Tethered Swimming

It took longer than everyone expected, but now we officially have our title fight contenders.  In the Red corner we have John McCain.  In the Blue corner we have Barack Obama.  They are both men and they are both United States Senators, other than that they have very little in common and five short months from now one of them will be elected President of the United States.  The history and context of their respective primary wins cannot yet be written because we do not know what will happen in November.  As such, we are mostly left with questions but it seems like a good idea to get some ideas down now while the events are still fresh.

Evolution or Aberration? - At this close vantage point the Blue primary seems like it will be mainly remembered because it came down to a black man versus a white woman instead of the usual monochromatic y-chromo cluster fuck.  Four or eight years from now, which isn’t that much time when you get right down to it, we’ll be right back at this though.  Will this year’s contest be the start of something new, or will this year be seen as a strange one?  It’s not like the Democratic Party is never going to nominate a white guy again, the question is, has the playing field been permanently expanded or not?  If Obama wins does that open the door even more, and if he loses does is slam shut for another couple of decades?

Wither Nixonland? - I’m just getting into Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland; what I’ve read has been excellent.  The central point (so far at least) is one alluded to by Robert Caro in his Lyndon Johnson books, made explicit by Paul Krugman here (the Larry Bartels PDF Krugman links to is a devastating read) and, I’m sure, advanced by many others: that the new American middle class which arose after World War II was deliberately made fearful (of blacks, Communists, hippies, etcetera) by Republican political operatives as a way to smash the liberal consensus that held sway during much of the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s.  One of the things that struck me about the 2008 Republican primary was the fact that, with the exception of Ron Paul, every candidate up there was still committed to the concept of Nixonland.  Watching clips from and reading transcripts of some of those Republican debates was really funny.  They were up on stage competing with each other to see who could most effectively terrorize whites with the idea that people different from them are coming to take their shit and rape their women.  If McCain wins in November the politics of 50%+1 polarization will have been validated one more time.  If he loses (coupled with likely further losses in Congress) will it mark the expiration of the politics of the late 60s and 70s?  If elected, Obama would be the first truly post-Vietnam president, imagine that.

Clinton, Bill; Clinton, Hillary; Last of the Mohicans? - There never were much in the way of policy distinctions between Obama and Hillary Clinton.  The general consensus is that he was stronger on Iraq and she had a better medical plan but given the unknowns either of them would face as President it was always silly to harp over the differences; both pledged to end the war and both pledged to create universal health care.  It was their campaign styles, and what those foretold about their governing styles, that separated them.

Clinton, as we all well know by now, is a fighter, a tooth-and-nail, praise-the-Lord-and-pass-the-ammunition fighter.  So much so that up until Wednesday evening she still had a lot of people worried that even with all the bullets fired and her decks awash in blood she might still give the order for ramming speed.  Obama, by contrast, is the new man of the people, or perhaps he’s the man of the new people.  He is running a campaign that lacks the bitterness of the previous decade(s) for the simple reason that he is too young to have participated in them.

Politics has always been and will always be a vicious kill or be killed game where rules and niceties are used as part of the arsenal rather than as impartial boundaries, but the style of fighting perfected by the Clintons has run its course.  Hillary and Bill, who seemed even more out of touch than her, were practicing nineties politics one election too late.  By the standards of 1992, 1996, 2000 and 2004 her initial advantages would’ve proved irresistible.  Instead the skinny kid with the funny name came out running an aughts campaign and blindsided her.  It is no longer about winning news cycles, coming to play on pundit teevee and locking down big donors.  Of course, if Obama loses the general, maybe it is.  Speaking of donors . . .

Everything Takes Longer Than You Think It Will - I went to John McCain’s website during his 2000 run.  I had read an article about how he was getting cash, not much but some, from on-line donations and how it was vital to his combat against the Bush money machine.  I didn’t make a donation, at the time I had made one (1) online purchase in my life, but I wanted to check it out.  On the day the Iraq War started, three years of experience with Amazon.com after having gone to McCain’s website, I dropped $50 on Howard Dean without blinking.  These days Barack Obama doesn’t even need my money.

McCain-Feingold was once colloquially referred to as “The Democratic Party Suicide Bill”.  The Democrats paid for everything with big donors and bundled checks.  It was easier, and vastly more efficient, to get a bunch of rich liberals in a room and serve them dinner in exchange for thousands of dollars than it was to solicit tiny amounts of money from vast numbers of people.  You needed a pretty hefty average donation just to pay the costs of the fundraising.  But there is safety in numbers and the technology to become rich one $25 donation at a time is now widespread and effective.  It took longer than the technovangelists predicted, but now it’s happened and it’s only going to accelerate.

Sexism Exists, but N Always Equals 1 - Serious political scientists have a hard time studying presidential elections because there isn’t enough data on which to test a hypothesis.  There is only one relevant data set every four years so it’s basically impossible to control for variables (if you take several elections together you’re adding in decades of other changes to the country), this is known as N=1.  The question on a lot of minds now is: did sexism lose Hillary Clinton the nomination?  Or, perhaps, how much did sexism affect her chances?

You’d need to be blind to miss a lot of the misogynist crap flung Hillary’s way (Judith Warner had a nice rundown Friday) but there are still a lot of perfectly good non-sexist reasons for opposing her candidacy.  There’s also the fact that for most of 2007 virtually everyone with access to a keyboard or a microphone was willing to proclaim her the winner almost by default.  Sexism wasn’t a silent issue then but it didn’t seem as pertinent because she was seen as winning.  (The same will apply to Obama.  If he loses in November the hand wringing over race will be tremendous.)

You can say that sexism cost Hillary Clinton the Democratic nomination; you can say that her gender was vital to her getting as close as she did; or you can say that it was irrelevant, but no matter what your opinion it is just that, an opinion.  We just don’t have many other examples to use as controls.  You can cite the fact that we don’t have many examples as evidence of continued male dominance, but in the realm of presidential politics N still equals 1.  We’ll just never know.

And that’s it for the primaries sports fans.  They were highly but the field is now down to two and elections are won in September and October, not June and July.  So while the pace and intensity of the coverage will increase over the summer most of it is going to be utterly meaningless.  Up through the conventions political reportage (in print, on-line, and on radio and television) will be filled with speculation about vice-presidential picks, the daily press release war, in-depth articles about get out the vote plans, fundraising, and the numbers behind the polls.  Almost without exception it will be a waste of time and effort for both the people creating it and the people consuming it.  Barring a truly major scandal or development (video of Obama in a dashiki dancing to Parliament’s Chocolate City, McCain having a stroke/heart attack/erection lasting more than four hours) there will be very little of real importance said.  So enjoy the weather and remember: America, fuck yeah!