Republicans Don’t Love Their Children

Filed under: Politics — one May 15, 2008 @ 12:48 pm

Yesterday there was a flurry of outrage on Digg, across the internet and even from people I respect like Keith Olbermann about President Bush “sacrificing” golf for the Iraq war. All of you should be ashamed.

Take Keith Olbermann for example: conservatives will criticize him as a blatant liberal but the basic facts are that even when he takes sides he is far more fair and balanced in his actual reporting than anyone on the network that uses that euphemism as their slogan. Sean Hannity & co. actually continue to insist that Climate Change (aka Global Warming) doesn’t exist and is a myth perpetrated by a vast left-wing conspiracy that hates capitalism (and I am guessing supports communism? It’s the new Red Scare! Like the old one, but now with 95% more imaginary!)

But when Olbermann goes off on a tirade (part1, part2) which is mostly on-target, the factually important pieces of his message (all the things Bush actually did do horribly wrong) are largely drowned out for many Americans because the basis for that tirade is so ridiculous. Bush was asked “What’s the doomsday scenario” if we pull out of Iraq early. Bush’s answer: A terrorist attack. What’s the problem with this statement that has everybody up in arms? Bush believes Iraq is an important front in the war on terror. I completely disagree, as does Mr. Olbermann but the problem is that Mr. Olbermann frames Bush’s answer to a “doomsday scenario” question as Bush saying “The election of a Democratic President could ‘eventually lead to another attack on the United States’”

That’s a complete and utter misrepresentation of what Bush said, and I’m telling you that as a former Bush supporter who came to realize what a monster that man is and how badly he and his policies need to be removed from power — as someone who has called for the impeachment of both Bush and his undead Vice-President, you do a great disservice to the important facts within your tirade by including, in fact starting off with, a blatantly disingenuous representation of the facts. It turns off everyone outside of your base audience and the remainder of your message is lost on deaf ears.

The same is true of the golf remark. Bush was specifically asked why he doesn’t play golf anymore and his answer was that he didn’t want some mother who’s son had just been killed in Iraq to see the President on TV playing golf, that he felt it would be insulting to those families and send the wrong message. Olbermann, Diggers and apparently half the internet decided to misrepresent that as Bush claiming he had made some grand sacrifice.

If the question was, “How has the Iraq war affected you personally” and his answer was, “I can’t play golf anymore” then I would be happy to jump on board the bandwagon of outraged people who will point to this remark as proof of how despicably detached this man is from the war he’s created, but the question was, “You haven’t been golfing in recent years, is that related to Iraq?”  With a lead-in like that exactly what answer would you prefer the man give? Is he supposed to make something up on the spot about how he’d love to be out there every week but he hurt his wrist?

This is exactly the kind of factual misrepresentation the people on the left always accuse (usually correctly) the people on the right of doing, and when moderates who were leaning left see that kind of behavior they tend to back off and rethink their position because they’re afraid maybe they’ve been listening to left-wing fanatics who try to trick people into supporting their views by spreading lies.

Bottom line: When you make things out to be more than they are, you lose credibility — and that’s the last thing the people on the left need because it could end up costing this country dearly in November.

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Why couldn’t Hillary win Louisiana & Missouri?

Filed under: Politics — one May 13, 2008 @ 9:55 pm
 
The latest argument to come from the Clinton camp to explain why Hillary still thinks she should be the Democratic Party's nominee is that she is the only one who can win the big swing states that have picked the President for the last however-many elections. This is partly because she's losing to Sen. Obama in States-won, Pledged Delegates, Superdelegates, and the popular vote but it's also because Sen. Obama has won a number of swing states like Colorado and Wisconsin — which are equally important in a strategic sense, but didn't happen to coincidentally swing the way of the winner every time.
 
So apparently the new measure, and the only one that we are to believe matters — aside from white voters who didn't go to college (according to Sen. Clinton) –  are the states that are not only so-called "swing states" but also had the coincidence of voting for the candidate that happened to win. Well, even on that count she can't claim exclusivity. There are six states that have a history of "voting with the winner" for the past 10 or more elections: Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Tennessee and West Virginia. Of them, Sen. Obama was the winner in Missouri and won by a wide margin in Louisiana.
 
That brings me to my question: Why couldn't Hillary beat Obama in Louisiana? We keep hearing so much about "Why couldn't Sen. Obama win white working class voters?" or whatever metric the Clinton camp is imagining to be the all-important barometer in this campaign. Since the new metric is "States that pick the President" then I'd have to ask Hillary why she couldn't beat Obama in  2 of these 6 states.
 
For certain, Sen. Clinton would appear to have a 4 to 2 advantage in this narrow arena, but the ultimate point is that she is losing in every other metric, of course there are going to be metrics where she is winning, but the best she can do is claim the election depends entirely on these 6 states, and by her own measure she can't even win all 6 of them.
 
Of course, I'm not counting on the probability that Sen. Clinton would respond by coming up with some clever explanation as to why Missouri and Louisiana don't count, but really isn't that the point? They've already dismissed the importance of the black vote by implying that they're only voting for Obama because he's black, as if that makes the votes count less. Hillary doesn't get nearly as much of the women's vote as Barack gets of the African American vote, but that's been dismissed.
 
Caucuses (which have gone largely for Obama) have been dismissed by Clinton as un-democratic, yet Hillary has said repeatedly that the Superdelegates (who are even more un-democratic) should be the deciding factor in this contest and should not base their votes on the democratic votes of their constituencies but instead base it on the extremely undemocratic method of guessing who has a better chance of beating McCain in November.
 
To bring this hypocrisy home, the latest polls show that Clinton can't even carry half of the swing-states that supposedly favor her. Kentucky and Tennessee are expected to go for McCain in November. This seeming-contradiction is easily explained by the fact that none of these primary results are reliable indicators for the general election which basically means there's no possible way she can reasonably claim winning in one state or another makes her more electable. But she does anyway.
 
Obama didn't lose to John McCain in those states, he lost to Hillary Clinton — and many of those voters will cross over and vote for him if it's him vs. McCain. Similarly, Hillary did not beat John McCain in the states she won, she beat Barack Obama. Many of Obama's supporters will cross over for her too, but it won't matter if the Democrats in a given state are in the clear minority, such as in Kentucky and Tennessee. Not even Sen. Clinton's beloved Michigan is expected to go Democratic in the fall, despite how important she insists it is in this primary process.
 
On the other hand, current polling shows Obama could deliver both Colorado and Virginia for the Democrats, important states that open up new paths to a November victory that are not open to Sen. Clinton. In fact, SurveyUSA's electoral maps overlayed with their polls suggests that Sen. Obama would beat McCain more easily, with more electoral votes than Sen. Clinton.
 
Ultimately Sen. Clinton is simply blowing smoke. In the end, most of the people who voted for her will support Obama in November, despite her attempts to make it seem (and perhaps even attempts to make it actually) otherwise. Against McCain both candidates both similarly, and both of them have clear electoral paths to victory in November, but Sen. Obama has won nearly twice as many states as Sen. Clinton, he has a strong lead in both pledged delegates and the popular vote, and is even leading now in declared superdelegates. Sen. Clinton has no reasonable argument, in fact has nothing but increasingly bizarre and cherry-picked metrics to point to as she continues to insist that she is the stronger candidate.
 
In the end, the national polls show that this country prefers either candidate to McCain by similar margins and shows that either candidate can beat McCain in the electoral college, but the Democratic primaries clearly show that between Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton Democrats prefer Obama by a clear margin.
 
By all means, allow Hillary to play this out until all the primaries have taken place and the situation with Michigan and Florida is resolved to the satisfaction of both states, but in the end Sen. Clinton will still have absolutely no claim on the nomination because she's simply too far behind in pledged delegates (without MI and FL she needs 94% of all remaining to overtake Obama. With those states decided the way she wants them to be she still needs nearly 80% of all remaining delegates) and her argument that she is more electable is based on the imaginary-fact that the states that voted for her are more important than states that voted Obama, and the complete fantasy that those primary results will have any bearing at all on the election in November — and that's if nearly all remaining superdelegates, given a good reason, are even willing to overturn the decision of the pledged delegates.

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Stop Whining about Michigan and Florida

Filed under: Politics — one May 11, 2008 @ 9:59 am
 
Seriously, stop it. Why am I still seeing articles like this one from Time Magazine that likens the Michigan/Florida situation to the 2000 Florida recount. Why are people still talking about how Michigan and Florida's primaries are a controversial issue that's casting a pall over the Democratic Primary and angering a lot of voters?
 
The reality is that in the scenario most favorable to Hillary Clinton that would ever possibly be agreed upon by the two states (and other Democrats not affiliated with either candidate) would give Sen. Clinton a 66 point gain over Sen. Obama, who is currently leading her by 168 delegates at the time of this writing (2 days ahead of West Virginia).
 
So even the most Clinton-favorable resolution to the Michigan/Florida issue will still leave her trailing by 102 delegates, with only 217 more pledged delegates available in the remaining 6 contests. That means she'll need to beat him 159 to 58 in the remaining contests — that's 73% to 27%, an average that will be even more impossible considering Obama is expected to beat her in half of the remaining contests, so she would have to either open up a 50% lead in those states out of the blue or else win the states favoring her by 90% or more.
 
As one observer puts it, Under Clinton's Rules Obama Still Wins. The Clinton camp (of course) disagrees with this assessment, but on what basis is unclear. On the other hand, the facts are very clear: With an even split of Superdelegates she cannot possibly win. The only path for her to achieve victory is for nearly 3/4 of the undeclared Superdelegates to flock to her, and that's simply not going to happen unless she overtakes Obama in the pledged delegate count — which as we just discussed is pretty much an impossibility.
 
Basically, adding Michigan and Florida back into the mix makes Clinton's chances go from less than 1% to a slightly higher number that is still less than 1% so please don't let the press fool you into thinking this is some sort of an issue. It isn't. In fact, here's how bad it's gotten: Sen. Clinton actually turned down a plan proposed by Michigan.
 
Yes, that's right. Michigan basically said, We would like our votes counted and here is what we think is fair, and Hillary Clinton turned them down because even though their plan gave her a 10 delegate boost she knows it would do her no good. She seems to be living in some imaginary world where she thinks Obama's name not being on the Michigan ballot means she should get all the delegates (or an imaginary world where Democrats use Republican rules in their primary, or… the possibilities are endless when you make up your own imaginary alternatives to the actual rules). That's simply never going to happen, but it's the only way she can win without Obama's campaign imploding. 
 
And just to rehash old facts, Obama and Clinton both agreed in writing that Michigan's primary wouldn't count because they violated DNC rules and most of the Democratic candidates removed their names from the Ballot except Hillary Clinton. In effect, the Michigan Primary became a referendum on Hillary Clinton. Hillary won 55% of the vote, but 40% of the voters chose to vote for "Uncommitted" rather than vote for her.
 
 

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