two candidates' delegate hauls with horizontal histogram bars—bars that are ostensibly 2,025 delegates long. When we started working on this post, Obama had 1,750 delegates to Clinton's 1,611. (It's now 1,752 to 1,611.) As a result, Obama should have had 86.6 percent of his bar filled, and Clinton should have had 79.6 percent of hers shaded in. In actuality, Obama severely underplays Clinton's total. Only 61.8 percent of her bar is shaded, nearly 18 percent less than should be to make the image graphically correct. The image is below.
We asked our Slate V and image swami, Andy Bouve, to mock up an image showing what the bar would look like if it were pictured accurately. The thing is, it's clear Obama is ahead in the legitimate version, so one wonders why they're misrepresenting Clinton's total.
UPDATE May 6, 8:14 a.m.: Thanks to the readers who pointed out that the Obama campaign updated the site to correct Clinton's bar graph.
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Barack Obama doesn’t
say he would scrap
the consent decree under which the federal government has overseen the
Teamsters for the past two decades. He just says that he’d start to think
about possibly scrapping it. This maneuver—the soft pander—has been a
staple of the 2008 campaign, particularly for Obama. Don’t make any promises;
just hint at them. Load them up with so many ifs that you won’t get
accused of breaking them when things don’t quite work out.
The Wall Street Journal reported
this morning that Obama got the Teamsters endorsement after telling them he
supported scaling down a federal oversight policy instituted years ago to crack
down on the union’s mob ties. But on Good Morning America, Obama denied
making a “blanket commitment.” He said, "The union has done a terrific job
cleaning house" and promised he’d "examine" the issue as
president. The Obama campaign and the Teamsters both say the candidate hasn’t
contradicted himself, and that anyway no president would have the power to lift
the decree. According to Teamster spokesman Bret Caldwell, “closure to the
consent decree will come through the legal process, not politics.” If that’s
the case, then Obama’s blowing smoke when he promises to “examine” the issue.
Hillary Clinton is doing the same when she says
it’s time to “turn the page” on the decree. The trick is to give the impression you’d shake things
up without making any concrete promises about how.
The candidates took a similar approach to NAFTA. As the
crucial Ohio
vote approached, Obama and Clinton didn’t promise to abolish the trade
agreement. They said they would “renegotiate” it, which could mean as little as
tweaking labor and environmental standards while leaving incentives for
downsizing and outsourcing intact. When Obama’s economic adviser reportedly
urged Canadian officials not to take Obama’s rhetoric too seriously, the NAFTA
purists pounced.
Same with the debate over withdrawal from Iraq.
No
one really thinks Obama could withdraw all combat troops within 18 months.
When Samantha Power, an advisor to Obama on foreign policy, called
Obama’s withdrawal plan a “best case scenario”—an honest acknowledgment that no
one knows what Iraq
will look like in 2009—she was forced out. (Calling Clinton
a “monster” didn’t help.) Here the fudge factor isn’t—indeed, may not be—uttered
out loud. But everyone knows it’s there.
Vague campaign promises are nothing new, but Obama has
elevated them to a fine art. Maybe he might possibly think about considering
whether or not he should hypothetically be more decisive. Or maybe not.
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We’ve gotten complaints about the Hillary Deathwatch before,
but this is a new one.
Dear Application Developer,
A Facebook user requested that we forward an anonymous
report that your application The Hillary Clinton Deathwatch (application ID
#30705275390) is violating Facebook Terms of Use. The user selected "Attacks individual or
group" as the violation category.
Any text entered into the additional comments box appears here: …
I find this
application offensive. If you continue to approve of applications like this, I
will discontinue my account on Facebook and encourage all my readers to do so. [E.A.]
To protect the privacy of our users, we cannot disclose any
further information. Facebook is not
taking any action against your application based on this particular report, but
we are passing this along so you are made aware of potential problems and
respond accordingly to ensure you are in compliance. Please note that failure to comply with the
Terms may result in an enforcement action. …
Thanks,
Facebook
And here we were thinking the Facebook team was on Obama's side.
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The home stretch to Indiana and North Carolina is pocked by negative
ads, indecisive polls, and last-minute revelations about Barack Obama
and the Teamsters. With an Indiana win within reach, Clinton's chances
inch up 0.3 points to 12.6 percent.
Clinton gets a Monday-morning gift in today's Wall Street Journal:
Barack Obama reportedly told the Teamsters that he would reduce federal
oversight of the union. An Obama spokesman confirmed to the WSJ that Obama believes the current oversight system has "run its course." On Good Morning America, Obama denied having made a "blanket commitment" to scrap federal oversight, which was instituted
in 1989 to settle a racketeering lawsuit by the Justice Department.
Rather, he said, "the union has done a terrific job cleaning house,"
and he'll "examine" the issue as president. The Clinton camp today
cried hypocrisy—will he or won't he? But Politico points to a similar statement made by Clinton that she would be "very open" to re-examining the decree. The issue won't decide the primary, but John McCain's ad team can probably squeeze a few spots out of it.
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
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