Tethered Swimming

Nobody likes the byline brigade.  The press is either too liberal or too conservative and it’s always being unfair to your candidate while never taking a hard enough look at the other guy.  This is especially true when it comes to John McCain, a politician famous for his cozy relationship with the reporters assigned to follow him around.  The popular on-line expression of this is to refer to him as Saint McCain.  (Put it into Google, the results are a veritable who’s who of liberal websites and blogs.)   It’s a cute little epithet, and it’s accurate as far as it goes, but it can’t possibly last.

Writing in last week’s New Yorker, Ryan Lizza gave us the inside story on the press-disarming magic worked by the back of John McCain’s campaign bus.  The senator, and now presumptive nominee, sits cheek by jowl with the reporters and holds court until they’re out of questions.  He can be gruff, he says some impolite (and impolitic) things, and he repeats his jokes ad nauseam; but it’s so much better for the reporters than the arranged marriage awkwardness they have with other candidates that it gives McCain an advantage.  What doesn’t get mentioned in the article is that no bus yet constructed is large enough to accommodate all the press that will be following McCain during the crucial stretch of the campaign from the convention through Election Day.

It’s a scenario that every politician in America, past and present, has probably fantasized about: toe-to-toe against the best candidate and savviest campaign the other side can muster with the most fabulous prize in American politics at stake.  The technical rules may be the same as other contests, but the overwhelming attention makes it a completely different beast.  The presidential race is as different from other political races as the Super Bowl is from regular season NFL games.

The national attention, especially once the conventions are over, focuses directly on the presidential campaign like nothing else.  National television, broadcast and cable, will mention the race every single day.  National newspapers won’t let a single edition go to press without at least one story about the campaign on the front page.  Even a heavily contested statewide election doesn’t merit that kind of attention from corresponding local outlets.  You might not know who your mayor is, or who your congressional representatives are, but everyone knows the president; and for a few months this year everyone will know the two contenders as well.

The nominee of a major party is subject to vastly more scrutiny than even the most outspoken Senator or most flamboyant presidential hopeful.  As a Senator who faced no real threat to his seat McCain could afford to take newsworthy positions and give out money quotes like candy (he hasn’t faced a serious electoral fight since he got to Congress).  As reporters who needed fresh angles and storylines he was a golden goose.  That mutually beneficial relationship has now been fundamentally altered.  He is no longer an amusing Senator for Life, now he’s a potential president and the reporters have a real incentive to challenge him and look for dirt and inconsistencies.

McCain the nominee is going to have every public word parsed and scrutinized.  His long experience with the press is certainly an advantage, but the kind of intense and unremitting attention he is about to draw is unlike anything he has ever experienced.  He will likely always have sympathizers in the press corps, but the free ride is most definitely nearing its end.  Once the Democratic nominee is definitively known, and that could be as soon as next Wednesday, the presidential race will gradually fade from view for awhile.  It’s not going to stop or anything, and there will always be coverage for those who seek it, but once both contenders are set the great majority of the country is going to pay attention to other things for a few months.  But once the conventions roll around and we get into the serious campaign months of September and October it’s going to be open season on both nominees, whatever their past relationships with the byline brigade.

Of the three remaining presidential hopefuls, Barack Obama is generally considered to be the least experienced.  In at least one way that is empirically true; he is fourteen years younger than Hillary Clinton and a whopping twenty-five years younger than John McCain.  In terms of legislative experience he and Clinton can each make a case for “most experienced”, she’s been in the Senate longer, but he was in the Illinois Legislature before she was in the Senate so his total time as a legislator exceeds hers.  Their combined years as legislators don’t even come close to equaling those of McCain though, and that’s probably a good thing for them and a bad thing for him.

John McCain was first elected to the House in 1982 and four year later he got himself into the Senate, where he has been ever since.  In 1982 Hillary Clinton was the wife of an obscure Arkansas governor who had just gotten back into office after a two year exile and Barack Obama was a senior in college.  In other words, McCain has been in Congress for pretty much the entirety of Barack Obama’s adult life.

During that time, McCain, like all legislators, has cast a lot of votes and has had a lot of people (constituents, donors, lobbyists, etc) vying for his attention and his consideration.  Anyone, sinner or saint, who comes into contact with that many people is going to have significant number of untold or rarely remembered stories floating around.  The - ahem - bombshell article in the New York Times on Thursday is a perfect example of that.

The piece has been criticized for basically being a rehash of previously known material used to pad an allegation of marital infidelity that relies only on anonymous quotes.  That may be true, but whether or not the attention grabbing sexual component has any merit or not the rather mundane headline, “For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk” quickly became a self fulfilling prophecy.  McCain’s rebuttal to the Times piece contained statements so provably false that it took less than forty-eight hours for a definitive contradiction to come out.

Writing in Newsweek (via TPM) on Friday, Michael Isikoff points out that back in 2002 McCain admitted, under oath, to writing a letter to the FCC on behalf of Paxson Communications in 1999; an action he specifically denied this week in his response to the story in the Times.  Yesterday came the full write-up of the story in the Washington Post, complete with quotes from Mr. Paxson himself contradicting McCain.  The eighth paragraph contains this shame free quote from McCain super-lawyer Robert Bennett, “We understood that he [McCain] did not speak directly with him [Paxson]. Now it appears he did speak to him. What is the difference?”

“What is the difference?” indeed.  In the grand scheme of things it’s a pretty harmless lie and I, for one, wouldn’t want to live in a country where politicians running for office couldn’t lie to the press and the public.  But it illustrates a bigger problem for McCain and his supporters, one that will continue all the way through November.  McCain honestly sees himself as an incorruptible crusader for truth, justice and the American way.  In reality he’s just a Senator who isn’t in lockstep with his party and likes to see himself on television.  Whenever that inconvenient truth is raised he seems genuinely offended and Heaven forefend that anyone might think him capable of such low behavior; as a result the political bullshit he puts out is of lower quality than we have a right to expect from the nominee of a major party.

His vaunted crossover appeal is based on the notion that he’s some kind of extraordinary Senator, a (forgive me) maverick.  The truth is that even if McCain is less sullied by the ugly side of politics than your run of the mill multi-term Senator, he is no white knight.  Yet one of the foundations of his campaign is the idea of his incorruptibility and honesty.  For a man who’s been in Congress for a quarter of a century that might not be a good strategy.

I have learned to be very respectful of Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president.  Throughout last year I thought her campaign was a paper tiger.  I figured the political media, compelled to do full time campaign coverage despite the fact that nothing was actually happening, needed something to talk about and that once the fur started to fly it’d collapse.  I was wrong about that.  The opposite has proved true; things that would’ve been fatal to just about any other bid for president have been endured through sheer force of will.

This was originally going to be last Sunday’s post, but as I try not to repeat my mistakes I pushed it back to see how things went in Wisconsin and Hawaii.  It turns out, I needn’t have waited.  Barack Obama racked up two more crushing defeats, though Clinton did at least manage to break 40% in Wisconsin, a first for her since Super Tuesday (which now seems like a very long fortnight ago).  John McCain ignored her in his victory speech last night and the question now is whether Hillary’s campaign juggernaut is in its death throes, or if it’s still got some fight left in it.  Just for fun, let’s assume the latter.

What would a(nother) Hillary comeback look like?  What scenario can be conjured in which she stands triumphant on the stage in Denver?  To, briefly, state the obvious, she’s got to start winning and winning big.  Hillary has lost ten straight and nobody likes to be associated with the candidate who has the word “Loser” following her around like a thought balloon.  But how can she accomplish that when Obama has solidified his own base and begun co-opting hers?  Two words: Attack McCain.

She’s tried campaigning on her supposed experience advantage by saying that she’s better suited to face the Red campaign attacks and, once in office, better prepared to govern immediately and effectively.  That hasn’t worked.  She’s tried attacking Obama by pegging him as a ditz who gives a good speech but doesn’t know all the political facts of life.  That hasn’t work either.  The only major strategy that remains untried is to go all out on the attack against McCain.  If she can score more hits on McCain than Obama can it could go a long way toward proving that she really is better prepared to face the Republicans, during the campaign and afterward.

At this point Clinton has no realistic shot of catching Obama in pledged delegates.  Proportional delegate assignment cuts both ways and his lead of roughly 150 is probably insurmountable even if we start by spotting her huge wins in Texas and Ohio.  Dan Balz did just that in the Washington Post last Friday and the math is pretty grim.  Going with best case assumptions he figured that a 60-40 win in Ohio would net her a gain of 30 on Obama, and a 55-45 win in Texas would net her about 19.  Even that rosy scenario would still leave her about 100 pledged delegates behind.

She’s going to be behind in the pledged delegate count and in the popular vote so no matter what she’s going to need a bigger share of the - ahem - automatic delegates than Obama.  Fighting him tooth and nail the way she did in Wisconsin might reduce his margin of victory, but it will not alter the outcome.  The only way she can prevail is to convince all those Democratic Party stalwarts that she stands a better chance against McCain.

The first order of business then is to immediately cease fire on Obama, train her sights on McCain, and open up with everything she’s got.  Attacking Obama, especially while John McCain is doing the same thing, alienates the automatic delegates.  She can only win in the loving embrace of those people and if they think she’s damaging Obama out of stubbornness, she’s cooked.  If, on the other hand, she can really lay into McCain, run ads all over Texas and Ohio calling him a flip-flopper and comparing herself favorably to him, she can show the automatic delegates what she’s been talking about all this time.

Attacking McCain, not Obama, would have two immediate benefits.  First and foremost it would quiet talk that she’s running a dead-end campaign.  The image of her and Bill as willing to burn down the house before they let someone else have a party in it is fatal to her.  The automatic delegates will not come running if she’s using scorched earth tactics against a fellow Democrat.  Second, it shows off (instead of talks about) one of her supposed strengths: fighting toe-to-toe with the Republicans.  Show, don’t tell.  Taunting McCain into attacking her would be ideal, but if she and Obama are going after McCain at the same time and she does it better, then that’s a legitimate point in her favor.

Could it work?  Hey, anything’s possible.  I know one thing for sure though, if Hillary Clinton keeps going the way she’s been going the last couple of weeks, taking potshots at Obama while talking up her ineffective positives, she’s done for.  Attacking McCain is the only strategy fresh enough to really shake up the campaign.  Doing what she’s been doing amounts to little more than running out the clock.

Whether or not he ends up the Democratic nominee, Barack Obama has already proved one thing: at least as far as Democratic primary voters go, a black man can attract substantial support from non-black voters even when there is a white alternative. Starting in Iowa and moving on from there, Obama has already probably won more individual votes than any other black politician in American history. Indeed, whenever one of his opponents has brought up his complexion, no matter how obliquely, his support has increased. The people who find racial attacks disgusting apparently outnumber the people who are ignorant enough to take racial arguments to heart.

Assuming he does win the nomination he will instantly become Public Enemy #1 of the right wing noise machine. It is going to say ugly, scathing things about him as loudly and as often as it can. That’s what it does. Here’s the good news though, that noise machine, from the lofty heights of Fox News and the American Enterprise Institute all the way down to the crudest and lowliest of blogs, is made up almost exclusively of white people. Sure there are a few minorities of various skin tones on board for the ride, but it’s a very monochrome operation.

We could get historical and start talking about the civil rights movement and the Republican “Southern Strategy”, but we don’t need to. Let’s just combine those two facts from above: 1) racial attacks on Obama are a one-step-forward-two-steps-back proposition, 2) most of the people attacking him are going to be conservative white people who, I’m guessing, don’t have much day to day interaction with the colored folks. That is a winning combination for Barack Obama.

If I were in charge of one of the press organs of the right I’d be furiously writing memos reminding all my, ahem, talent that nothing with even a whiff of racism about it can be said about Obama. Unfortunately for them, but fortunately for the rest of us, a lot of right wingers with big audiences (in print, on-line, or through radio and television) aren’t all that clever. They wouldn’t know how to construct an argument with subtlety if their lives depended on it. Especially when it comes to matters of race they’re so clumsy that they are inevitably going to write, say or do something that is a lot more racist than they realize. I expect to see a lot statements from right wingers beginning or ending with racial disclaimers, “The PC police don’t want me to say this, but…”, “It has nothing to do with his race, but…”, “…I’d be saying the same thing if he were white”, etcetera etcetera etcetera. Media Matters is going to have a field day.

It’s possible that the general electorate isn’t as ready to embrace Negro leadership as the Democratic electorate, but I don’t think so. Anyone racist enough to out and out not vote for a black man probably isn’t voting Democratic anyway. For the rest of the country simply raising race as an issue reminds people of unpleasant things they’d rather not think about; and drives them further into the arms of the Senator from Illinois.

After what was essentially a tie last Tuesday there was much speculation that the Blue nomination wouldn’t be decided even after all fifty states had had a say.  The general response to that scenario seems to have been to scream “Super delegates!  Brokered convention!”, tear out hair in great fistfuls and then run screaming into the street.  For the record, I’d like to state that I consider the prospect of a brokered convention very unlikely.  Sure it’s possible, but the political discourse in this country is notoriously short term.

Clinton and Obama basically fought each other to a draw on Super Tuesday and the immediate reaction was, “What if they keep tying?”  The odds of them doing that are pretty slim, witness last night’s crushing Obama victories.  Super Tuesday happened at a point in time when Obama and Clinton were roughly on a par with each other, it was an anomaly and it hasn’t lasted.  Sooner or later one of them is going to build a lead and the pressure on the other one to drop out will mount accordingly.  For the moment it looks to be advantage Obama, but there are a lot of contests to go.

No matter when it happens, at some point one of them is going to have to concede and the specifics of that concession are scaring a lot of ordinarily rational people.  For the starkest (and probably most widely read) example, look at the New York Times op-ed page from the last three days.  Starting with Frank Rich on Sunday, continuing through Paul Krugman on Monday and finishing with Bob Herbert yesterday there were three consecutive days of fretful op-ed columns, one each from the three heaviest liberals in the rotation.  The specifics of all three were different, but each was expressing the same fundamental fear: that the race between Obama and Clinton will somehow damage the eventual winner and perhaps clear a path for a Republican win in what should be a Democratic year.

Rich is worried that the Clinton machine would rather scuttle the ship than see Obama at the helm when it comes into port.  Krugman is worried that Obama’s Fedaykin will not support Hillary if she vanquishes their Maud’ Dib.  Herbert is worried about both, though he didn’t mix his metaphors like I just did.  I certainly understand the motivation behind those fears.  If the Reds manage to win in November it would be…bad.  For my part though, I’m going to disagree.

There is at least an anecdotal case for worry on both counts.  Team Clinton has never conceded defeat in anything and is known for its willingness to keep fighting until the last bullet.  On the other side, Obama is driven by the rabid support of people who took him seriously when he talked about changing everything and they might feel betrayed by any Clinton victory.  I strongly suspect that all of the internecine rancor will fade rapidly once one of them is sharing a stage with the Senator from Warizona though.  (”Warizona”, hmmm is that clever or not?  Probably not.)  Even writers like Rich, Krugman and Herbert, who decry their media brethren for treating politics as little more than sport, may be unprepared for the sometimes ugly displays that come from real political passion.  The boring (but polite) “who’s up, who’s down” storylines that posed as campaign coverage last year have given way to real fireworks and the sometimes untidy excesses that come when the great unwashed start paying attention and participating.

Clinton and Obama are fighting hard for the Democratic nomination, and with good cause; it is a sterling prize and worth the fighting for.  The level of excitement produced by both of the contending Democrats has been astounding.  All of it cannot be attributed to Bush fatigue and general Blue enthusiasm.  At least some of it is doubtless due to the fact that the campaigns have been directly engaging each other for more than a month.  If Hillary had simply romped through Iowa and New Hampshire, and none of the rest of the contests meant anything, would we be seeing all this record setting voter turnout?  If Obama had crushed her in New Hampshire and gone on to flick away John Edwards, would all those first time donors still be donating?  Not a chance.

I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that the last time the Democrats managed to take the White House from the Republicans it was after a long, and sometimes ugly, nominating campaign.  Eight years ago Al Gore wasn’t a populist hero; he was an establishment candidate who was handed the nomination with little resistance.  Four years ago John Kerry stepped into the media void created by the implosion of Howard Dean and was never seriously challenged.  A little bloodletting may just be a healthy thing; and if it takes a little longer than the Pooh-Bahs like, that also may be a healthy thing.

“I can’t tell you how excited Rod Stewart is about this millennium concert.  He’s gotten a little older but you’re gonna see how much he can still rock.” - Rod Stewart’s Manager

Barring a serious medical complication, and at his age it’s a real possibility, John McCain now has the Republican nomination sewn up.  Mitt Romney has left the building and Mike Huckabee would need an awful lot of help from his fictional deity to surprise everyone again.  Huckabee’s strong showing yesterday hopefully indicates that conservative displeasure with McCain is strong enough to withstand a couple of “Get behind McCain!” news cycles but it still looks safe for me to (happily) retire my “Go John Go!” tag.

On the other side of things, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are still vying for the Democratic nomination.  He crushed her yesterday, the closest she came was in Cajun country where she lost by a mere twenty-one points, and if those type of results continue for the next few weeks then Hillary is in serious trouble.  The Clinton campaign is more or less openly talking about losing everything until Texas and Ohio on 4 March, I guess we’ll see if the Giuliani strategy works better for them than it did for its namesake.

In short, McCain is all but assured the Red nomination and many conservatives are pissed off about it while Obama looks like he’s in for a very nice February.  It’s not black history month, it’s black, uh, present month, or whatever.  Handicapping the race, while fun, isn’t the main topic today.  What I want to do was add another pillar of support to the “Republicans are Doomed!” theory.

Speaking on a very general level, one thing in this heavily commented upon election that I haven’t seen commented on much is the difference of tone between the Red and Blue races.  The Republicans have had a downer primary while the Democrats have had a very happy one.

If you add up the issues the Reds are talking most about it amounts to “Things are bad now, but they’re going to be catastrophically worse if we lose!”  It has been, for lack of a better word, a very negative campaign.  We can’t afford to let Hillary in the White House, we can’t let Democrats be in charge of the various wars, we can’t this and we can’t that.  Bush’s tax cuts are the only thing holding up the economy and the Democrats want to repeal them!  Illegal immigrants (read: brown people) are going to rape your daughter!  But that’s nothing because all those terrorists we’re fighting in Iraq are going to kill us all!  The general tenor is just plain depressing.

On the other side you have the feel good nominating process of the Democrats.  Even before John Edwards took down his sign the overwhelmingly positive agenda has been remarkable.  We’re going to pass health care reform, we’re going to end the war, we’re going do something about global warming, etc etc etc.  Everyone likes patting each other on the back over the fact that the nominee isn’t going to be a white guy.  Obama’s sales pitch fits more comfortably into this than Clinton’s, but both of them are pretty upbeat.

In the general election either one of them is more focused than any Republican on the things that the electorate seems to care about most.  Iraq and the economy are the two big ones, obviously, but when you look at the second tier issues the Republicans seem to care most about illegal immigration and terrorism while the Democrats talk more about health care and global warming.  Here in 2008 more people care about the latter pair than the former.  The medical system in this country has deteriorated to the point that ordinary, working Americans are being squeezed, and global warming genuinely scares people.  Illegal immigration and terrorism, while indisputably bad, just don’t seem as pressing.

The priorities of the American people are prone to shifting, and Red scare tactics are never to be underestimated, but at the moment one side is talking about things that the people care about and the other is talking about things that they wished the people cared about.  Add that to the overwhelming popularity for ending the Iraq War and the Republicans just look out of touch.  Nominating a septuagenarian senator who bears more than a passing resemblance to Abe Simpson doesn’t help.  There is a lot of time left between now and November, but the Republicans seem to be operating as though it were still 2004 whereas the Democrats are happily living in 2008.

“Ripoff!” - Abe Simpson

“We paid for blood!” - Hans Moleman

Democracy is a strange thing isn’t it?  At its core it is utterly simple, every member of a group gets one vote and whichever position garners the most votes wins.  The end.  In practice, of course, it is a bit more complex.  Last night was a perfect example.  Popular votes, delegate counts, arcane rules, etcetera etcetera etcetera.  Who won?  Nobody knows!  Even declaring a winner is a political act of spin.

The voting yesterday, the overloading of the first party sanctioned Tuesday, was a direct result of the last few nominating contests being, for the most part, over before they began.  If you told political fans in December that neither contest would be settled on 5 February they wouldn’t have believed you.  Now the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Mitt Romney will all likely continue through this weekend and beyond.

The big losers in all of this are the states that voted yesterday.  Cramming themselves into a single day of voting was thought to increase the influence that they would have, even if it meant slicing the pie very thin.  Instead, especially on the Democratic side, their brief, heavily shared moment in the sun will barely be remembered two weeks from now.  The New York Times has a handy schedule of the primaries to come (Democratic, Republican) and there are a lot of states yet to go.

It will be interesting to watch what happens in four years when primary scheduling is again an issue.  One party will likely have an incumbent running so it won’t much matter for them, but the other party is going to have to take a long, hard look at the overloading of primaries on a single day.  Strictly from the perspective of state parties wanting attention from the candidates it sure looks like jamming everything in as early as possible was a mistake.  Is an overreaction in the other direction possible?  Sure it is.  Knee jerk reactions never go out of style.

For now though, we get to settle in and watch the campaigns slug it out.  A couple of weeks ago I was afraid that yesterday would settle things prematurely, just as the candidates and their surrogates were really beginning to lay into each other.  Now that we’ve cleared that hurdle it looks like campaign season will continue at least through the month of February (where there are quite a few contests in both parties).  This is exciting shit and it couldn’t be coming at a better time.  Football season is over (what a finish!) and the nation is hard up for entertainment.  The 4 March primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island and Vermont seem like the next big stopping point.  By then, we might be ready for it to be over.

Just how much does the Republican establishment hate John McCain?  Is Mitt Romney willing to keep writing himself checks?  Can Mike Huckabee become the anti-McCain candidate?  Will Barack Obama’s stunning rise continue now that it is no longer a two person sprint, but a two person marathon?  Can Hillary Clinton keep her coffers full?

Tune in next week for another exciting edition of Democracy Theater!

“Early reports indicate, and these are very preliminary, that one of the fighters is a giant lizard.” - Kent Brockman

This Tuesday half of the states united will, in one manner or another, indicate their preference for party presidential nominees.  It is the closest we’ll come to a national moment of political decision until November.  Various cable channels will cover it as such; reporters will be stationed from coast-to-coast, instanalysis will fill time between actual news, and many commercials will be shown.  The whole thing is dull, pointless and stupid and as a former, and now reformed, viewer I urge you not to watch.

Election night in 2000 I was very ill.  I had a fever and I’d been nauseous and vomiting all day.  I did manage to vote though and right afterward I went to bed.  From a little after eight that evening until after midnight, when it became clear that there would be no resolution to the Florida vote, I curled up in bed and flipped channels.  From the networks to the cable news channels and back again I sought to avoid commercials and find new information from any source.

One of the things I learned that night was that watching election coverage like that is not only pointless, it’s stressful and generally dull.  Trying to find things out eight seconds before anyone else, commiserating with friends about what some temporary piece of information means, it’s all a waste.  The votes are cast, the outcome has been determined and the only thing to do is wait to find out the details.  Trying to jump the gun, or getting excited to learn the information as soon as possible doesn’t help matters or alleviate any stress about the outcome.

We had a recent reminder of this in New Hampshire.  That entire day’s news coverage was a funeral for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, and then the votes actually came in and everyone got egg on their face.  By Tuesday evening there will be nothing intelligent left to say, no campaign tactics left to digest, no more sound bites to critique.  There are only results to wait for, and all that requires of you the home viewer is a little patience.

On Tuesday I’m not even going to look at a news broadcast.  I will simply go about my routine and, at my leisure, check a couple of websites for numerical totals.  I can provide plenty of half assed analysis all by myself and without the harping distraction of commercials and channel surfing.  I might, I dunno, read a book or something.  It will not affect the outcome and nothing will change; my evening will just be that much more pleasant.