Obama will announce his running mate this week, given that the Democratic National Convention starts a week from today. In theory he could announce it as late as next Wednesday, since that’s the night that the VP nominee is supposed to make a speech.
Here’s a list of when running mates have been announced in prior campaigns.
Obama’s finally hitting back. It’s about damn time.
I feel sorry for Steve Carell, though. There’s a clip of him near the end. I wonder if Jon Stewart will razz him about it.
I haven’t been happy with the Obama campaign lately. The McCain campaign is doing all the defining and driving most of the news coverage. Yes, McCain’s ads have been asinine, but they’ve got the media talking, and that’s where many voters get their information.
Regular readers of my blog will know that I am no doe-eyed Obama supporter. I went back and forth between Clinton and Obama over the course of the primary race. First I was undecided; then I chose Obama, voted for him in my primary in February, and posted an Obama icon on my blog. Then, as the race went on and Clinton began to define the debate, I started to think she might be a more impressive general election candidate, even if I loathed some of what she was doing. (Gas tax holiday? Please.)
Lately I still think she might have been a better nominee.
On June 3, the day Obama effectively clinched the nomination, Electoral-vote.com published its last set of competing matchups: Clinton vs. McCain and Obama vs. McCain. Clinton was doing much better against McCain than Obama was. That was two months ago, and things have moved in Obama’s direction since then. But I can’t help wonder whether Clinton would have a stronger lead right now.
Several months ago, the Republicans were relishing the idea of running against Clinton; they had a whole attack plan ready. And if she were the nominee they’d be using it right now.
But Clinton would be out-Roving McCain. She’d be running commercials that everyone would be talking about, defining the debate, defining McCain, going on the offensive against him, while casting herself as an issues-oriented champion of the working class. That’s what she started doing against Obama once she got her act together in March. The only reason Obama won is because he had a superior organization and racked up state after state in February. There’s nothing illegitimate to that; he knew the rules and took advantage of them. But he got blindsided once the Ohio/Texas campaign got under way and never really recovered. If not for February, Clinton would be the nominee. She ultimately lost, but she won the rhetorical debate.
The polls right now should not be as close as they are. Granted, according to the state-by-state polls, Obama still has a healthy lead. But the election is exactly three months from today, and so much can happen in that time. I want to smack Obama upside the head for not being more aggressive these last couple of weeks. Of course, if he winds up winning, everyone will say he chose his strategy wisely. But if he loses, Democrats will once again be banging their heads against the wall.
He’s still the favorite right now. But is anyone talking about his commercials? Is he doing anything but play defense? I’m sick of Democratic nominees who overestimate the intelligence of the American people. We need a nominee who kicks people’s asses. Clinton would have been that nominee.
Would her cynicism piss me off? Yes. Would I call her craven? Yes.
But would she have a better chance of winning?
Yes.
Some interesting tidbits from this extended piece on the Clinton campaign.
Bill Clinton:
While riding with Mr. Clinton in his car to an event, [Congressman] Altmire said, he asked how Mr. Obama’s learning curve at the White House would stack up with that of the former president, who was 46 when he took office. “I made a lot of mistakes when I started out,†Mr. Clinton replied, according to Mr. Altmire. “And I did some things in office that were politically naïve, and I would have a fear that Senator Obama would have the same experience.â€
Mark Penn:
Election night [in Pennsylvania] brought home the varied complex personal and political dynamics at play. Mr. Penn, once the most influential voice in the Clinton universe, showed up at campaign headquarters outside Washington to watch the returns but virtually no one would talk with him and he left early.
Terry McAuliffe:
Mr. McAuliffe served as morale officer, regularly visiting headquarters and taking dejected aides to dinner. His feisty, manic television appearances became so ubiquitous that aides developed “Terry Bingo†with 25 boxes listing his most common lines of spin — “More electable,†“Can still win†— and marked the boxes as he uttered them again and again.
Most interesting of all, Elizabeth Edwards:
Mrs. Clinton’s elation at each new victory was stemmed by some painful new setback. She crushed Mr. Obama in West Virginia. But as she celebrated, Mr. Obama upstaged her by appearing in Grand Rapids, Mich., the next day with a surprise endorser, former Senator John Edwards.
Mrs. Clinton noticed, however, that Elizabeth Edwards did not join her husband. Mrs. Edwards in recent months had grown to like Mrs. Clinton, an Edwards adviser said, and so the campaign reached out to see if she might back the New York senator.
Mrs. Edwards would not go that far.
Classy.
Also classy.
That’s what I like seeing.
I love watching this analysis of Obama’s 2004 convention speech. A star is born.
Here’s a great chart summarizing Obama’s delegate lead over five months of voting, including reminders of the various events over the past five months, as well as a U.S. map showing where Obama and Clinton each won popular votes. The Times often puts together neat charts like this that manage to pack a whole lot of information into one image.
Here’s a great, in-depth piece about how Obama’s team outmaneuvered Clinton to win the nomination. It was all about piling up delegates in lots of small states that Democrats usually ignore. It’s really remarkable how the Clinton team didn’t realize this.
I am disappointed. As a long time Hillary Clinton supporter and more importantly, an admirer, I am sad that this historic effort has ended with such a narrow loss for her.
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I am also so very disappointed at how she has handled this last week.
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She had an opportunity to soar and unite. She had a chance to surprise her party and the nation after the day-long denials about expecting any concession and send Obama off on the campaign trail of the general election with the best possible platform. I wrote before how she had a chance for her “Al Gore moment.” And if she had done so, the whole country ALL would be talking today about how great she is and give her her due.
Instead she left her supporters empty, Obama’s angry, and party leaders trashing her. She said she was stepping back to think about her options. She is waiting to figure out how she would “use” her 18 million voters.
But not my vote. I will enthusiastically support Barack Obama’s campaign. Because I am not a bargaining chip. I am a Democrat.
Michael Tomasky writes in the Guardian about Clinton’s speech:
She held a rhetorical knife to Obama’s throat and said, in not so many words: I’m still calling some shots, buddy. You offer me the vice-presidency, or I walk away. But she has also forced Obama into a situation whereby if he chooses her now, he looks weak. So that’s the choice she is hoping to impose on the nominee: don’t choose me, and Bill and I will subtly work to see that you lose; choose me, and look like a weakling who can’t lead the party without the Clintons after all. Now that’s putting the interests of the party first, isn’t it?
This, to me, was the most telling line of Clinton’s speech last night:
And I want the nearly 18 million Americans who voted for me to be respected, to be heard, and no longer to be invisible.
This is what it’s always been about for her. Respect. She feels like she’s been wronged, and that those who voted for her have been wronged, merely because somebody else won.
A desire to be respected is a desire grounded in insecurity. But respect isn’t something other people can give you. It’s something you have to give yourself.
Apparently the contest for her hasn’t been about getting a Democrat into the White House. It’s been about respect. She’s decided to ruin the party over… hurt feelings.
But feeding the fire of the people who didn’t vote for your party’s nominee, feeding their anger and insecurity, is really unprofessional, not to mention potentially destructive.
I will be making no decisions tonight.
How delusional are you? Don’t you get it? The decision is not yours to make. It’s already been made. You are not going to be the nominee. Your voters are not delegates that you control and can “release” to your opponent. They’re people with independent minds, and you can’t tell them what to do. And by the way — Obama already has the delegates. That’s what last night was about, in case you missed it.
Obama does not need to appoint you as his running mate, or promise to do anything for you. He’s the nominee. There’s no such thing as a co-presidency. The framers of the constitution thought about an executive council, but they decided to invest the executive power in a single individual.
The only choices you do have are whether to campaign for Obama, which, if you truly care about the issues more than you care about yourself, you will do enthusiastically; or to make an independent run, hoping to throw the election into the House and destroying the Democratic Party in the process.
But stop laboring under the delusion that you have any power left in this situation.
It’s not about you, Hillary. If you truly have any self-respect, you’ll realize this.
I’ve been following this all afternoon. The superdelegates keep rolling in today. Pretty exciting.
There’s one good thing that has come out of the prolonged Obama-Clinton race.
There seems to be a big chunk of Clinton voters who say they’re dead-set against voting for Obama. They’ll vote for McCain before they vote for Obama. Basically, their order of preference was: (1) Clinton, (2) McCain, (3) Obama.
The thing is, had Clinton not stayed in the race, we’d never know who these people are. Those Clinton voters who say they’ll never vote for Obama would have been indistinguishable from voters who would vote for John McCain over any Democrat whatsoever.
But because Clinton stayed in the race, we know who they are. We know they’re receptive to Democratic arguments, since they voted for Clinton. It will be easier to convince them to vote Democratic than it will be to convince die-hard Republicans to do so. Just convince them that Obama holds the same positions on the issues that Clinton does.
It may or may not work, depending on whether you see Clinton as the centrist and Obama as the liberal (Clinton and guns, Obama and his bad bowling), or Obama as the centrist and Clinton as the liberal (see universal health care). But it’s a thought.
Chris Cillizza writes about the remarkable nature of Obama’s impending nomination victory:
The facts are thus: Clinton came into the nomination fight heavily favored to be the nominee. Not only did she have the backing of the most potential political machine in the country — due in large part to her husband’s eight years in the White House — but she had also built a vaunted fundraising operation of her own and surrounded herself with some of the best and brightest aides in Democratic politics.
Obama, on the other hand, had served for two years in the U.S. Senate after doing a stint in the Illinois state Senate. He has toured the country for Democratic candidates during the 2006 election cycle and had begun to build a national organization through his Hopefund political action committee. (In fact, Obama often referred to himself as a “skinny kid with a funny name.”)
There seems little dispute that Obama over Clinton deserves a place in the conversation of great political upsets.
Whether it makes you happy or sad, it’s pretty amazing. Clinton was supposed to be the nominee. People had talked about it for years. She was the wife of a popular two-term Democratic ex-president, and she had money and loyalty. The Clinton machine was intimidatingly unbeatable.
And then Obama happened.
Despite the talk of racism hurting Obama among whites, there’s a good argument for the notion that his race helped him as much as his hurt him.
[E]very four years, the candidate who is the new politics, new left darling, whether it’s Howard Dean or whether it’s Bill Bradley or whether it’s Gene McCarthy, has historically fallen on the shoals of the white working-class vote… And that candidate would always make a big splash early in the contest and there would be a lot of media attention… [but] ultimately what would happen is working-class whites and working-class nonwhites would align behind another candidate. …
[I]f you think of the Democratic Party as working-class whites, working-class blacks… and then the elite class, whatever that is, the cappuccino, latte class… and trichotomize the Democratic Party coalition as those three things, if you can get two of the three you’re probably going to be the nominee.
If you see Obama as a black Bill Bradley or Howard Dean, then the reason he did so well is that in addition to the “elite”-type voters, he also got the black voters — unlike Bradley or Dean, who only got the “elites,” while the more mainstream candidate got everyone else. The argument is basically that if Obama had been white, he would have gone the way of his “new politics” predecessors and faded away. Also, by this argument, a large chunk of the white population voted against him not because he’s black, but because he’s the “elitist” candidate. Just as they supposedly wouldn’t support Bradley or Dean, they wouldn’t support Obama, either.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t racism going on as well. Or at least some sort of quasi-xenophobia. As David Brooks writes today:
These independent voters were intrigued by Obama’s “change†message, but they knew almost nothing about him except that he used to go to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. It’s as if they can’t hang Obama’s life onto anything from their own immediate experiences and, as a result, he is an abstraction.
Basically, Obama is just too weird an idea for some people.
Now that he’ll be able to run a race without one hand tied behind his back, he needs to spend some time focusing on his personal narrative.
And Clinton needs to campaign full-steam for him so we can get a Democrat back in the White House. She needs to hammer away at McCain and convince her supporters that she does *not* want them to vote for him. Whether she can do this, I don’t know. But unless she wants McCain to get elected and appoint a couple more Supreme Court justices, she’d damn well better work her ass off for the ticket.
Misleading headling of the day: As Race Wanes, Talk of Clinton as No. 2 Grows.
If you saw this headline, what would you expect to read? You might expect to read an article in which a whole bunch of Democrats and pundits are increasingly talking about the prospects of Obama choosing Hillary Clinton as his running mate.
Instead, the only person in the article who seems to be talking about her prospects as VP is Bill Clinton. There’s sentence after sentence about what Bill Clinton wants.
Later in the article is this:
The growing discussion about a ticket of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton is largely being fueled by Clinton supporters, although it is a suggestion that Obama supporters do not dismiss.
Again, the article mentions exactly one of those Clinton supporters: the candidate’s husband. And the fact that Obama supporters “do not dismiss” the suggestion doesn’t mean that they’re actively talking about it.
There’s also this:
Jerry Crawford, a Des Moines lawyer who is the Midwest co-chairman of the Clinton campaign, said in an interview Thursday that he supported the notion of Mrs. Clinton serving as a vice presidential candidate for Mr. Obama should he become the nominee.
It sounds like reporter Patrick Healy asked Jerry Crawford about this in order to gin up a story. Again, it doesn’t sound like this is a grass-roots movement.
Worst headline ever.
This disgusts me and worries me. All these elderly Florida Jews who won’t vote for Obama because he’s black. I don’t know what bothers me more — those who are prejudiced, or those who are misinformed.
Come on, people. You’re retired. Pick up a goddamn newspaper.
He’s going to have to work hard to win Florida. Hopefully he can make it up by winning states like Colorado and Virginia.
There’s been so much talk in this presidential race about Hillary Clinton as a woman: about whether her campaign has been hurt by sexism, about her campaign’s effect on future female presidential candidates, about her effect on the women of tomorrow, and so on. I’ve seen this discussed most often by Salon.com editor Joan Walsh, who seems obsessed with sexism against Clinton to an unhealthy degree.
The most recent piece I’ve read on the subject is this one by Peggy Orenstein from the Sunday Times Magazine, in which she wonders what effect Clinton’s campaign will have on her daughter.
So it is not the attacks themselves that give me pause, but the form they consistently have taken, the default position of incessant, even gleeful (and, I admit it, sometimes clever) misogyny. Staring down the sightline of my daughter’s index finger, I wondered what to tell her — not only at this moment, but in years to come — about Hillary and about herself. Will the senator be my example of how far we’ve come as women or how far we have to go? Is she proof to my daughter that “you can do anything†or of the hell that will rain down on you if you try?
I have to admit — I just don’t see it. I’m baffled by those who say that Clinton’s treatment will discourage females from running for president in the future, or that it has anything at all to say about future female candidates. I don’t know if it’s because I’m a Gen-Xer or because I’m male, but to me, Clinton’s gender has barely registered as an issue in this race. Stephen Colbert sometimes jokes about how he “doesn’t see race”; me, I haven’t seen gender in this campaign.
It’s not that there haven’t been some isolated sexist attacks against her. But “Iron my shirts!” was something yelled out by a couple of yahoos at a campaign event, and “How do we beat the bitch?” was a question asked by a single voter at a McCain event a few months back, and although Chris Matthews of MSNBC has said some dumb things (including some allegedly sexist comments that were not actually sexist), he’s one anchor. There are always going to be sexist people and attitudes in the world, just as there will always be racists and homophobes and antisemites and anticatholics. There will always be unenlightened idiots.
But there’s a big difference between isolated examples of sexism and systematic sexism. And I haven’t seen any systematic sexism in this campaign. Some people see any attacks against Clinton as sexist, particularly attacks by those in the media. Well, that’s the way politics goes. Cable news anchors are opinionated and they say dumb things about all candidates. Romney, Edwards, Giuliani, Thompson, McCain (sometimes), and even media darlings Huckabee and Obama have had to go through this.
There are at least ten reasons why Clinton isn’t going to be the nominee that have nothing to do with her gender. I don’t buy any of the crap about how “Americans are uncomfortable with an ambitious woman.” It’s not that she’s a woman, and it’s certainly not that she’s ambitious. It’s that she doesn’t know when to stop, which is an obnoxious quality in anyone, man or woman. Were Clinton a man, I would be just as scornful of her for the way she’s run and is continuing to run her campaign. Were the two remaining candidates Obama and Edwards instead of Obama and Clinton, and Edwards weres doing what Clinton has done over the last few months, I would still be thinking, “Come on, get out of the race already.” I feel the same way about Ralph Nader, who runs narcissistic and delusional campaigns. I feel contempt for him. It’s not sexism.
Perceptions of sexism in this race are primarily a generational thing: I didn’t live through the sexist ’50s and wasn’t scarred by the battles of the ’60s or ’70s. And it’s a gender thing: I’m a man, so I’ve never directly experienced sexism. (Some say anti-gay attitudes have ties to sexism, but it’s not the same.)
Which of us is correct? Are those of us who are younger, or male, or both, blind to the sexism that exists because we’re not its target? Or are those of the older generation paranoid, seeing sexism when it’s not there? I suspect it’s the latter.
We’re dealing with (1) people who want a female president more than anything, versus (2) people who are completely happy and even eager to vote for a female president but not if she’s not the best candidate. Some people in group #1 see people in group #2 as sexist, and some people in group #2 see people in group #1 as sexist in their own way.
This is how it always works with identity politics. Some claim A is just as good as B, some claim A is different and therefore better than B, some claim A needs an extra boost to make up for past injustice, some claim that true justice lies in treating A and B the same. Thus will it ever be.
Perhaps if I understand that, I can get over my irritation at the people who see nothing but gender in Clinton’s candidacy. I haven’t yet. But we’ll see.
(Update: I missed this in the Times today.)
Some quick thoughts on the wonderful California decision (still reading it):
It took me forever to find the actual decision of the court. I had to skim through the first seven pages before I found something resembling a ruling. Then on the next page it said something about not needing to deal with the word “marriage” and I thought maybe it was more like the New Jersey decision, pro-rights but not mandating the word. Thoroughly confused and figuring I wasn’t going to find anything definitive in the next few pages, I tried to find the end of the opinion but couldn’t (the end is in the middle, as the main opinion is followed by some concurrences/dissents). Finally found the end and realized the good news.
In six months, Californians will likely be voting on a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Some people expect a backlash against the court’s decision. Some people, those who are anti-gay or who are against marriage equality for gay couples, will feel angered and energized by the decision and be even more eager to turn out to vote in favor of the amendment. Also, the vote will be happening in the context of the Obama-McCain race on the same day’s ballot; if McCain runs strong in California, this could help get out the Republican vote.
But I think this decision helps those of us on the side of equality more than those on the other side. Over the next six months, gay couples will be marrying in California. And Californians will see that gay couples have gotten legally married and the world hasn’t fallen apart. Just as important, there are many people who might oppose same-sex marriages in theory but who are good at heart, who have empathy for their fellow human beings, and who are not going to want to take marriage away from couples who have already been legally married under the imprimatur of the California constitution. They’re not going to want to tell the children of those couples, sorry, your parents are no longer married. This is different from the legally dicey San Francisco marriages four years ago; this is really and truly legal.
This is really and truly wonderful.
This Times editorial says something silly that I’ve also seen elsewhere.
There is a lot of talk that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is now fated to lose the Democratic nomination and should pull out of the race. We believe it is her right to stay in the fight and challenge Senator Barack Obama as long as she has the desire and the means to do so. That is the essence of the democratic process.
Will people stop using this straw man? Has anyone ever said she has no right to continue campaigning? No.
I have the right to wear a clown suit to work every day. But if someone says “You shouldn’t wear a clown suit to work every day,” and I respond by saying, “But I have the right to do it,” that doesn’t really address the point. “I can if I want to” is rarely a useful answer to anything. It’s what a five year old says.
The question isn’t whether Clinton has the right to continue campaigning. Of course she does. The question is whether it serves any purpose. Me, I don’t care if she continues campaigning or not, as long as she stops bringing the likely nominee down with her. Also, superdelegates are allowed to change their minds as many times as they want until the convention at the end of August, and since neither candidate will reach a majority without superdelegates and Obama could still somehow collapse over the next three and a half months, she’s there as a backup.
But she’d be there as a backup anyway. Maybe the best thing for her to do is not end her campaign, but “suspend” it, right after the Montana and South Dakota primaries on June 3. At that point, there won’t be anyone left but superdelegates to convince, and while it’s unlikely a publicly-declared superdelegate will have a change of heart, she can still be there as a backup in case Obama falls apart.
Side note: how weird is it that Puerto Rico has more delegates than Montana and South Dakota combined, and more delegates than Kentucky alone, but Puerto Ricans don’t get to vote for president?
Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the speaker of the House, was among those on Wednesday giving Mrs. Clinton room to make her own calculations about the race, saying “a win is a win,†in reference to the Indiana results.
This is something that has annoyed me throughout this nomination process. A win isn’t a win. There’s no such thing as “winning a state” in the Democratic nomination process, or rather, there’s no real importance to winning a state, since states aren’t winner-take-all. These primary nights are not about winning a state; they’re about adding proportional chunks of delegates to running totals. But to the news media, that’s not quite as exciting.
News anchors were up past midnight waiting to see whether Obama or Clinton had won Indiana, when it really only meant the difference of one or two delegates out of 2,000. The media is used to covering winner-take-all presidential elections, and they’re wedded to the concept of “calling a state” for one candidate or another. Determining a “winner” creates news. But it’s inaccurate to say that “winning a state” matters in anything but a symbolic sense.