Shadow Campaign

New Gallup Poll Shows HRC's Lead Shrinking (Courtesy of Andy Brown)

Gallup: Hillary's National Lead Over Obama Down To Six Points
By Eric Kleefeld - January 30, 2008, 1:17PM
The new Gallup poll shows the national Democratic race might be really tightening — Hillary's lead is down to the single digits. Here are the numbers, compared to their last poll from two days ago:

Clinton 42% (-2)
Obama 36% (+3)
Edwards 12% (-2)
Only a week ago, Hillary was up by 16 points.

Edwards' Graceful Exit

Timing is everything, but location counts, too.  JE will end his campaign at 1 PM today where it began--in New Orleans' Ninth ward.  He will undoubtedly keep the focus on poverty and inequity in America and will almost certainly not make any endorsements that might detract from that message.  At least not today.  If it is true and Teddy Kennedy prevailed upon him to drop out before Thursday's debate and the super Tuesday contests, then that would certainly presage an Obama endorsement some time in the near future.  But what is more intriguing to me is what will happen to Edwards' congressional endorsements--yesterday, Arizona Dem Raul Grijalva came over, perhaps because he was tipped off--and there are still some key Texans (Charlie Gonzalez and Eddie Bernice Johnson), most members of the NC delegation, and possibly Bart Stupak who could be enormously helpful to Obama.

Even short of an official endorsement, there is the matter of resources, consultants, and donor lists, and of course ground troops, who might be expected to gravitate to the remaining insurgent in the race.  And then there is Trippi and his loyalists.  You gotta believe Trippi was an Obama guy from Day One and was just running out clock with Edwards until he coudl make his move.  I have only watched him from afar, but I know that he is one of the most principled guys in a generally unprincipled field.  He is also a scrappy and unabashed idealist used to long odds and improbable candidacies.  Unlike Edwards, this a guy made for this fight and I suppose that the conversation with Axelrod is already underway.  How Edwards' brain trust--egos and ids and all-- can be coolly integrated into the Obama operation will be a huge test for the candidate and one measure of his ability to manage a sprawling bureaucracy and ease the inevitable friction between big personalities that always dogs national campaigns.  Much more to come on this... 

I Was Against the Florida Primary Before I Was For It

Pope Theodore

Now that he has issued his encyclical on the Democratic race, will he take an active role in the campaign?  More to the point, will he go to California?  Imagine Kennedy headlining an Obama town hall in downtown LA on immigration reform.  Could the stars be aligned any more perfectly for this "anchor baby", this son of a foreign-born father whose quintessentially American story may land him in the White House?  Obama's narrative is itself an eloquent response to those who would hound immigrants back to their native lands and close the gates behind them.  What's needed is a sure-footed and graceful pivot--this part of his story needs to be told and re-told, but especially in Spanish, so that Obama's campaign is not misinterpreted as another extension of zero-sum tribal politics so prevalent in LA. "I understand what is to be a stranger in a strange land.  My father was a stranger here.  As a boy, I lived in an unfamiliar place with customs that were new to me.  And I have always carried that with me--to be from a place but not entirely of a place..."

So Teddy and Obama...the venerable Kennedy brand wedded to a start-up with a great upside potential.  If Maria Shriver also could speak her mind and lend more of her family's DNA to the movement, that would be the trifecta.  In any case, how could cousin Teddy come to town without at least a visit or a joint appearance?  A tantalizing possibility for Obama, who needs Schwarzenegger independents and crossover votes to overcome HRC's built-in advantages in the state.  More to come on this.

The Fire this Time

"Jesse Jackson won South Carolina in '84 and '88. Jackson ran a good campaign.  And Obama ran a good campaign here."

--Bill Clinton in Columbia, SC today in response to a question about Obama's statement that it "took two people to beat him." Jackson had not been mentioned.

This much I know--Bill Clinton is all id and vicarious ambition, and even his most innocuous comments are today laced with broken glass and razor blades.  Clinton is referring to Jackson's two historic victories back when the state held caucuses, not a primary.  And Clinton's objective was not to commemorate Jackson's success but to belittle Obama's and marginalize his campaign.  In fact, in 1988, in his best showing in the state, Jackson only won between 5 - 10% of the white vote, far short of the kind of numbers he needed to call his base a "rainbow coalition".  That improbable mosaic of progressives, African-Americans, and blue collar whites that he sought to assemble never emerged.  As it turns out, Jackson was twenty years too early.   

Exit polling from today's SC primary reveals that Jackson's unlikely coalition of two decades ago may be crystallizing around the candidacy of Barack Obama, with some important differences.  For Obama's campaign, the single most significant cleavage today's primary demonstrated wasn't racial nor class or gender-based, but generational. An astounding 52% of "non-black" (largely white) voters ages 18 - 29 who pulled a lever in today's primary supported Obama--more than twice the percentage (21%) who voted for the only white male still in the race.  Obama lost to Edwards in ever other "non-black" age category, but still ended up with about 25% of the total white vote--2.5 to 5 times the level of Jackson's percentage from '88.  Overall, an average of 66% of voters 18 - 39 of all races chose Obama over his two rivals.  And this in a primary which brought out tens of thousands of new voters and in which over a half million went to the polls.  Obama won women, won men, and, in an encouraging sign for the general, won churchgoers--overhwhelmingly.   

The fears of white backlash over the outpouring of black support for Obama were simply unfounded.  Many whites also found Obama a sympathetic figure in light of Clinton's (Bill's) attacks on him, so the exit polling suggests.  A party elder I know and admire who is neither black nor white once told me that a putative "race traitor" is more threatening to a southern white voter than even a black candidate with a shot at winning.  This is why he believed that Bill and Hillary might hit a wall once the primaries moved south. 

Now I don't think Bill's a "race traitor" or a "race partisan" and I'm even a little embarassed to dignify such a freighted and archaic term with this much attention.  My friend may be giving the Clinton's too much undeserved credit for loyalty to what I have always presumed was their base.  If anything, the last two weeks have demonstrated the transcience and purely utilitarian nature of the coalitions the Clinton's have assembled in the past.  They jettison old friends whose votes they are unlikely to secure this time around and speak in code to groups once thought of as hostile to their interests.  Perhaps the last two weeks in SC have been one extended "Sista Souljah moment" for Bill and Hil.  Like Obama, they may have in fact succeeded in bringing new voices into their coalition--a far lower percentage of Clinton's SC primary voters thought America "is ready for a black president", than Obama's primary voters. 

But what should be most worrisome for the Clinton's is not the shifting sand beneath their coalitions nor the new embrace from some voters who are presumably hostile to black aspirations; what should put the fear of Jesus in Bill and Hil is their near irrelevance to so many young people of all backgrounds.  And what should embolden the rest of us to believe again is the utter indifference to race with which these 20 and 30 somethings seem to exercise their franchise--something Jesse Jackson could only dream of in 1988.  Twenty years later, that's bad news for Mr. and Mrs. Clinton and any other Dems who want to replicate their "Southern strategy" in the future, but a most heartening development for our nation.

 

A Message for DW

Trust the man, trust the message, and trust the voters to shovel through the BS.  The news cycle had already shifted its focus back to Bill Clinton by mid-afternoon and the Rezko story had once again petered out.  WJC is becoming a huge distraction for HRC and he is always one inflammatory remark away from overshadowing her.  And more importantly, voters in key states are getting a taste of what four more years of the Clinton Travelling Circus would feel like if HRC is elected--he always vying for attention, voters (and perhaps foreign leaders) never quite knowing who is really pulling the strings, and his appetites and sense of grievance always pulling him off message.  If he has been abandoned by her and left to get out the vote in SC--a fool's errand, since she has no chance--and even his base is tuning him out, then we can surmise that HRC left him there to limit the damage he can do in the more important Feb. 5th states.  It might be that HRC has seen the writing on the wall and it clearly says, "It's the change, stupid."  You can't be a change candidate when your principal surrogate is a tired and petulant former President, with neither the grace to stay above the fray nor the sense to see that his approach will fragment the party and hand the White House to the GOP for another term.

Daschle, Kerry, and the other Democratic Party

Maybe it's a guy thing.  Maybe it's a white guy thing.  But some of the adults in the Democratic Party are beginning to find their own voices and confront the Clintons over their demonstrably false attacks on BHO.  Kerry's e-mail this afternoon to the several million names on his list and Daschle's announcement earlier today of a "Truth Squad" to debunk false allegations about Obama reveals some deep fault lines in the party that are at once surprising and refreshing.  We always knew Kerry and the Clinton's had their issues, but when a grey lion like Pat Leahy goes public with his endorsement, you've really got to assume that 8 years of Clintonism took its toll on the party and the fear of a replay of 1994's GOP revolution still resonates.  Claire McCaskill has raised the spectre of vast down-ticket erosion in red states if HRC is the nominee, erasing any gains we have made since the mid-terms.  Others clearly have been sharpening this axe since the health care debacle when even Dem legislators were shut out of discussions with the administration.  What BHO really needs is a Barbara Boxer to speak up, bringing an outspoken woman and an indisputable progressive to condemn these attacks and blunt the implict message that the interests of women and those of African-Americans cannot and do not coincide or intersect.  This kind of messaging from Mark Penn & Co. will destroy the party's chances of regaining the White House for a generation. 

Night of the Long Knives

"Oh, No She Di-Int!", my wife shouted when HRC pelted BHO with the "slum landlord" Tony Rezko slur (what ever happened to more regal and summary "slumlord"?  Is that term of art so passe or does HRC in fact have contributors whose business cards actually read "Slumlord"?  And besides, it wasn't clear if she was knocking slums or landlords in that thrust).  But none of attacks tonight were more startling than her assertion that "You (BHO) never take responsibility for any vote..."  So here we are in SC, where close to 60% of primary voters will in all likelihood be African-American, and HRC's telling a black man he never takes responsibility for something.  That's code for white voters--another black man who won't take responsibility.  That's HRC's dog whistle.  It's only overheard by the intended recipients in Missouri, Colorado, New Jersey, and rarefied suburbs in Tsunami Tuesday states.  So I think she conceded SC tonight to Obama but at the same time was speaking to white voters (and some Latinos), and more particularly, white women voters, in the Feb. 5th contests.  What woman at the end of her rope hasn't at some point wanted to tell off their boyfriend, son, lover, Commander-in-Chief husband with same line?  "You never take responsibility, Bill..."  She is right, this is intensely personal. 

Let that simmer a minute and then stir in the element of race and you get a truly combustible accusation.  "You never take responsibility..."  For the babies you make.  For the jobs you've been fired from.  For your addictions.  For the hurt you have caused your family/community/co-workers.  Check the box.  And the irony is that Obama, alone among the Dem candidates, speaks candidly and often about the essential role that personal responsibilty plays in strengthening communities and ensuring that well-meaning policies have the desired effect.  Mark Penn's hidden hand undoubtedly at work here.  I bet he even focus-grouped that line before she used it.  So it sounds to me like HRC didn't leave her all race cards in Vegas, but palmed a few on the way out of town.  She's just laid one down again, and as the Super Tuesday stakes continue to rise, you can expect more of the same in the days ahead. 

Leaving Las Vegas

Look Obama-philes, don't be crestfallen. At the end of the day (actually, by the early to middle of the evening) he in fact had pocketed one more delegate to the convention than HRC because of Nevada's bizarre precinct by precinct winner-take-all rules.  Yes, we have work to do with Latinos, women over 40, and the elderly (clearly, we've lost Chita Rivera--a three-fer for HRC--if these demographic verities hold true in NY primary), but importantly, black voters were energized and flocked to him while rural voters in northern Nevada emerged as a key bloc for his campaign and not John Edwards'.  Think about that--a coalition of rural whites, ranchers, farmers, and largely urban blacks probably accounted for his delegate margin.   When was the last time a coalition like got a Dem to the White House?  1932? 

Anyway, back to business of the moment--we won the young, the hyper-educated, and the independents again, but nobody wins big state primaries that way and as Feb. 5th approaches, we can see how the campaign was using Nevada as the incubator for its California strategy and messaging.  There was nothing accidental about BHO's characterization of Reagan as a "change agent" in his Reno Gazette interview; nor was it a slip of the tongue to call the GOP "the party of ideas" for the last 15 years.  California has open primaries; Reagan is still hugely popular even among many Dems; and western voters tend to be less ideologically-driven than those of us anchored to the eastern seaboard. The Clinton's are certainly adored in certain sections of LA--it feels like their second home--and drama was always Bill's first love.  But the feel in Cali today is post-partisan--it is Arnie's state, not Barbra's--and that vaunted west coast progressivism has been coopted by a nominally GOP governor armed with high approvals and a 21st century platform of conservation, alternative energy, and fiscal responsibility.  That sounds to me like fertile terrain for the quintessential candidate of this new century--one who seeks to move his party and country beyond the endless and unresolved arguments of the past.  And that candidate, decidedly, is not HRC.   

Chins up.  South Carolina will be sweet sweet retribution.

Huck and Me, PM edition

which is to say that there is nothing in the DNA of most evangelicals that compels them to consistently pull the lever for the GOP.  Scratch the suface of an evangelical's geneology and you'll find FDR Dems, dustbowl socialists, small farmers with a soft spot for Henry A. Wallace, small business people suspicious of Wall Street and the plutocrats.  The bricks and mortar or clapboard of their churches may be exactly the same as it was when Fala scampered on the White House lawn, but that old time religion has long since been harnessed to an agenda scrubbed clean of the Gospels' redistributionist zeal.    That is starting to change and Huckabee is a small but encouraging sign for us.  Don't support his candidacy, support his message--I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper.  And don't fear evangelicals.  I will crawl out on a thin green limb (more like a marshmellow roasting stick) here and state that gay marriage and abortion are sunsetting as the sine qua non issues for many.  Sometimes a cause exhausts itself and its adherents move on.  A menu of causes now motivates evangelicals:  prison reform, AIDS in Africa, education in the third world, poverty, and the environment.  While we may disagree with their motivations and methodologies in some cases, there is room for common ground here.  Who on the left doesn't want a more compassionate penal system in this country?  Prison ministries are huge and a great cause for evangelicals today and they are at the forefront of improving conditions in state lock-ups in the south and west.  And who among us would oppose a more aggressive and targeted foreign aid approach to sub-Saharan Africa?  Here's common ground and a compelling target of opportunity for a particular presidential candidate with roots in that beleaguered region of the world, and a lexicon drawn in part from the book these folks hold so dear.