Time to diagnose this as an act of God

I know it's wrong of me to feel this way, but when I see 60 tornadoes hit the SE and leave 50 people dead, I have to wonder why people can't make the logical connection to God's wrath in the same way that they do when a "liberal" or non-Christian area gets hit with a natural disaster. Oh yeah, it's because they're fu#$*ng stupid.

Maybe God's angry that TN went for Hillary and the SE went for Huckabee?

Politics notes

A few politics notes:

Obama leads in pledged delegates, those who have to vote with the people. He lags with superdelegates, those who are apparently better than other Americans and get to decide close races for us:

It looks like Obama, by the narrowest of margins, won last night’s delegate hunt. By our estimates, he picked up 840 to 849 delegates versus 829-838 for Clinton; the Obama camp projects winning by nine delegates (845-836). He also won more states (13 to Clinton’s eight; New Mexico is still outstanding), although she won the most populous ones (California and New York). And Obama’s argument that he might be the most electable Democrat in a general election was bolstered by the fact that he won nine red states versus four for Clinton. Yet with Clinton’s overall superdelegate lead (259-170, based on the lists they've released to us), and when you toss in the 63-48 lead Obama had among pledged delegates going into Super Tuesday, it appears Clinton has about 70 more overall delegates than Obama does (1140-1150 for Clinton versus 1070 to 1080 for Obama). It’s that close, folks...

See this and this for more details. Yeah, it pisses off John Aravosis too.

Barack has raised $6.7M since the polls closed on Tuesday. I did my part ($25), for the third time. On the other hand, Hillary and Bill are tapping into their personal fortune (how did they make $30M???).

Obama is pointing out the "let's return to the '90s" stuff isn't so smart.

The huge gap between GOP and Dem primary voting is an encouraging sign for November:

Obama/Clinton voters: 14,460,149
McCain/Romney/Huckabee voters: 8,367,694
Or, 73% more Democratic voters than Republican voters...

Some economics logic from Bill Gross at PIMCO for moving away from supply-side insanity that supports making the Bush tax cuts permanent (i.e., John McCain's plans) and towards demand-side, liberal economic policies. Looks like the market is catching on to the ill prospects of further coal-powered plants. Bernanke is tanking among fellow economists.

Faux News threatens Barack and Hillary for avoiding the partisan network. "Fair and balanced"? You decide.

Poor Dobson & RR. Watch 'em squirm with schadenfreude.

JibJab VDay Striptease

I made another JibJab movie, this one a funny striptease for Valentine's Day, rather than about politics like the last one:

Don't send a lame Valentine's Day eCard. Try JibJab Sendables!

Primary results in table form

**PS: RealClearPolitics documents the vote tallies, so I'm done updating mine, although I am still the only person (so far as I can find) making mine available as an Excel file.**

LAST UPDATED: 5/5/08 @ 5:15 AM

I don't know why this sort of workup of the primary results isn't more readily available:

Get it HERE as .pdf, HERE as .htm, HERE as .jpg, HERE as .png, and HERE as .xls (Excel '07, R-click and "save as").

My data is from CNN. Here is Barack's data and here is Hillary's.

See this post from DKos for arguments about the (non)merits of using the popular vote tally:

Point Number 1: If the popular vote determined the nominee, no candidate would ever go to Iowa or New Hampshire. They'd spend all their time in big urban areas all over the country from the outset of the campaign, racking up raw numbers. What would be the point of even visiting New Hampshire if you could camp out in Brooklyn? Concrete Example: Barack Obama would not have spent only a day and a half in California before the Feb 5 primary. He would have never gone to Idaho. Duh.

Point Number 2: If the popular vote determined the nominee, no state in its right mind would ever hold a caucus, instantly disenfranchising itself. Concrete example: Minnesota-Missouri. Minnesota gets credit for 214K votes, and Missouri gets 822K votes, but they each get 72 delegates. Is Missouri's voice 4 times more important than Minnesota's?

Point Number 3: The arbitrary distinction between who gets to vote in these primaries is nothing like the general election, where everyone registered gets to vote. In the primaries, sometimes it's just Dems, sometimes Dems and Indies, sometimes anyone. Concrete example: Texas gets a million more votes than similar overall population New York (2.8M to 1.8M), even though New York is far more Democratic, simply due to this arbitrary restriction on who can vote (NY = closed, Texas = open).

Overall point: regardless of the fact that Obama will win the popular vote, it is completely illegitimate in this race. THIS IS NOT LIKE POPULAR VOTE IN THE GENERAL ELECTION.

Also see Barack's page where delegates are tallied. This is cross-posted to my personal page.

Politics notes

A few politics notes:

The bankrupting of our country under Bush is incomprehensible. Taxes for the ultra-rich were cut at the expense of the poor and elderly, as their programs were slashed in order to make up for the account deficits. Senator McCain and other GOP candidates intend to continue his economic policies.

On that note, Ezra Klein delves in to the policy differences between Barack and Hillary. He finds that:

In his book The Audacity of Hope, he admits to appreciating the Gipper's understanding of government's failings. "Reagan's central insight," he wrote, "that the liberal welfare state had grown complacent and overly bureaucratic … contained a good deal of truth." This insight was hardly peculiar to Reagan; it was shared by a generation of community organizers, Obama among them, who fought with public bureaucracies every day. This insight has led Obama to the belief that individuals should experience a government as gentle and unfussy as possible. In my talks with his advisers, the term "iPod government" repeatedly came up, a reference to Obama's desire for a sleeker, easier-to-use state. This guiding principle helps explain how he came up with a health-care plan without an individual mandate. Obama's fears that care would prove unaffordable and individuals would be left begging for exemptions from some unconcerned bureaucrat outweighed concerns that the healthy would opt-out of the system and that the insurers wouldn't cover everyone at a fair price if "everyone" meant only the sick. It's that thread that reconciles his philosophical preference for single-payer with his programmatic eschewing of universal care. Single-payer is simple. Mandates are more complicated, and Obama fears that a mismatch between affordability measures and care costs will leave individuals fighting with the state for coverage. Better the policy be meeker and the experience smoother than risk a strong policy's potential to force the unsuspecting into unwanted dealings with an unfamiliar bureaucracy.

Similarly, Obama's stimulus plan is essentially a quick, across-the-board tax cut. Clinton's is a series of tax credits and targeted subsidies. The difference between the plans, again, is between the ease-of-implementation of Obama's and the specificity of Clinton's. Her targeted credits help worthwhile programs and do more to target the worst-off, but in so doing, they create an essentially means-tested stimulus package that would require beneficiaries to prove their distress. Obama, by contrast, offers a large payroll tax rebate that would require little in the way of administration.

In this, as in much else, Obama betrays a universalist streak. Government is simplest when it is unspecific—it's when it starts trying to subdivide the population and impact only targeted groups that it becomes hard to administer (think of how little trouble seniors have accessing a universal program like Social Security versus how much trouble the poor have trying to determine eligibility for a means-tested program like Medicaid). If Kennedy wanted a rising tide to lift all boats, Obama wants us all in one boat to better navigate the waves. But before he can rehabilitate the universalist approach to government, the experience of interacting with government must be bettered. In a world where a trip to the DMV is such a Kafkaesque odyssey that you can actually hire individuals to undergo the torment for you, unifying the public square first means beautifying it. So Obama's detailed plans for more government accountability and transparency precede and even take priority over his plans for what the newly accountable and transparent government should do. Till that day when government is reformed and citizens' trust is ensured, that new government must be used with care, and its capabilities should not be overestimated.

Harold Pollack responds to Krugman about Barack and mandates. His points about the study summarized:

So we're back where we started: two plans, both with guaranteed availability of insurance regardless of health status, both with subsidies. One has a mandate with (as yet undefined) enforcement mechanisms. The other has no mandate but (as yet undefined) financial disincentives for free-riding. Until the two plans are better specified, there is no basis on which to estimate how many people will wind up not buying insurance under either plan, and therefore no basis for any firm estimate of costs to the taxpayer.

This is hardly justification for the holy war the Clinton campaign is waging on Obama on the mandate issue.

David Brooks follows up on the same issue (Clinton's mandates and dealings with health care):

Moreover, the debate Clinton is having with Barack Obama echoes the debate she had with Cooper 15 years ago. The issue, once again, is over whether to use government to coerce people into getting coverage. The Clintonites argue that without coercion, there will be free-riders on the system.

They’ve got a point. But there are serious health care economists on both sides of the issue. And in the heat of battle, Clinton has turned the debate between universal coverage and universal access into a sort of philosophical holy grail, with a party of righteousness and a party of error. She’s imposed Manichaean categories on a technical issue, just as she did a decade and half ago. And she’s done it even though she hasn’t answered legitimate questions about how she would enforce her universal coverage mandate.

Cooper, who, not surprisingly, supports Barack Obama, believes that Clinton hasn’t changed. “Hillary’s approach is so absolutist, draconian and intolerant, it means a replay of 1993.”

Kevin Drum makes his case for Obama.

The evolution of Hillary's views on Iraq by Spencer Ackerman show a complete lack of clarity and track with polling figures, this is the sort of thing that will hurt her badly in the general election:

...Clinton set herself up to run for president as both a pro-war and an anti-war candidate—depending on the contingencies of the war and the politics of the moment.

Clinton’s statements during October 2002 have received much attention. But what she’s said in the intervening years demonstrates a vertigo-inducing lack of clarity. Her position tracked the political zeitgeist elegantly: cautiously in favor of the war before it started; enthusiastically in favor of it during its first year; overtaken with doubt during 2004; nervously against withdrawal in 2005; cautiously in favor of withdrawal ever since—and all without so much as an acknowledgment of her myriad repositioning. At no point did she challenge the prevailing assumptions behind the war.

This will come back to haunt her.

"Yes We Can" video

This is pretty amazing.

Celebrities featured include: will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas, Scarlett Johansson, Tatyana Ali, John Legend, Herbie Hancock, Kate Walsh, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, Adam Rodriquez, Kelly Hu, Adam Rodriquez, my wife Valetta and Nick Cannon

Obama

Both Gallup and Rasmussen show Obama benefiting from Edwards' departure.

Christopher Hayes at The Nation makes the case for Obama in '08. Read it below:

The Choice

by CHRISTOPHER HAYES

[from the February 18, 2008 issue]

It's gotten to that time in the primary contest where lines are drawn, camps are solidified and conversations around dinner tables grow heated. My friend Dan recently put it this way: "You start talking about the candidates, and next thing you know someone's crying!" The excellent (and uncommitted) blogger Digby recently decided to shut down her comments section because the posts had grown so toxic. The recent uptick in acrimony is largely due to the narrowing of the field. While once the energy was spread over many camps, it is now, with the exits of Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards, concentrated on just two, leaving progressives in a fierce debate over whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would make the better nominee, and President.

According to polling data as well as my conversations with friends and colleagues, progressives are evenly split or undecided between the two. This is, to me, somewhat astonishing (about which more in a moment), but it also means that at a time when other subgroups within the Democratic coalition are leaning heavily toward one candidate or the other, progressives are at a moment of maximum leverage.

Insofar as the issues discussed during a presidential campaign are circumscribed by the taboos and pieties of the political and media establishments, they tend to be dispiriting for those of us on the left. Neither front-runner is calling for the nation to renounce its decades-old imperial posture or to end the prison-industrial complex; neither is saying that America's suburbs and car culture are not sustainable modes of living in an era of expensive oil and global warming or pointing out that the "war on drugs" has been a moral disaster and strategic failure, with casualties borne most violently and destructively by society's most marginalized and--a word you won't be hearing from either candidate--oppressed. And yet, this election is far more encouraging (dare I say hopeful?) than any in recent memory. The policy agenda for the Democratic front-runners is significantly further to the left on the war, climate change and healthcare than that of John Kerry in 2004. The ideological implosion of conservatism, the failures of the Bush Administration and, perhaps most important, the shifts in public opinion in a leftward direction on war, the economy, civil liberties and civil rights are all coming together at the same time, providing progressives with the rare and historic opportunity to elect a President with a progressive majority and an actual mandate for progressive change.

The question then becomes this: which of the two Democratic candidates is more likely to bring to fruition a new progressive majority? I believe, passionately and deeply, if occasionally waveringly, that it's Barack Obama.

Had you told me a few years ago that the left of the Democratic Party would be split between Obama and Clinton, I'd have dismissed you as crazy: Barack Obama has been a community organizer, a civil rights attorney, a loyal and reliable ally in the State Senate of progressive groups. For the Chicago left, his primary campaign and his subsequent election to the US Senate was a collective rallying cry. If you've read his first book, the truly beautiful, honest and intellectually sophisticated Dreams From My Father, you have an inkling of what young Chicago progressives felt about Obama. He is one of us, and now he's in the Senate. We thought we'd elected our own Paul Wellstone. (Full disclosure: my brother is an organizer on the Obama campaign.)

That's not, alas, how things turned out. Almost immediately Obama--likely with an eye on national office--shaded himself toward the center. His rhetoric was cool, often timid, not the zealous advocacy on behalf of peace, justice and the dispossessed that had characterized Wellstone's tenure. His record places him squarely in the middle of Democratic senators, just slightly to Clinton's left on domestic issues (he voted against the bankruptcy bill, for example). As a presidential candidate, his domestic policy (with some notable exceptions on voting rights and technology policy) has been very close to that of his chief rivals, though sometimes, notably on healthcare, marginally less progressive.

But while domestic policy will ultimately be determined through a complicated and fraught interplay with legislators, foreign policy is where the President's agenda is implemented more or less unfettered. It's here where distinctions in worldview matter most--and where Obama compares most favorably to Clinton. The war is the most obvious and powerful distinction between the two: Hillary Clinton voted for and supported the most disastrous American foreign policy decision since Vietnam, and Barack Obama (at a time when it was deeply courageous to do so) spoke out against it. In this campaign, their proposals are relatively similar, but in rhetoric and posture Clinton has played hawk to Obama's dove, attacking from the right on everything from the use of first-strike nuclear weapons to negotiating with Iran's president. Her hawkishness relative to Obama's is mirrored in her circle of advisers. As my colleague Ari Berman has reported in these pages, it's a circle dominated by people who believed and believe that waging pre-emptive war on Iraq was the right thing to do. Obama's circle is made up overwhelmingly of people who thought the Iraq War was a mistake.

Clinton's fundamentally defensive conception of how to defuse the Republicans on national security (neutralizing their hawkishness with one's own) is an example of a larger problem, rooted in the fact that so many of her circle served in her husband's Administration. Their political identities were formed in the crucible of crisis, from the Gingrich insurgency to the Ken Starr inquisition. The overriding imperative was survival against massive odds, often with a hostile public, press or both. Like an animal caught in a trap that chews off its leg to wriggle away, the Clinton crew by the end of its tenure had hardly any limbs left to propel an agenda. The benefit of this experience, much touted by the Clintons, is that they know how to fight and how to survive. But the cost has been high: those who lived through those years are habituated to playing defense and fighting rear-guard actions. We know how progressives fared under Clintonism: they were the bloodied limbs left in the trap. Clintonism, in other words, is the devil we know.

Which brings us to the one we don't. A President cannot build a movement, but he can be its messenger, as was Reagan. Part of what tantalizes and frustrates about Obama is that he seems to have the potential to be such a messenger and yet shies away from speaking in ideological terms. When he invokes union organizers facing Pinkerton thugs to give us our forty-hour week, or says we are bound to one another as "our brother's keeper...our sister's keeper," he is articulating the deepest progressive values: solidarity and community and collective action. But he places more rhetorical emphasis on a politics of "unity" that, read uncharitably, seems to fetishize bipartisanship as an end in itself and reinforce lame and deceptive myths that the parties are equally responsible for the "bickering" and "divisiveness" in Washington. It appears sometimes that his diagnosis of what's wrong with politics is the way it is conducted rather than for whom.

In its totality, though, Obama's rhetoric tells a story of politics that is distinct from both the one told by Beltway devotees of bipartisanship and comity and from the progressive activists' story of a ceaseless battle between the forces of progress and those of reaction. If it differs from what I like to hear, it is also unfailingly targeted at building the coalition that is the raison d'être of Obama's candidacy. Consider this passage from Obama's stump speech:

I've learned in my life that you can stand firm in your principles while still reaching out to those who might not always agree with you. And although the Republican operatives in Washington might not be interested in hearing what we have to say, I think Republican and independent voters outside of Washington are. That's the once-in-a-generation opportunity we have in this election.

Obama makes a distinction between bad-faith, implacable enemies (lobbyists, entrenched interests, "operatives") and good-faith ideological opponents (Republicans, independents and conservatives of good conscience). He wants to court the latter and use their support to vanquish the former. This may be improbable, but it crucially allows former Republicans (Obama Republicans?) to cross over without guilt or self-loathing. They are not asked to renounce, only to join.

Obama's diagnosis of the obstacles to progress is twofold. First, that the division of the electorate into the categories created by the right's culture warriors is the primary means by which the forces of reaction resist change. Progress will be made only by rejecting or transcending those categories. In 1971 a young Pat Buchanan urged Richard Nixon to wield race as what would come to be known as a wedge issue. "This is a potential throw of the dice," he wrote, "that could...cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half." Obama seeks to stitch those halves back together.

Second, that the reason progressives have failed to achieve our goals over the past several decades is not that we didn't fight hard enough but that we didn't have a popular mandate. In other words, the fundamental obstacle is a basic political one: never having the public squarely on our side and never having the votes on the Hill. In this respect the Obama campaign is uniquely circular: his political appeal is rooted in the fact that he's so politically appealing. This means that when he loses, the loss affects him worse than it would other candidates, since it also cuts against his message. But when he wins, particularly when he wins big, as he did in Iowa and South Carolina, the win means more because it reinforces the basic argument of his campaign.

The question of who can best build popular support for a progressive governing agenda is related to, but distinct from, the question of electability. Given a certain ceiling on Clinton's appeal (due largely to years of unhinged attacks from the "vast right-wing conspiracy"), her campaign seems well prepared to run a 50 percent + 1 campaign, a rerun of 2004 but with a state or two switching columns: Florida, maybe, or Ohio. Obama is aiming for something bigger: a landmark sea-change election, with the kind of high favorability and approval ratings that can drive an agenda forward. Why should we think he can do it?

The short answer is that Obama is simply one of the most talented and appealing politicians in recent memory. Perhaps the most. Pollster.com shows a series of polls taken in the Democratic campaign. The graphs plotting national polling numbers as well as those in the first four states show a remarkably consistent pattern. Hillary Clinton starts out with either a modest or, more commonly, a massive lead, owing to her superior name recognition and the popularity of the Clinton brand. As the campaign goes forward Clinton's support either climbs slowly, plateaus or dips. But as the actual contest approaches, and voters start paying attention, Obama's support suddenly begins to grow exponentially.

In addition to persuading those who already vote, Obama has also delivered on one of the hoariest promises in politics: to bring in new voters (especially the young). It's a phenomenon that, if it were to continue with him as nominee, could completely alter the electoral math. Young people are by far the most progressive voters of any age cohort, and they overwhelmingly favor Barack Obama by stunning margins. Their enthusiasm has translated into massive increases in youth turnout in the early contests.

Finally, there's the question of coattails. In many senses there's less difference between the two presidential candidates than there is between a Senate with fifty-one Democrats and one with fifty-six. No Democratic presidential candidate is going to carry, say, Mississippi or Nebraska, but many Democrats in those states fear that the ingrained Clinton hatred would rally the GOP base and/or depress turnout, hurting down-ticket candidates. Over the past few weeks a series of prominent red-state Democrats, most notably Ben Nelson, Kent Conrad and Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, have endorsed Obama. When I asked a Democratic Congressional candidate in the Deep South who he preferred at the top of the ticket, he didn't hesitate: "Obama is absolutely the better candidate. Hillary brings a lot of sting; he takes some sting out of them."

Whoever is elected in November, progressives will probably find themselves feeling frustrated. Ultimately though, the future judgments and actions of the candidates are unknowable, obscured behind time's cloak. Who knew that the Bill Clinton of 1992 who campaigned with Nelson Mandela would later threaten to sanction South Africa when it passed a law allowing the production of low-cost generic AIDS drugs for its suffering population--or that the George W. Bush of 2000, an amiable "centrist" whose thin foreign-policy views shaded toward isolationism, would go on to become a self-justifying, delusional and messianic instrument of global war? In this sense, Bill Clinton is right: voting for and electing Barack Obama is a "roll of a dice." All elections are. But the candidacy of Barack Obama represents by far the left's best chance to, in Buchanan's immortal phrasing, take back the bigger half of the country. It's a chance we can't pass up.

Indeed.