Will Clinton Do What Reagan Did in 1976?

In the end, numbers prevailed and all the talk about a convention fight in Denver proved to be just that... talk. Hillary Rodham Clinton will suspend her campaign and endorse Senator Barack Obama on Saturday, which was her only possible choice after Democratic members of Congress urged her to leave the race and allow the party to coalesce around the nominee. Now, the problem is: what will Clinton do in the Fall?

I suspect that the rumors about her becoming Vice president are nonsense: if she is really serious in asking the n. 2 position on the ticket, Obama will be dead serious in refusing it. Not because of her sometimes vicious attacks during the primaries but because an Obama-Clinton ticket would not have credibility vis-à-vis the voters: it would give them the feeling that everything was simply a show and that, in the end, every nasty political fight can finish with tarallucci e vino (if you are not familiar with this Italian motto, send me an email, and I will explain). There are all chances that Obama will pick up someone with experience, and possibly a military background, to stand up to McCain when things will get tough after the conventions. 

The real issue, then, is whether Hillary will indeed campaign for Obama in the Fall, or not. There is one precedent: the 1976 long contest between Gerald Ford, the incumbent President who had entered the White House because of Richard Nixon's resignation after Watergate, and conservative rising star Ronald Reagan. Reagan fought to the bitter end and this solidified his name recognition, and his relationship with the party, opening the path to his easy nomination 1980.

In the campaign of 1976, however, he stayed home in California, and his presence at political events was perfunctory. Ford asked him to play an active role, at least in some swing states were he was popular, like Ohio and Mississippi, but Reagan declined.Of course, nobody can say what would have happened had Reagan campaigned vigorously, but the numbers are there: barely 11.500 ballots more in Ohio and 15.500 in Mississippi would have been enough to tilt these states to Ford, and create a majority for him in the Electoral College. Carter would still have had a plurality of the popular vote but Ford would have won 272 electoral votes and with that the White House (a scenario similar to the one of 2000, when Gore easily won the popular vote but Bush got more electoral votes).

So, the real question is: how hard will Clinton work in the Fall, to convince her supporters that a democratic victory in 2008 is indeed necessary? I suspect that 85% of them will vote for Obama anyway, but the traps on the road to victory in any American presidential election are more than land mines in a Cambodia uncleared field.

Obama and Clinton viewed in an equally positive light by American media

Washington D.C. - A new study was released Friday by the Project for Excellence in Journalism on the tone of the media coverage of the three candidates still running for the White House; John McCain, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The research, conducted by the Pew Research Center in partnership with the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University looked at how various mainstream media outlets have talked about the three Senators since the beginning of the year.
It appears, for example, that the accusations brought forward by the Clinton campaign that media coverage has been more accepting of Barack Obama than of the ex-first lady are not grounded in any data. In fact, the study found that the image of the two democratic candidates that has been portrayed by the media has been equally positive until March and then it has become increasingly negative toward Obama. The report says; "From January 1, just before the Iowa caucuses, through March 9, following the Texas and Ohio contests, the height of the primary season, the dominant personal narratives in the media about Obama and Clinton were almost identical in tone, and were both twice as positive as negative...The trajectory of the coverage, however, began to turn against Obama, and did so well before questions surfaced about his pastor Jeremiah Wright...What’s more, an additional analysis of more general campaign topics suggests the Obama narrative became even more negative later in March, April and May."
In general, both Obama and Clinton have been more successful than John McCain in projecting the image they chose. Obama is viewed as representing change and hope and Clinton is described as being experienced and ready to be president on day one, precisely the message their campaigns have been trying to get across. John McCain, instead, doesn't seem as much in control and the media coverage on him has focused significantly on the fact that he's not a true conservative, something that he's been trying to wipe off, so far unsuccessfully .

Angry Democratic White Men/3 - an Interview with Michael Katz

Michael B. Katz is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is considered one of America’s leading experts on the history of social welfare, poverty and inequality. Professor Katz spoke with Marco Polo Review of Books about the issue of racism and how it might affect Democratic candidate Barack Obama.

Marco Polo (MP): There has been much talking recently about Barack Obama’s problem with white working class voters. Do you think that this is true at the national level or are his difficulties with this particular constituency regionally-based?
Michael Katz (MK): My sense is that it may be a problem in general with white working class voters but I suspect that it is more extreme and regionally concentrated in some areas, such as rural areas and Southern states. Basically we are talking about those places with a history of slavery and confederation, where I think racism lingers, especially among less educated people.

MP: How much do you think these problems could affect the general elections and the race against John McCain? Is it something the Democratic Party should seriously worry about? And could it be an issue that might convince super-delegates to endorse Clinton against the results of the primaries?
MK: My suspicion is that if Obama wins the greater number of delegates, the majority of leaders and officials of the Democratic Party will move behind him and mobilize in those areas where he has been weak. In the cities this would be easier to do because there are more established Democratic machines and voters could be rallied more easily. As far as white working class voters that seem hostile to Obama, their influence in the general election will depend on the state where they are located, what percentage of the population they comprise and if they will turn out to vote. In the last analysis, these people will really have to ask themselves if they want to vote for a Republican, considering the state of things now, between the Iraq war, the economy, gas prices, and the housing crisis. I think it will be very hard for them to make such choice. Then there is the other side of the issue as well, or the disgruntled Republicans. Yesterday I read an interesting piece on The Nation which pointed out that in a number of primaries, Republicans chose to vote in the Democratic contest and over 70% of them cast a ballot for Obama.
So, I think these will be very complicated elections; on one hand there will be white working class Democrats that could go Republican. On the other, there could be those frustrated Rockefeller-type Republicans that might go Democratic.
And, we should consider that there might be a slight decline in white working class voters’ turnout, but other than that there will be a huge participation among African Americans and young people. Obama has this way of mobilizing people that is incredible.

MP: What kind of an African American would you say Barack Obama is? How black is he?
MK: It is not a question of how black he is; it is a question of how street he is. And he is not street. He is a highly educated, articulate, handsome, presentable American and, let’s put it this way, I think that most Americans that would be uncomfortable with Jesse Jackson would be comfortable with Obama.

MP: Considering his peculiar profile and personal history, do you think Barack Obama should be viewed as a symbol of real change in America, of the end of an era of segregation and discrimination? How much instead is he just an exception?

MK: I honestly think that his candidature is a momentous development because, it is true, he does have a white mother and an unusual upbringing, but he is cast in the mind of the public as an African American, that is how people look at him. The fact that an African American could very well be the next President is unprecedented; something that ten years ago I would not have imagined could happen in my lifetime. But it can only be an African American who has Obama’s characteristics, well spoken and highly educated. It could not be someone like Al Sharpton.

MP: Because of his mixed racial heritage, his international background and his degrees from Ivy League universities, would you say that there could be doubts about Barack Obama within the African-American community itself?

MK: There was some discussion of it earlier, about the fact that Obama wasn’t black enough. But then people have come around. The African-American population in general has a very mixed background, and the homogenous view that is normally cast is simplistic and racist. Obama falls within this group.

MP: In conclusion, what do you think will be the biggest challenges for Barack Obama in running for President of the US?
MK: I do share the worry of many people that he might be a target for assassination. This is true for Hillary Clinton too. I think every President is, but there are hardcore racist people and hardcore misogynist people. I don’t think that this should stop him from running or people from supporting him. But I hope his security is well taken care of. Just think about those doctors who perform abortion and how heavily they are targeted by groups of extremists.
Secondly, he will have to unite the Democratic Party. He has to win over the people that have been Hillary Clinton supporters and he has to make them enthusiastic and get them to work for him and to go vote. I think Clinton will come around and she will support him wholeheartedly.
In the end, the two elements that will decide the race are, on one hand, the attraction for Obama, which is very great. On the other, there is the repulsion for Bush. So the next thing to watch in this election is how successful John McCain will be in distancing himself from Bush. But Republicans have a terrible record right now.

John McCain's Decisive Handicap

Hillary Clinton is making her case to the superdelegates claiming that she would be "a stronger candidate," and cites recent poll in which McCain has a narrow lead over Obama.
The problem with such horserace polls, however, is that they are not very accurate predictors of the actual election results. Polls in the spring of 1988 showed Michael Dukakis with a comfortable lead over George H.W. Bush and polls in June of 1992 showed Bill Clinton running third behind both Bush and H. Ross Perot. So recent polls showing a close race between McCain and Obama may not tell us much about what to expect in November.
Instead of using polls, political scientists rely on measures of the national political climate because it can be measured long before the election and it has a powerful influence on the eventual results. As we wrote in several occasions, in 2008 all forecasts point to the Democrats.
Three indicators of the national political climate have accurately predicted the outcomes of presidential elections since the end of World War II: the incumbent president's approval rating at mid-year, the growth rate of the economy during the second quarter of the election year, and the length of time the president's party has held the White House.
The higher the president's approval rating and the stronger the growth rate of the economy, the more likely it is that the president's party will be victorious. However, if the president's party has controlled the White House for two terms or longer it is less likely to be successful. Time-for-change sentiment seems to increase after eight years regardless of the president's popularity or the state of the economy.
These three factors can be combined to produce an Electoral Barometer score that measures the overall national political climate. The formula for computing this score is simply the president's net approval rating (approval minus disapproval) in the Gallup Poll plus five times the annual growth rate of real GDP minus 25 if the president's party has held the White House for two terms or longer.

This would give a 2008 castastrophic forecast for the Republican party, based on President Bush's net approval rating in the most recent Gallup Poll (-39), the annual growth rate of the economy during the first quarter of 2008 (+0.6 percent), and the fact that the Republican Party has controlled the White House for the past eight years. The current Electoral Barometer reading would be a dismal -63.

This number translates into a decisive defeat for the Republican presidential candidate. The only election since World War II with a score in this range was 1980. In that election, a combination of economic troubles and personal unpopularity provoked the defeat of Jimmy Carter, the worst one for an incumbent president since Herbert Hoover in 1932. The second lowest score, -50, occurred in 1952. That was the last election in which neither the incumbent president, Democrat Harry Truman, nor the incumbent vice-president appeared on the ballot. Nevertheless, the candidate trying to succeed Truman, Democrat Adlai Stevenson, lost in a landslide to general Eisenhower.

It is possible that factors like deep-seated streams of racism against Barack Obama, and the split in the Democratic camp, would work at the margins, limiting the dimensions of the Republican Waterloo. The final result, however, should not be in doubt.

Angry Democratic White Men/2

What is important, in these comments by angry supporters of John Edwards, is the extent of their resentment, and their willingness to accept the rumors, half-truths, and complete fabrications spread during a presidential campaign. We must remember that these people certainly are part of the most active voters, not uninvolved citizens prone to swallow any lie that surfaces on the Internet. This is another comment posted on the ABC blog: “At the end of the day, the core preoccupation about our floundering Democracy lies in the issue of consistency and integrity. John Edwards knows that Obama is the ‘offspring’ of Chicago’s corrupt political machine, but he still supports him. John Edwards understands that Obama has personally funded, via his directorship in the Woodsfund, terrorist sympathizers (Khalidi and others) who claim that SUICIDE BOMBING is a legitimate method of resistance fighting (even if used against school children). John Edwards also knows that Obama is completely unprepared to become Commander in Chief, something to which he had continuously alluded to in multiple interviews, nevertheless, we now have him riding this faux pony all the way to the White House.”

Another participant takes issue with the perks of politicians: “I had heard on my local CBS radio station today that local US congressmen even charge the taxpayers for gasoline. So, on top of the best health care in the world, we pay the $4/gal gas for their SUVs. Yes, SUVs. Then they have the gall to lecture us about our polluting the air.”

Some readers try to defend Edwards’ endorsement of Obama: “I do not care how win the nommination!obama or clinton.democrat have to win,in november” but the majority vents its anger at his repudiation of Hillary Clinton: “John Edwards lies like a rug! I would not trust him anymore than I would Barack Obama or any other Democratic bully boys! Edward's funny timing endorcement for Sen Barack Obama amazes me, especially right after Hillary's landslide victory in West Virginia. GO-Go Sen. Hillary Clinton in '08....” and this: “John Edwards what a snake. Elizabeth [Edwards] must be really proud of your endorsement of Osama right now. I had thought better of you. Guess a lot of people were wrong about what you really stood for. Sad.”

And another one: “Does Edwards really believes that the American people are so stupid as to buy into his story that there was no deal cut to endorse Obama? He is just an opportunist who ran away from the North Carolina Senate reelection because he knew he would have never been reelected.”

The threat to jump ship in November is crystal clear: “Edwards has gone to being a man for the people to supporting elitists. You go figure. I am voting for McCain Well I think I am just not voting.”

There are some responses:”All of you so called "democrats" who insist that if Obama gets the nomination then you will vote for McCain in the fall. Well, you'll show them huh? Then we will have a 3rd term of Bush as if the country had not had enough already. WOW just because the nominee that some democrats wanted Hillary isn't going to get the nomination doesn't mean that you should switch parties. What are you accomplishing? If you vote out of anger and not on the issues then you are only hurting yourselves.”

Nevertheless, the split in the party is there and it is clearly dangerous in some swing States needed to create a majority in the electoral college: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan. While it is technically possible, for Obama, to get 270 electoral votes and win without Ohio (if he prevails in some western States like Nebraska, Montana, Colorado, Nevada and New Mexico) he definitely need Pennsylvania and Michigan, where many low-income white families do think along the lines we described above.

Angry Democratic White Men/1

A number of high-profile political figures like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Secretaries of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, governor of New York David Paterson have brought black politicians in the spotlight, and created the impression that the color of skin is no more a factor in the mind of voters. Unfortunately, this is wrong: most of these high-profile figures have been appointed, not elected, and it makes an enormous difference when someone must present himself to the judgment of citizens. The depth of resentment against “elitist” politicians, and the extent of hidden racism among white voters is apparent in the comments published by an ABC blog after John Edward’s endorsement of Obama.

Dozens, probably hundreds of Edward’s supporters rebelled against this choice, flatly ignoring the fact that Obama’ political positions are very close to those of their preferred candidate. Edward was at the far left of the political spectrum, but nevertheless he is a white Southerner, and this is what many of his fans had to say (I keep the original spelling for authenticity): “Obama is a superficial, arrogant individual who is dangerous. He said he is here to unite.. but he is here to destroy. A uniter doesn't go to the San Francisco elite fundraisers and talk behind America's back.”

Another one, referring to Obama and Edwards together on stage: “Actually both of them look quite effeminate. Maybe I would call them a lesbian couple??? No offense to the real lesbian intended.” The fact that both Edward and Obama are happily married with children didn’t prevent another angry voter from writing: “Maybe wants more $400 haircuts. is he gay?" Many were convinced that Obama paid the endorsement promising future appointments to Edwards: “No deal was cut? Yeah, I sure believe that. And to think Edwards used to be my guy.” Another one: Edwards is a traitor to the American working class that he teared up about. Political bull****. He is a traitor to West Virginia who chose who they believe will better represent them and help them. I cannot get over how out of touch these dems have become. Hello Edwards - you just betrayed the memory of your father.” And one more: He didn't endorse barack obama just for the sake of endorsing him. Like Bill richardson, edwards has an motive. Unfortunately for them, Barack Hussien Obama will never be president.”

Other contributors to the blog mocked the Democratic party: “Politics of Change! Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha. Politics of Change! Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha. Politics of Change! Ha,ha,ha,ha,ha. This is Obama's New Washington! Kennedy – Loser. Kerry – Loser. Richardson – Loser. Dean – Loser. Edwards – Loser.” (more).

How Will Obama Perform in November?

No matter what, Barack Obama has secured the nomination: he need only 63 more delegates to cross the required number of 2,025. However, the first Afroamerican candidate to the presidency nominated by a major party has many serious problems that the media is ignoring. While the conventional wisdom is that hate and racism disappeared in American politics, the fact that they are banned in polite discourse in Manhattan doesn’t mean that they are equally banned at the ballot box. 

The actual performance of Afroamerican politicians in elections is mixed at best. A number of them have been elected mayors (David Dinkins in New York, Harold Washington in Chicago, Andrew Young in Atlanta, Kurt Schmoke in Baltimore (MD), Harvey Gannt in Charlotte (SC), and many others). There is a number of successful representatives, whose dean is Charles Rangel, who has been in the House since 1971, taking over the Harlem’s seat of colourful Adam Clayton Powell. And, of course, there has been a handful of black senators: Obama himself had Carol Moseley Braun among his predecessor in Illinois, but she was a one-term senator, elected in 1992 and easily defeated in 1998. Gannt run twice, in 1990 and in 1996, against aging Republican Jesse Helms in South Carolina and he was defeated twice, favorable polls notwithstanding. Harold Ford was a young and dynamic politician, but he failed to win the Tennessee Senate seat in 2006.

This experience in various elections suggests that charismatic politicians of Afroamerican origin can win, but they some times underperform compared to the expectations in the polls. If a black candidate is credited of 53% of the vote 24 hours before the voting, his actual results may be between 48% and 51%. People were simply ashamed of saying pollsters they would NOT vote for him, inflating his numbers in the polls and depressing them in the actual results. Does this mean that Obama is a weak candidate? Not in the least, but he will need a mistake-free campaign because his margins will be smaller than those of a white candidate. This is clearly shown by the angry reactions of some Edward’s supporters to the announcement that he would endorse Obama (more later on this). We are strongly convinced, however, that race will a factor much less important this year, and that long-term demographic and political trends will propel Obama to victory in November.

A History of Women Running for President

Washington D.C. - Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is probably the most famous to date, and certainly the one who is closest to actually winning her party's nomination, but she's definitely not the first American woman to run for President of the United States.

Research from the National Women's History Museum shows that at least 35 women have tried before. Most remain unknown, and a few represented parties of dubious standing, including the Surprise Party and the Looking Back Party. Some of them, however, are worth mentioning.

It was Victoria Claflin Woodhull (in the photo) who first undertook the long, and yet to be completed, journey to a woman president. In 1890 she announced her intention of running by sending a letter to the New York Herald, despite being too young too qualify as a candidate. The elections were still two years away, by which point she would have been 34, and Ms. Woodhull used that time to travel across the country campaigning and raising awareness of women's issues. A colorful personality considered among the initiators of the suffragists movement, one must remember that Victoria Woodhull ran at a time when, as a woman, she didn't even have the right to vote. Stirring controversies everywhere she went, she was incarcerated at the time the elections took place, on charges of libel and obscenity.

In 1884 came the turn of Belva Lockwood, who ran for the Equal Rights Party, which not only advocated for extending all rights to women, but also had plans for the economy and foreign affairs.

The first credible female candidate was Margaret Chase Smith, who ran in 1964 for the Republican Party after having served in Congress for 32 years, the first woman to be elected to both the House and the Senate. She won 27 delegates at the convention, where she lost the nomination to conservative Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater.

Patsy Takemoto Mink was number four. An Hawaiian of Japanese descent whose father, despite being a U.S. citizen, had nonetheless been put under surveillance and interrogated in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Ms. Mink was the first non-white woman to appear on a presidential ballot when a group of liberal democrats asked her to run in the Oregon primaries in 1972.

Shirley Anita Chisholm was the first well-known African-American woman to run for President. A democrat, and the first African-American woman in Congress, she gave a shot to the White House during her second term as a Congresswoman, in 1972.

More recently Elizabeth Hanford Dole, wife of Kansas Senator Robert Dole, ran against George W. Bush and John McCain in the Republican primaries of 2000.

Finally, in 2003 Illinois Senator Carol Moseley-Braun announced her intention of taking part in the Democratic primaries. However, encountering difficulties in fund-raising, she dropped out before the January Iowa Caucus.
This year is Hillary Clinton's year, although numbers suggest that the United States might have to wait at least four more years before electing a woman president.

Another inconclusive primary night

Everything went as expected on yet another Tuesday night of primaries.
Hillary Clinton won easily in Kentucky with 65% of the votes (and 72% of the votes of white Americans). In her victory speech she pledged to continue on while thanking her supporters for their dedication. "I will never give up on you," Clinton told a cheering crowd in Louisville.
At the same time, Obama took Oregon and came one step closer to sealing the nomination. According to his campaign team, even just with the delegates that the Senator from Illinois will pick up in Kentucky despite the defeat (we must remember that delegates in the democratic primaries are apportioned proportionally to the percentage of popular vote a candidate wins), Obama amassed, as of tonight, more than half of the pledged delegates going to the convention. Speaking in Iowa, where Obama successfully kicked off the primary season in January, he said that the nomination is now "within reach."
Hillary Clinton can only hope that the superdelegates who have yet to endorse either of the candidates will choose to support her and, in doing so, will overturn the verdict carried by the pledged delegates.
In order to find a rationale that might convince the superdelegates to make this choice, the Clinton campaign is coming up with increasingly elaborate calculations that seemingly prove that the ex-first lady is actually ahead in the race.
It started with the popular vote, which according to Clinton, must include the ballots cast in Michigan and Florida despite there is no agreement yet on what to do with those two states. The most recent count, instead, has to do with the electoral votes, those that will determine the outcome of the general elections in November. Apparently Clinton has won in those states that offer more electorate votes, supposedly proving that she is a stronger candidate.The Clinton campaign keeps changing the definition of what victory is, how votes should be counted and which states matter the most, according to her showing.

George W. Bush's Fin de Règne

While Dubya travels the Middle East and gives nonsensical speeches to the Israeli Parliament, Congress has sent him a farm bill that includes a lot of money for food stamps amid rising grocery prices (and a boost in farm subsidies in order to create a veto-proof majority). The Senate passed the bill 81-15 Thursday, a day after the House approved it with 318 "yes" votes, that means enough votes to override a presidential veto in both houses of Congress. Bush had threatened to veto the $290 billion bill, saying with a straight face that it is fiscally irresponsible. What is remarkable is that this is the very first time in seven and a half years that a number of Republicans rebel against the White House.

"Republicans Must Stand for Something!", or Who Needs Friends When Enemies Work For You?

No less the engineer of a vision of politics based upon dirty tricks, Karl Rove, writes that "As Republican ranks declined, the number of independents and Democrats grew. Has the bottom been reached?". So, what we have been saying for months now has been vindicated by "Bush's Brain" himself: powerful currents in American politics do favor the Democrats in 2008, and panic is spreading in the GOP. 

Rove has his recipe for winning the Presidency (not even the Virgin of Guadalupe could make Republicans win back Congress, where a Democratic landslide is more or less inevitable) and the prescription would be: "Republicans Must Stand for Something!" This doesn't sound very original (even if the entire leadership of the ITALIAN Democratic party could benefit from the advice) and it skips a very basic point: "Will a majority of voters AGREE with the SOMETHING offered to them?"

The very issues advanced by Rove in his column seem to go precisely in the opposite direction: To tell Americans that they are winning in Iraq and that the economy is improving appears to be a message rejected by two thirds, or even three fourths, of the voters. If this is what the political guru of the Wall Street Journal has to say, Democrats should start making preparations for their victory party in November.

"The math is controlling. This race, I believe, is over”

After Hillary Clinton's victory in West Virginia, former Governor of Colorado Roy Romer, said that he endorsed Obama because "The math is controlling." And indeed it is so: the race is over, comments by Howard Wolfson, Clinton’s communications director, notwithstanding. Wolfson said Tuesday: “I think superdelegates who have been moving toward Barack Obama in the last week are going to wake up tomorrow and say, ‘I’m a little concerned about the fact that our nominee, presumptive nominee, can’t win West Virginia. I’m a little concerned that he can’t win Pennsylvania or Ohio, or Michigan, or Florida."

Well, Wolfson might be correct, but up to a point: Superdelegates are cold-blooded politicians and they know that a Superdelegates' coup d'état handing the nomination to Hillary would fracture the party right in the middle, with all young people and all African Americans (the two most loyal constituencies this year) simply walking out (and may even supporting an independent candidate). Not to mention the fact that Clinton should convince NINETY-ONE PERCENT of the Superdelegates still uncommitted today, to snatch the nomination.

The fact that this scenario is a fairy tale doesn't mean that the problem of working class male who tend to vote Republican doesn't exist, as we pointed out earlier this year in several posts. However, the electorate of the two parties strongly polarized in the last 8 years, and most Democratic voters, even unhappy with Obama, will come back to the fold in November. The real issue is not how many of them will defect, but in which states: Ohio, Colorado, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Nevada are states where a handful of ballots changing side can deliver the victory to either candidate. And prevailing in those swing states is crucial to winning an Electoral College majority.

The Importance of The Mobilization of Democratic Voters

Anyone who doesn't think Democratic voters are fired up for this year's election is not paying attention. On Tuesday, over 1.25 million Indianans voted for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary. This is 30% more of the total votes received in 2004 by presidential candidate John Kerry in the general election. The Democratic vote in the Indiana primary not only outstrips Kerry's total from the general-usually the vote in aprimary is about 50% of the vote in November-but it is closer to Bush's vote total in Indiana than it is to Kerry's. Bush received about 1.48 million votes in Indiana in 2004, 60% of the vote.

Indiana didn't vote for a Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and, looking to the number of votes in the general election, the last time a Democrat topped the one-million mark was in 1976. Jimmy Carter was nevertheless defeated by Gerald Ford. That means that 1.25 million votes indeed is a historic achievement.

The combined results of Obama and Clinton in Indiana confirm a trend that was already apparent in the first primaries: the exceptionally high turnout among Democratic voters, and the depressed turnout among Republican voters.This is enormously important because the main political trend in recent years has been the polarization of the electorate: about 90 percent of those identifying with a political party vin a given year do vote for that party's presidential candidate in November. In 2004, exit polls showed that John Kerry had won 89 percent of the Democratic vote, George W. Bush 93 percent of the Republican vote. 

In other words, there is a huge advantage for the party that is ahead in what political scientists call "party identification," simply because its pool of voters is larger. And what is the situation today? The Democratic advantage is now of 10 points, according to Rasmussen, one of the widest partisan gaps ever measured and it is clearly linked to the interest created by the primaries season.

Conclusion: even if the internecine war between Clinton and Obama will leave some scars in the party, the clear trend this year is toward a mobilization of Democratic voters that should propel the nominee over the top in November, whoever he or she is.

Obama, the Youngsters's Candidate

The race for the Democratic nomination can go on for some more days, or weeks, but the final result is no more in doubt. Barack Obama will be the nominee and his victory owes much to the mobilization of young people. But how many are they?

Obama has an overwhelming support among the 17-29 years-old, but this age group is smaller, and less inclined to vote than seniors (who are richer, more motivated by civic duty and less in trouble with the justice system). In 2004, for example, two over-60 citizens voted for every under-29 one, as it happened last Tuesday in North Carolina. In this state, 30% of voters in the Democratic primary were seniors, against 14% of juniors. In Indiana, the ratio was 25% to 17%, while in Pennsylvania it was an amazing 32% to 12%. That means that Obama may have a potent support, and thousand of volunteers working for him, but in the general election the youngsters as a group are far from being the decisive factor.

Clinton, The Candidate of Seniors

The brawl for the Democratic nomination may be about to stop: numbers leave no chance to Clinton of snatching the nomination. However, Obama may have several concerns to think about in the coming weeks (aside the fact that Hillary hasn't withdraw yet). One is his trouble in convincing the 65+, voters, who in Indiana preferred Clinton by a massive 71% to 29%. This pattern was already established in the first primaries and caucuses and was particularly apparent in Ohio, where Hillary crushed Obama in this age group by a whopping 46-point margin, and Tennessee, where she got 40 percentage points more than her opponent.
Obama still has an overwhelming support among the 18-29 years-old, but this age group is smaller, and less inclined to vote than seniors. In 2004, for example, two over-65 citizens voted for every under-29 one. That means that facing McCain (an appealing figure to seniors, at least because he is over-70 himself) Obama may have a potentially dangerous weakness in the general election. Seniors count for much in some key states like Florida and Ohio, that in 2000 and in 2004 went to George Bush, tilting the electoral college to Republicans.

Obama Two Steps Closer to The Nomination

In the end, Barack Obama remained barely 13,000 votes behind Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the hard-fought primary in Indiana, where the outcome was clear only after counting the very last vote. As Indiana has been a draw, and not the large vicotry Clinton needed, Obama is now much closer to the nomination: on Tuesday the Illinois senator won a commanding victory in the North Carolina primary, too. He has now enough momentum to widen his lead in pledged delegates, and new ammunition in seeking to persuade Democratic leaders to rally around his campaign.

Don't Forget About Congress...

Some interesting news about Congress. In the House District LA-06, centered around Baton Rouge (Louisiana), Don Cazayoux (D) defeated local newspaper publisher Woody Jenkins (R) in a special election to fill the seat vacated by the Republican Richard Baker, who resigned from the House to become a lobbyist. Cazayou got 49% of the vote to Jenkins' 46% in a race with major national implications: LA-06 is a heavily Republican district that has been in GOP's hands for 33 years. President Bush got 59% of the vote there in 2004.

Both parties spent like drunken sailors advertising there. The rationale was that in a year when deep currents of American politics favor the Democrats both campaigns needed to know how much a "safe" republican seat was, indeed safe. Therefore, NRCC nicknamed Don Cazayoux (a Cajun name) "Don Tax You" and claimed he is a "liberal," which he most certainly is not. At this point, contrary to the media establishment, the Republicans assume Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee and LA-06 was a field test of their November strategy to paint him as a big-government, high-tax, arugula-eating, out-of-touch, arrogant liberal. 

Unfortunately, it didn't work, even in a very conservative area. Today, every Republican in the House is going to be thinking "There but for the grace of God go I." If a well-known strongly conservative GOP candidate with 28 years experience in the state legislature can't win an open seat in a heavily Republican district that the GOP has held since 1975, what is going to happen in the many open seats and marginal Republican districts in November?

Obama Attacks Both Clinton and McCain on Gas Tax

While mainstream media are in a frenzy over Barack Obama's pastor, the candidate chose to speak forcefully about the one issue that may be paramount in the mind of voters: inflation, particularly at the gas pump. And he took issue with the farfetched proposal of Clinton and McCain about a "Gas Tax Holiday" during the Summer, discussed here.

Obama especially needs to focus again on the issues, because Rev. Wright's ramblings took a toll on his standing: for the first time in months, polls give Hillary Clinton a statistically insignificant but politically important advantage over him among Democratic voters.

Harvard: Millions of Americans "Without any visible means of support"

The Harvard Kennedy School of Government offers an interesting insight about poverty in the US. Excerpts of an interview with author Kathrin Edin on the results of 1996 welfare reform are here: "There are big winners and big losers. At about the same time we reformed the welfare system, we made work pay better than welfare by implementing the earned income tax credit (EITC). This credit ensures that if you are a low wage worker, especially a single mom with no other earner in the household, the government pays you at tax time; you don’t pay the government. Families are getting thousands of dollars that supplement their income when they file their taxes each spring.

The problem with this solution is that it’s based on the assumption that everyone can work full time, full year. Because of what’s happening in the economy, lots of people can’t sustain full time, full year work. Then there are sick kids and disabled relatives to care for, very low human capital, and other reasons people can’t maintain a full time participation in the labor market. So there are also big losers. Whereas full time, full year workers who used to be on welfare are now probably better off than they’ve been in a long time – largely because of the tax credit – those who aren’t able to sustain full time work are possibly worse off than they’ve ever been before. At any given time roughly a third of people who used to be on the welfare rolls are without any visible means of support. We know very little about how those people or their children are doing."

Populist Commercials and Oil Money

Hillary Clinton spent April 25, 2008, in Indiana, and gave a speech about economic issues in Bloomington. You can see a clip of it in the video below:

Clinton also broadcasted a populist commercial about the soaring prices of gasoline, an issue very important to Midwest voters. In this spot (see below) she calls for "suspending the gas tax this Summer." 

However, this is the same proposal offered by Senator McCain in a recent speech and is generally considered a gift to the oil companies (it's not clear whether the details of the two plans are identical). An examination of campaign contributions by individuals from the oil and gas industry by the Center for Responsive Politics reveals that McCain has been the largest recipient of their largesse and Clinton comes second. 

So far, individuals from the oil and gas industry have given McCain more than $404,000, while Clinton received $309,363 and Obama $222,309. In fact, nearly 70 percent of the industry’s donations in the 2008 White House race have gone to McCain and other Republicans, which is no surprise knowing that the Bush administration has been a figurehead for the oil industry during the last 7 years.

It's somehow bizarre, instead, that Clinton would attack Obama on this issue, when he is the least connected to oil interests of the three candidates.

The Day After

Pennsylvania spoke, and the two Democratic candidates are more or less in the situation of the two Civil War armies on the morning of July 4, 1863, at Gettysburg (which, by the way, was in Pennsylvania).

The question, today, is: "Does the never-ending battle for the democratic nomination alter the dynamics of this campaign?" It might, but the fundamentals remain on the Democratic side, whoever is the nominee (and Marco Polo remains strongly convinced that it will be Barack Obama). We think significant that at this low point of Democratic Party's internecine war, polls show Barack Obama with a statistically insignificant two-point advantage over John McCain, 47% to 45%. During last month, it was McCain leading Obama by similarly close margins: at this point the two candidates are tied in the preference of voters. In a match-up with Hillary Clinton, McCain maintains the advantage: yesterday, 47% of the vote, while Clinton would get 45% (all data coming from Rasmussen).

This almost perfect parity between Obama and McCain is apparent in the Electoral College, too, and this is what will really matter in November. So far, the race remains a toss-up: the Democrats lead in states with 200 Electoral Votes while the GOP has the advantage in states with 189 ones. When States that “lean” toward one of the two camps are added, the Democrats lead 260 to 240 (the magic number to enter the White House is 270).

All this means that John McCain, at the moment when Democrats are engaged in a dogfight, and mainstream media are romancing him, is not capable of obtaining a significant lead over Obama, and has only a modest advantage over Clinton. Why is that?

The only reasonable explanation is that McCain is the Republican standard bearer in a year when all the the strong currents of American politics favor the Democrats. The economic crisis and the social tragedy of million of people losing their home will be on the forefront of voters' concerns in November. The same can be said for the Iraq war, that vanished from the TV screen, but not from the mind of citizens: two-thirds of them still want the troops home ASAP.

Much will depend on the two Conventions, but in the Fall most Democratic voters will go back to the party candidate, no matter his or her name. Today, only 74% of Democratic say they would support Obama but American politics has been polarized for 30 years, and the two parties has never been so far apart as during George W. Bush's era. Three out of four citizens think that the Country is "on the wrong track." This trend will favor heavily the Democrats and it will matter a lot in November.

The DUEL Will Go On And On...

Big Trucks, Big Duel in this cartoon of the "St. Louis Post-Dispatch": the media are enthusiastic about the chance of a fight going all the way to the Convention in Denver, at the end of August. American voters seem more skeptical, and a bit tired. In any event, Obama still has a solid lead in the delegates' count: 1713 against 1586.

Zero Tolerance Comes To Italy

There has been much talk in Italy on the necessity of adopting a "Zero Tolerance" policy toward crime and illegal immigration, talk fueled by the results of general elections on April 13-14, and by a number of violent crimes, particularly against women.

It is striking to note that this fashion of politicians willing to show they are "tough" on crime arrives in Italy at the very moment when in the US many start to challenge the "broken-windows" theory of crime, which is the basis of the so-called Zero Tolerance criminal policy.

It is enough to go to a mainstream media website to find fresh news like this: "Innocent man free after 26 years in prison." And, of course, there are literally hundreds of cases of innocent people executed, or still in the Death Row.

But facts are never enough to have a theory abandoned, and so it is important to show that the theory that has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws is baseless. Although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years (it started in Newark, New Jersey, in the 1970s) it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of "law abiders" and "disorderly people" and of "order" and "disorder," which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that a particular society adopts.

How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? The problem is that it appears plausible, it offers "something" to show to citizens, and is highly symbolic: politicians can use it to build a "macho image" and this usually is good in competitive elections. Absent a more complex thinking, and serious research, the media and lobbies interested in a repressive policy easily prevail in pushing opportunistic politicians in this direction. The fact that it is a costly and ineffective policy is never seriously debated.

How ABC Set A Trap To Question Obama's Patriotism

Wednesday night there was the debate in Pennsylvania, considered an important moment before the democratic primary of April 22. Many observers remarked how silly were the questions asked by the two moderators (see, here and here, for example).

However, most pundits failed to note that the question by a member of the public on why Barack Obama doesn't usually wear a flag pin on his jacket was planted by ABC, which hosted the debate, and was in no way a "spontaneous" question surging from the heart of a citizen. What happened was that ABC tracked down Nash McCabe, the woman who asked "I want to know if you believe in the American flag" after she was quoted in a New York Times story about white voters in small-town Latrobe, Pa., being against Obama.

We know that because Joshua Micah Marshall's blog had this: "In this case, the producers put the producers' question into the mouth of a voter, because it made the question seem more authentic, as if people care in large numbers about the flag pin question. That is, the woman was used to legitimize the traditional media's focus on these frankly trivial and, yes, distracting issues."

It may well be that Gibson's and Stephanopoulos's unethical behavior was simply part of the traditional media's focus on trivial and distracting issues, but one might wonder if the long relationship between Stephanopoulos and the Clintons (he worked for Bill Clinton's campaign in 1992 and at the White House later) has really nothing to do with his obvious hostility toward Barack Obama and the plot to question his patriotism. 
In any event, the attack misfired: the latest Rasmussen Reports survey in the state shows Hillary Clinton with 47% of the vote and Barack Obama with 44%. This poll was conducted AFTER the nationally televised debate between the candidates. Last Monday, before the ABC' show, Clinton was leading Obama 50% to 41%.

Hillary Clinton, Religion and The White Working Class

Very often, innocent remarks by a candidate are constructed as "major gaffes," or even statements that are "deeply offensive" to a particular group, or to all American voters. This was the case with Obama's words last week in Los Angeles: "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years, and nothing has replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate, and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Quite unremarkable, to say the least: there are thousands of studies about the "bitterness" of white working class, and the libraries of Political Studies Departments overflow with books about religion, and its role in American Politics. Not so, if you are involved in a dogfight with an opponent who will spin your speech into an "attack" against religion, or at least, against "people of faith." This is precisely what Hillary Clinton did in this video, borrowing another page from Karl Rove's campaign textbook in order to accuse Obama of being an "elitist."

The fact that Barack Obama was a community organizer in South Side Chicago during the very years spent by Hillary Clinton on the board of Wal-Mart should say something about her cynicism, but apparently her determination to win, even at the cost of destroying her party, has no bounds. However, as the Cook Political Report observed, "For Clinton, the odds are the incident is too late to save her candidacy. But more [Obama's faux pas] would increase her chances of drawing enough support in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary to justify, or even guarantee, her continued run. There are likely to be more gaffes for each of the candidates as this campaign progresses, but in a race like this, each one is exceedingly costly and, cumulatively, can become fatal." The issue of Religion and American working class was the topic of an interesting piece by Timothy Noah in Slate magazine. We shall return to this soon, but first have a look at what we wrote on February 28 here.

Benedetto XVI, George W. Bush and How To Get Through the Week

I borrow here the beginning of an interesting piece by Christopher Hitchens in Slate magazine because it seems to have some relevance to the Italian situation, too. "The visit of his holiness the pope to the United States this week," writes Hitchens, "will be an occasion for all kinds of manifestation of deference and servility from politicians and from the press. There will also be the usual speculation about the growth of a specifically or distinctively American Catholicism [a kind of] of cafeteria Catholicism, by which the faithful pick and choose among the doctrines that do and do not appeal to them, has long been understood. It was Joseph Ratzinger's role, when he was the right-hand man and enforcer of the last pope, to recall the flock to a more traditional and orthodox version of the faith. The chief interest of this trip, at least for Roman Catholics, will be to see how explicitly he addresses himself to a flock that is too used to making up its own à la carte rules. Meanwhile, all this piety and ceremony is a bit of a bore and a waste of media space for the large majority of us who are still not Roman Catholics. How should we get through the week?"

Well, how should we get through the next FIVE YEARS, when deference and servility will be the mark of all political forces present in the Italian Parliament?

Sins, Bad Memory and The Future of The Country

David Brooks, a New York Times columnist I'm not particularly fond of, made a good point in his recent colum about our "Bad Memory Century." He wrote that "International relations experts will notice that great powers can be defined by their national forgetting styles. Americans forget their sins. Russians forget their weaknesses. The French forget that they’ve forgotten God."

While I have the feeling that the French survive very well even if they forgot that they’ve forgotten God, I wonder if a "Chosen People," (or ANY people, for that matter) can really thrive when they forget their sins. "Sins" means errors against humanity, compassion, and care for the common good: unfortunately, they have the bad habit of catching you sooner or later, often when you think that "forgetting" them was the functional equivalent of "erasing" them.

Americans, for example, did commit a number of sins in Vietnam, and sprayed vast areas with toxic products like Agent Orange, indifferent to the consequences. This caused the birth of thousand of handicapped children, born without arms, or severely brain-damaged. But it also provoked a number of deaths among American troops, many because of cancers that stroke years later, as it was the case with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt's son (as Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Zumwalt was responsible for the order of spraying Agent Orange over the Vietnamese jungle).

In the 1920s, American bankers and businessmen did commit a number of sins against common sense, and brought financial havoc to Wall Street, a disaster that was only repaired by Franklin Roosevelt's administration in the 1930s. As Eric Hobsbawm wrote, the XX Century ended early, in 1989; a few years later we entered the Bad Memory Century, with the Clinton administration promoting a financial deregulation that was later triumphantly completed by George W. Bush.

This, and nothing else, was the source of the "subprime mortgages" catastrophe: Bad Memory about bad financial practices.

Unfortunately, all Presidential candidates this year seem have the same trouble of their fellow citizens in overcoming Bad Memory and proposing to Americans the effort to recover the memory of past errors and sins.

Is John McCain A Strong Candidate?

Polls give today John McCain with a statistically insignificant one-point advantage over Barack Obama, 46% to 45%. Yesterday, it was Obama leading McCain by that same statistically insignificant margin (it is important to understand that 46-45 may mean any result between 49 Obama and 42 McCain, or 43 Obama v. 48 McCain). In a match-up with Hillary Clinton, McCain would obtain 48% of the vote while Clinton would get 42%.
This almost perfect parity between the two main candidates is reflected in the balance of power in the Electoral College, which is what really matters in November. There, the race remains a toss-up: Democrats lead in states with 190 Electoral Votes while the GOP has the advantage in states with 189. When States that “lean” toward one of the two camps are added, the Democrats lead 243 to 240 (the magic number to enter the White House is 270).
All this means that John McCain, at the moment when Democrats are engaged in a dogfight, and mainstream media are all sweetness toward the Senator from Arizona, is not capable of obtaining a significant lead over Obama, and has only a modest advantage over Clinton. What is the reason of this relative weakness?
The only explanation is that McCain is the Republican candidate in a year when all the the strong currents of American politics favor the Democrats. The economic crisis and the social tragedy of million of people losing their home will be on the forefront of voters' concerns in November. The same can be said for the Iraq war, that vanished from the TV screen, but not from the mind of citizens: two-thirds still want the troops home ASAP.
After the Convention, if Obama will adopt Bill Clinton's 1992 slogan "It's the Economy, stupid!" that will be enough for the Democrats to win.

Even The New York Times Realized That...

It's not by chance that the New York Times is nicknamed "The Gray Lady," giving the newspaper the reputation of being serious, well-mannered, and a bit boring. On 42° Street, it took a couple of weeks to recognize the obvious: the counting of Democratic delegates shows that Hillary Clinton has no real chance to snatch the nomination. "Trailing by more than 160 pledged delegates — those chosen in state primaries or caucuses — Mrs. Clinton has counted on Superdelegates to help her overtake Mr. Obama with a late surge before the party’s convention in August" wrote John Harwood yesterday. "The party’s rules for proportional allocation make it highly difficult for her to erase Mr. Obama’s pledged delegate lead, even if she sweeps the final 10 contests. (...) Yet Mrs. Clinton’s once formidable lead among Superdelegates who have announced preferences has shrunk to 34 by the Obama campaign count." Even if the pool of remaining uncommitted Superdelegates is around 330, many of them will support the candidate who prevailed in their home state, and that means an advantage to Obama, as we predicted on March 26, here. 

The coldness of the "Supers" is understandable: they are politicians in good standing, and can read the numbers of the popular vote so far (advantage: Obama). They can read the polls, too, and Gallup tells us today that "Barack Obama now leads Hillary Clinton by a statistically significant margin, 52% to 43%." Same verdict at Rasmussen's, which gives Obama over the 50-percent-mark for the fifth consecutive day: "Obama now attracts 51% of the vote while Clinton earns 41%. Obama leads by five points among Democrats and by a two-to-one margin among unaffiliated voters." In other words, while Hillary has zero chances of capturing the nomination, how long her campaign will go on is another matter. According to well-respected Cook Political Report, "Generally speaking, presidential candidates don't decide to drop out because they lose primaries and caucuses; they decide when their donors have stopped writing checks and their campaigns run out of money. Unless Clinton wins Pennsylvania, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina and a few other places by landslide margins, which is very unlikely, her donors will stop giving and her campaign will grind to a halt."

When Life Imitates Art... It's Not Pretty

John Grisham's latest novel, "The Appeal," was released on January 29, 2008, and is climbing fast the bestseller list. It tells the tale of a Supreme Court race in Mississippi, where a sitting justice is targeted for defeat by business interests. During the campaign, ads accuse the incumbent of being soft on crime and being too tough on business. The stakes are high: the election results could tip the balance of the court to the conservatives. On April 1, 2008, a group of business interests in Wisconsin was able to unseat Justice Louis Butler by launching a campaign of negative ads. A key ad accused Butler of having been the "deciding vote" in a Court decision that resulted "in the release of a sexual predator." But the offender was never released. Another ad from a conservative group, aired 526 times, accused Butler of overturning a murder conviction despite overwhelming evidence of guilt. Problem: the Court based its ruling on new DNA evidence that undercut the prosecution's case.

Looking at the facts, one has the feeling that Grisham's book was used as a campaign manual in Wisconsin: in "The Appeal," a direct-mail letter accused the incumbent of being responsible for setting a child molester free, while the molester escaped from a local jail and died long before the court campaign. In Wisconsin, as a watchdog group affiliated with the Annenberg School of Communication revealed here, "the sex offender remains in the same treatment facility where he was confined when his case went to the Supreme Court." The challenger supported by business interests, Mike Gableman, won 51% to 49%.

In most States, justices are elected, and the campaigns increasingly politicized. Who sits on the highest courts determines where billions of dollars go: to corporations and insurance companies or compensation for those who have been injured. No surprise that, when the stakes are so high, real-life conspirators get into action, even if that means taking a page from John Grisham.

Are intra-party feuds fatal in November?

Media pundits look restlessly for political events similar to the harshly contested Democratic race in this year's primaries; the 1976 elections (on the Republican side) and the 1980 competition between Edward Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, on the Democratic side, are often cited in the search for historical lessons that might be applied to the present.

However, former US Ambassador Dennis Kux has another example in mind: "I think that all these people are just not old enough to remember the primary that is most similar to the ongoing one; the Republican race of 1952," he told Valentina Pasquali at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars, one of the most respected think tanks in Washington DC.

In 1952, Senator Robert Taft, son of former President William Taft and leader of the Republican "Old Guard," tried to capture the GOP nomination against Dwight Eisenhower, the war hero that wasn't even affiliated with the party. The Republican bosses decided that, after 20 years of Roosevelt-Truman domination, they wanted to win the White House at any cost (what happened on the Democratic side was covered here).

Just like today, the incumbent was out of the race, since President Harry Truman had announced he would not seek a second full term (although an exception for him was included in the XXII Constitutional amendment). Just like it might happen this year, the race between Eisenhower and Taft went all the way to the convention and was only decided by delegate-count. Moreover, just like in 2008, a fight over the standing of some delegations happened in 1952, when accusations of rigging in the primaries in Texas and Georgia heated up the convention and gave rise to a litigation over the seating of delegates.

"So many observers keep repeating that the clash between Obama and Clinton will end up damaging the party in November by creating divisions among the democratic voters," Ambassador Kux told Valentina Pasquali. "I really don't agree."

In 1952, despite the prolonged battle inside the party, Dwight Eisenhower went on to take the White House in a landslide, with an 11% victory margin over his Democratic opponent Adlai Stevenson II.

Clinton goes to Jay Leno's show to defuse issue of truthfulness

As we reported earlier this week, Clinton was attacked on the key issue of her truthfulness because of misleading statements made during a visit at George Washington University. Talking about a trip to Bosnia in 1996, Hillary had said that her plane landed "under sniper fire." Quite embarrassing, when footage of the event broadcasted by the networks revealed that there was no fire, and that she was welcomed by a red carpet and a young girl presenting her flowers. Satirical videos promptly appeared on You Tube (see this, for example).

The Senator from New York's skilled communication staff chose to cut short clumsy explanations, and sent her to Jay Leno's show, where she opened with a well-crafted one-liner: "I was worried I wasn't going to [arrive on time], I was pinned down by sniper fire." Leno's interruption, "Really!" made the audience laugh, she "admitted" her exaggerations, proved to be capable of self-irony and now the Clinton's campaign hopes the issue will fade. The (very serious) issues of the role of late-night shows in the American political process were first discussed in an excellent Salon article by Michael Scherer on Stephen Colbert two years ago, and now by  Russell L. Peterson's new book "Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into a Joke," below.

For those who thought the crisis was over...

US employers shed 80,000 jobs in March, in the latest sign that the US economy may be falling into recession, announced the BBC, quoting US Labor Department figures. The decline was the third consecutive monthly drop, and worse than market expectations of a 60,000 reduction.The jobless rate rose to 5.1% in March, the highest level since September 2005, and a rise from February's 4.8%. Federal Reserve boss Ben Bernanke warned earlier this week that the US economy faced the risk of recession. While the Labor Department said March's job losses were spread across the economy, the biggest cuts came in the construction sector, badly hit by the free fall in houses' prices.

In fact, the US housing downturn shows no sign of slowing: US house prices fell at an annual rate of 11.4% in January, according to the latest monthly Standard & Poor's/Case-Schiller index, the biggest decline in 21 years. This latest snapshot of the slump in the US property market was confirmed by the main US estate agents body, which said that prices fell 8.2% in February. 

Indianapolis, April 4, 1968

On April 4, 1968, forty years ago, Robert F. Kennedy was scheduled to give a campaign speech in Indianapolis, when news of the assassination of Martin Luther King reached him. Rejecting the advice of many advisors, Kennedy continued toward the ghetto playground where he was to give his speech, undeterred by a police warning that they could not provide him with protection if things got out of control. This video features the original sound of Bob Kennedy's remarks disclosing the death of Martin Luther King to an Afro-american crowd.

A VIDEO THAT WILL HAUNT HILLARY FOR A LONG TIME

In a single week, this ironic video posted by "Barely Political" (the nickname of "I Got a Crush on Obama" producer) collected 1.6 million hits on You Tube. Quite damaging for Clinton's reputation.

There would be hell in the party for a long time/5

Even if she is still ahead in Pennsylvania, it appears that Hillary Clinton, facing an uphill battle in the contest to collect enough delegates in the next primaries, is staking her chances to win the nomination on the fight to seat the Florida and Michigan delegations at the convention. Delegate from both States were disqualified because the local party organizations violated DNC rules related to the national schedule of primary elections. Hillary did not campaign there, but her name was the only one on the ballot, and therefore she would add some 300 delegates to the final count, if Michigan and Florida delegations were seated.

“I have no intention of stopping until we finish what we started and until we see what happens in the next ten contests and until we resolve Florida and Michigan,” she told the Washington Post. “And if we don't resolve it, we'll resolve it at the convention — that's what Credentials committees are for.”

It is doubtful that the Credentials committee, where Obama will have more members than Clinton, and where a majority of the 25 appointees by DNC Chairman Howard Dean will side with Obama, could accept Clinton's demand but she could require to vote out a minority report, meaning that both Democratic candidates could have their positions voted on by all seated convention delegates. The prospect of a convention that begins with a contentious vote on a “minority” or “majority” report is “the nightmare scenario," according to many Democratic party insiders. Whoever the candidate, a nomination obtained by a 51-49 margin would mean hell in the party for a long time, and the slimmest chance of winning in November. Such a split might tilt the balance of the election to John McCain (see previous posts 1 to 4, below). A different opinion, by former ambassador Dennis Kux, can be found in this post in From the Field.

WHAT A PRESIDENT SHOULD KNOW

Washington DC - "It would have been difficult four years ago to schedule a meeting with the President to discuss with him the fact that there were too many people in this country getting houses," says Marc Summerlin in response to a question on the crash of the housing market at the book launch of What a President Should Know, which he co-wrote with Lawrence B. Lindsey. "In retrospect this would have made perfect sense."
Marc Summerlin served as Deputy Director of the National Economic Council for President George W. Bush, while Lindsey was Director of the NEC. They both now work for the Lindsey Group, the economic advisory firm based in Washington DC that they co-founded.
Their book,  presented at the Council on Foreign Relations on Monday, offers an insider's look at the Oval Office: Through a review of the history of the office of the Presidency, the authors portray the constraints under which the Executive makes decisions. Summerlin and Lindsey also highlight the difficulties, even for the closest advisers, to have regular visitations with the President. With many competing issues that at all times require urgently the attention of the President, some necessarily end up to the sideline, often those that have longer-term effects.
The history of the architecture of the Oval Office itself stands as a symbol of how access to the President has been restricted through the decades.
The idea of the Oval Office was first conceived under Teddy Roosevelt and was finally built at the beginning of the Presidency of William Taft in 1909, in the shape of an oval precisely because it was the one that allowed for the largest number of doors to be added. Teddy Roosevelt wanted as many people as possible to enjoy direct, walk-in access to him.
Under the first "Imperial Presidency," as Summerlin described Franklin Roosevelt's three-term government of the United States, the West Wing - where the Executive meets - was moved and expanded, and the Oval Office was relocated to a side of the building with only one door opening onto it. "Such change was followed by the creation of the role of the Chief of Staff", said Summerlin at the Council on Foreign Relations, "that from then on strictly regulated access to the President," and with that the flow of information that made its way all the way up to the top.
Today, White House advisers have to fight among themselves to be able to see the President and documents containing important information must be signed by tens of people in order to make it to the desk of the Commander-in-Chief.
The most important advice that Summerlin, and Lindsey, would give the future President is to "truly reinforce those people that are advising him/her honestly, because it is hard to find such people."