Biden versus Palin: The SNL parody

You've seen the real thing. Now watch the parody:

The Biden-Palin debate

Herewith video of the 2008 vice-presidential debate:

Primary colors

The Census Bureau has already divided America into regions and divisions. Might these boundaries help the parties organize — and rotate — regional primaries?

Now that primary season is over, it's time to draw and quarter the political rules that make a mockery of America's system for selecting each major party's presidential nominee. Herewith four rules that should change before the 2012 primary:

Caucuses must die. What a hideous way to choose candidates. All-day commitments. No privacy in voting. No absentee balloting. Rabid partisans are far more likely to attend than normal voters, especially those with families and jobs. Eliminate caucuses; rely exclusively on primaries.	So must superdelegates. Pledged delegates to the convention are democratic. Superdelegates are not. Either let people vote, or dispense with the pretense. I prefer democracy; it's a great American tradition. Fire the superdelegates and have nothing but pledged delegates.
Play primary roulette. It's ludicrous to let the same two states, Iowa and New Hampshire, set the table and eliminate weaker candidates every presidential cycle. We can sort states by region and let the regions take turns going first. And let's time primaries sensibly. There's no reason to devote six weeks to one state, and then rush to four others in the next week.	Share fairly, but not stupidly. It has become clear that neither winner-take-all nor proportional representation is a good way to allocate delegates. How about proportional representation for the lion's share of delegates in any state (75 percent?), plus a winner-take-all bonus awarding the remaining delegates to the winner of the state as a whole?

A Hillary Clinton campaign montage

Primary season is over, and Hillary Clinton didn't win. Even though she didn't win (enough) delegates or the Democratic nomination, she did make history and win the grudging admiration of many friends and foes, especially down the stretch. Herewith a gallery of images drawn from two New York Times slide shows, Clinton Cross-Country and Clinton's Bid Comes to a Close.

William Butler Yeats To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing (1916) Now all the truth is out, Be secret and take defeat From any brazen throat, For how can you compete, Being honour bred . . . ? Bred to a harder thing Than Triumph, turn away And like a laughing string Whereon mad fingers play Amid a place of stone, Be secret and exult, Because of all things known That is most difficult.
Photos: First row: Citizen Hillary. Hillary Clinton stands before a giant American flag. Second row — Left: Heir apparent. Will Chelsea extend the Clinton dynasty? (original photo). Right: Crowd pleaser. The adoring masses press Hillary after her June 7 exit. Third row — Left: Working-class heroine. Hillary found her voice and her core constituency, a bit too late. Right: Every woman's right to shoes. Hillary leaves big shoes to fill. Fourth row: Exit Hillary. The National Building Museum wasn't the party Hillary wanted, but she liked the company.

Obama versus Clinton, county by county

Herewith an intriguing county-by-county look at the 2008 Democratic presidential primary:



Barack Obama's counties are in purple; Hillary Clinton's, in green.

The comparison with the county-by-county results of the 2004 presidential election is also interesting:



The 2004 map follows the color coding that has become familiar since the 2000 presidential election: Democratic counties (Kerry) in blue, Republican counties (Bush) in red.

The similarities between these maps jump out almost immediately, even to the casual eye.

Barack Obama's strength, by and large, lay in the counties that John Kerry carried in 2004, while Hillary Clinton tended to carry counties that favored George W. Bush. There are exceptions, especially (1) in states where delegates were awarded on the basis of caucuses rather than primaries, a process that heavily favored Obama; and (2) in states voting immediately after Super Tuesday, which contests Clinton notoriously failed to anticipate. States that fit both these categories skewed heavily in favor of Obama; this effect is especially pronounced in the interior West and Alaska.

But the overall trend is pronounced. What does it say about the general election? Will Obama's stronger appeal within Democratic strongholds translate into greater enthusiasm and turnout in those areas? Or would the Democratic Party have been better served by nominating Hillary Clinton, whose claim to superior strength in battleground states is buttressed by these maps?

Ah, such a fine parlor game, which might have translated into real results for Hillary Clinton had the Senator and her staff learned what the Obama campaign team evidently understood:

1. Delegates, not popular votes or "battlegrounds," decide the nomination.


2. In a party that awards delegates by proportional representation rather than winner-take-all, it makes sense to contest primaries and especially caucuses in seemingly remote, delegate-poor states.


3. A nomination season that is (a) based on proportional representation and (b) being contested by two closely matched candidates is almost guaranteed to last beyond Super Tuesday.


4. Given the relatively low cap imposed by federal campaign finance rules, it is easier to raise money from a larger pool of small donors than from a smaller pool of wealthy donors.


5. It's even easier to raise money from the masses when you have a cool website and campaign staffers who know about ringtones, media player skins, social networking sites, and viral videos.

A campaign season for the ages

Victor

Vanquished

Barack Obama's triumph over Hillary Clinton for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination will be the subject of intense popular and academic scrutiny for years to come. What blogs can do is to capture the heat of the moment and — variable coding skills permitting — to deliver multimedia, bit by byte, to a voracious online audience.

1. In his own words, how Barack Obama won

Via Katharine Q. Seelye of The Caucus, I've learned about and am pleased to present this remarkable interview ( .mp3 file) of Barack Obama by Karen Tumulty of Time magazine's Swampland blog.

Karen Tumulty interviews Barack Obama  (June 5, 2008)

2. A video post-mortem of Hillary Clinton's campaign

Via Washington Post video:



3. Written analyses

Multimedia hasn't fully displaced the written word. Herewith a pair of matched posts from the Washington Post's The Fix blog, one on what went wrong for Hillary Clinton and one on what went right for Barack Obama. Plus this overview of the Obama campaign's successful strategy.

Too cruel anywhere

As the 2008 presidential primaries wind to a close, Hillary Clinton invokes the assassination of Robert Kennedy as a reason not to end her campaign. In response to suggestions from reporters and Barack Obama's campaign that she should quit the race, Senator Clinton replied: "[H]istorically, that makes no sense. . . . We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California."

In fairness, Senator Clinton was referring to the historical fact that primary seasons have stretched into June. She had just described Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, which also reached June and the California primary that proved so fateful for Robert Kennedy.

Nevertheless, Anne Kornblut of The Washington Post described Clinton's "choice of words" as "surprising," especially in the context of "a campaign in which voters have voiced concerns about the safety of the first African American front-runner in history" and in which "Clinton has already faced harsh criticism for allegedly exacerbating racial divisions."

Senator Clinton later clarified her statement:

Earlier today I was discussing the Democratic primary history and in the course of that discussion mentioned the campaigns that both my husband and Senator Kennedy waged in California in June 1992 and 1968 and I was referencing those to make the point that we have had nomination primary contests that go into June. That's a historic fact. The Kennedys have been much on my mind the last days because of Senator Kennedy and I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation, and particularly for the Kennedy family was in any way offensive.

John Singer Sargent, Ellen Terry as Lady Macbeth (1889)

Yes, this has been a campaign of many verbal missteps. From Hillary Clinton's appeal to "hard-working Americans, white Americans" to Barack Obama's irresistible attraction to the nickname, "Sweetie," it has been a long walk through a tight verbal minefield. And this is to say nothing of words such as bitter and cling. Perhaps the rhetoric of this campaign is so bitter precisely because so little of substance separates the candidates.

This latest episode came straight from Shakespeare's Macbeth (act II, scene 3). Senator Clinton, having been caught in her unfortunate invocation of Robert Kennedy's assassination, protests: "Woe, alas! / What, in our house?" To which the only proper response also comes from Macbeth:

Too cruel anywhere.

Sugar, sugar

Memorandum   Fellow members of the Barack Obama campaign, we're about to seal the deal. We just scored endorsements from NARAL and John Edwards. One little matter does warrant our attention: In addition to bitter and cling, please remind Senator Obama to drop the word sweetie from his vocabulary: Our candidate is the smoothest orator in the recent history of American politics. Hillary Clinton is usually the one who misspeaks. We're giving bloggers and newspapers too much ammunition. Especially when this is the second time he's called a woman sweetie on the campaign trail. Striking sweetie from our candidate's vocabulary is an admittedly modest measure, but this is linguistic change we can believe in.

Just do it: Obama's victory lap in Eugene, Orgeon

Above: a brilliant piece of political photography by Bruce Ely of the Associated Press, published in connection with the Washington Post's coverage of Barack Obama's campaign stop in Eugene, Oregon.

Hillary's last great hope

From Hillary Clinton's explosive interview staking claim to a "broader base" among "hard-working Americans, white Americans":

West Virginia and Kentucky are the next battleground for swing, working-class voters. These are the people you have to win if you're a Democrat in sufficient numbers to actually win the election. Everybody knows that. And I think it's important that I won this group decisively in Texas, and Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and even North Carolina. We've got to appeal to those voters if we're going to win in November. . . .

[T]here was just an AP article posted that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how . . . whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me. And in independents I was running even with him and doing even better with Democratic-leaning independents. I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on.

Herewith two additional images. Their relevance to this post is left as an exercise for the reader. If you remain befuddled, roll your mouse over each image, or click through:

A campaign picture worth a thousand words

The above image is what Fox News used to illustrate Hillary Clinton's announcement that she had challenged Barack Obama to a Lincoln-Douglas debate. A tip of the stove-top hat to The Faculty Lounge, Feminist Law Professors, and Bitch Ph.D..

And in the interest of preventing that image from becoming too strongly associated with the real Lincoln-Douglas debates, the ones that took place 150 years ago and involved a Democratic Senator from Illinois who would go on to win his party's nomination for President, I offer this image from 1858:

Pyrrhus of Epirus, campaign manager

Obama, Osama, and one hot kitchen Alternate video source

New York Times editorial, The Low Road to Victory (April 23, 2008) Ferdinand Bol, Fabritius and Pyrrhus (1656). Read more about Pyrrhus of Epirus. The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it. . . . On the eve of this crucial primary, [Senator Hillary Rodham] Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned. If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.” . . . Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of this campaign. He is increasingly rising to Mrs. Clinton’s bait, undercutting his own claims that he is offering a higher more inclusive form of politics. When she criticized his comments about “bitter” voters, Mr. Obama mocked her as an Annie Oakley wannabe. All that does is remind Americans who are on the fence about his relative youth and inexperience.

Annie Oakley

Immoderate thoughts about the Clinton-Obama debate

Watch it again. Read the transcript. It's impossible to miss what 10 million viewers noticed: ABC News' moderators, Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, along with the national news media as a whole, were the real losers of this week's debate between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton:

[V]iewers of all political persuasions were affronted by the moderators’ failure to ask about the mortgage crisis, health care, the environment, torture, education, China policy, the pending G.I. bill to aid veterans, or the war we’re losing in Afghanistan. Those minutes were devoted not just to recycling the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Bosnian sniper fire and another lame question about a possible “dream ticket” but to the unseemly number of intrusive commercials and network promos that prompted the jeering at the end. The trashiest ads often bumped directly into an ABC announcer’s periodic recitations of quotations from the Constitution. Such defacing of American values is to be expected, I guess, from a network whose debate moderators refuse to wear flag pins.

Kudos to Frank Rich of the New York Times for this succinct evaluation of the disastrous debate. For some comic relief, read Obsidian Wings' parody.

Update, April 20, 2008

As reported by the Washington Post:

[I]n Crown Point, [Indiana,] a town 25 miles from Gary, the New York senator downed a shot of Crown Royal whiskey, had a beer and chomped down a slice of cheese pizza, as her aides rushed to fill her request for another slice, with pepperoni. The crowd at Bronko's restaurant cheered as [Hillary] Clinton clinked her glass against fellow drinkers', while at the same time the restaurant's manager told a man who brought his grandchildren to the event he needed to take them out of the room.

Comedy, tragedy, or farce? You decide.

Bad science, shrewd politics?

It’s indisputable that autism is on the rise among children. The question is, What’s causing it? And we go back and forth, and there’s strong evidence that indicates that it’s got to do with a preservative in vaccines. — Senator John McCain

And with that pronouncement, Senator John McCain touched one of the most politically controversial questions in modern medicine. He's right on the increase in diagnoses of autism. He's wrong on the alleged link between thimerosal and autism:

Several large-scale studies have found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism, and medical groups including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Institute of Medicine and the American Academy of Pediatrics have publicly stated as much. In January, California reported an increase in autism cases, despite the removal of thimerosal from most vaccines.

In February, an international team of researchers, analyzing blood samples from vaccinated children, found that blood levels of ethyl mercury “fell rapidly and had largely returned to baseline levels by Day 11 after vaccination.” Those levels fell much more rapidly, for instance, than levels of the mercury people absorb by eating fish — suggesting that the injected thimerosal is less likely to build up in the blood, the researchers concluded.

But because the parents who fervently believe that the government and vaccine provenders have somehow conspired to cripple their children trust none of the science, Senator McCain's comment on autism arguably represented shrewd politics.

This is not the first time that the Republican presidential campaign has encountered a politically contentious scientific issue. At a May 2007 debate, three candidates — Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee, and Tom Tancredo — indicated that they did not believe in evolution:

The May 2007 debate	Mike Huckabee explains further

To his credit, Senator McCain did answer a simple yes when that question first arose.

Evolution denial has deep consequences for environmental policy. I'll go further: no person who denies the overwhelming scientific case for evolution has any business being President. As I write this, the last of the deniers in the Republican field is being eliminated — by Senator McCain, who has shown in an arguably less contentious context that he too can and will deny science when doing so confers a putative political advantage.

God save the United States.

Campaign 2008: Dueling "3 a.m." commercials

Courtesy of the New York Times, the Jurisdynamics Network is pleased to present the dueling "3 a.m." commercials being aired by the Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama campaigns. We embed; you decide:

Hillary Clinton's ad	Barack Obama's ad