EVENING UPDATE:  MAY 9,  2008

Posted at 10:20 p.m. ET

NEW POLLS

A new L.A.Times/Bloomberg poll is good news for Hillary Clinton.  It shows both Obama and Clinton defeating John McCain, but whereas Obama is up six, Clinton is up nine.  This is consistent with other polls showing Clinton to be the stronger candidate.

Once again, and we've been saying it, Senator Clinton exhibits remarkable strength, and all the shouting for her to get out of the race doesn't seem to move the numbers.

Get this.  West Virginia votes Tuesday.  A new ARG poll shows Clinton up 43 points.  (Yes, you read that right.)  Rasmussen has her up only 29.

Kentucky votes a week later.  The latest Survey USA poll shows Clinton up 34 points.  (Yes, you also read that right.)

Okay, Oregon votes the same day as Kentucky, and Rasmussen has Obama leading there by 12.  But 12 isn't 43 or 29 or 34.  And Oregonians eat health food for fun, so an Obama win there might just reinforce his image as a kind of natural-fibre guy, not like a real person.

Will any of this matter?  At this point, I suspect the upcoming Clinton blowouts have already been discounted.  But they muddy the waters, and that is real fun.

May 9, 2008.      Permalink           

THE McCAIN FACTOR

You get the feeling, reading the columns and monitoring the talk shows, that John McCain can win this election.  Indeed, I've sensed an undercurrent of suspicion about Barack Obama.  One caller to a radio show suggested that voters ask themselves this:  "Barack Obama should be president of the United States because..."  Then, try to finish the sentence.  The caller suggested that very few people could provide a coherent answer. 

However, John McCain can also lose, and he will if he blurs his focus and goes out of synch with the word, which he is prone to do.  Susan Demas, a Michigan political analyst, complains that a recent McCain speech in the state was out of whack:

ROCHESTER HILLS - Say you're running for president and dropping by the most economically ravaged state in the nation.

Your Democratic rivals are too busy butchering one another to campaign here, much less notice 7.2 percent unemployment, record foreclosures and skyrocketing demand at local food banks.

So naturally, you'd give a speech on child pornography and human trafficking around the world, right?

It's not that John McCain's 20-minute indictment of these heinous crimes at Oakland University on Wednesday wasn't admirable.

But it was a speech you deliver outside the United Nations, not a few miles from Delphi world headquarters, which just emerged from bankruptcy after shuttering factories and slashing wages in half for many autoworkers.

In Michigan, it's the economy, stupid.

Republican after Republican I talked to, including McCain's most diehard supporters, were floored by the misstep. He has a great shot at winning the Mitten State thanks to a botched Democratic primary, but his advisers seem intent on blowing it.

One fear I have about McCain is that he'll throw it away.  Fortunately, he has a good political team around him - at least on the national level.  He's got to have people in the states who can advise him. 

There's a story out that McCain will go on a national tour emphasizing energy policy and global warming.  Okay to the first, no to the second.  Sure, he has to appeal to moderates, and he wants to draw in the Reagan Democrats.  But if he thinks he can ever win even a part of the tofu and vitamins crowd, he's wrong.  He's as wrong as Hillary Clinton was wrong in thinking that African-Americans would vote for her instead of Obama because of her long commitment to civil rights.  The people who think New York will sink under a flood of melting ice within the next four months are in the tank for anyone who labels himself a "progressive," and that person isn't John McCain.

Be yourself, John.  With that you've got a shot.

May 9, 2008.      Permalink          

AFTERNOON POSTING:  MAY 9,  2008

Posted at 4:08 p.m. ET

LATEST POLLS

New tracking polls fail to show any new boom for Obama. 

For the Democratic nomination:  Rasmussen has Obama up eight over Clinton, but Gallup has him up only two.  Two thirds of those in Gallup's survey were polled after this week's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana.  The Clinton camp seems to be holding.

In the general:  Rasmussen has Obama up three over McCain, but Gallup has him up only one.

Rasmussen has Clinton up five over McCain, whereas Gallup has her up four.

Clinton does better in the general than Obama, despite the fact that Clinton has been widely declared out of the race.

It's too early to make definitive statements about these results.  But if they continue, the Democratic Party may have a serious problem with its Clinton contingent.  They ain't gonna be pushed around that easily.

May 9, 2008.      Permalink          

FRIDAY:  MAY 9,  2008

Posted at 4:47 a.m.

THE OBITS

The obituaries for Hillary Clinton are already being written.  Charles Krauthammer has one that's particularly perceptive:

WASHINGTON -- By the time Hillary Clinton figured out how to beat Barack Obama, it was too late. When she began the race in 2007 thinking she was in for a coronation, she claimed the center in order to position herself for the real fight, the general election. She simply assumed the party activists and loony left would fall in behind her.

However, as Obama began to rise, powered by the party's Net-roots activists, she scurried left, particularly with her progressively more explicit renunciation of the Iraq War. It was a fool's errand. She would never be able to erase the stain of her original war vote and she remained unwilling to do an abject John Edwards self-flagellating recantation. It took her weeks even to approximate the apology the left was looking for, and by then it was far too late. The party's activist wing was by then unbreakably betrothed to Obama.

And...

There's only one remaining chapter in this fascinating spectacle. Negotiating the terms of Hillary's surrender. After which we will have six months of watching her enthusiastically stumping the country for Obama, denying with utter conviction Republican charges that he is the out of touch, latte-sipping elitist she warned Democrats against so urgently in the last, late leg of her doomed campaign.

Yeah, he's probably got it right.  We should always caution, though, that there's another major player in this race who gets very little mention - the president of the United States.  We don't know what George W. Bush has in store for us these next eight months.  Eight months are 100 lifetimes in politics.  Bush does not strike me as the kind who will go gently or quietly, unless his father's crowd clamps down on him.  I'd watch the Middle East or the Persian Gulf for moves that could have far greater impact on the presidential race than anything Obama or McCain could do.

May 9, 2008.       Permalink          

THE DIVORCE

Another grim remembrance.  The Wall Street Journal writes of the divorce, without lawyers apparently, of the Clintons from the Democratic Party.  It is painful, it is poignant. It is a paperback series:

Truth be told, this was always a marriage more of convenience than love. The party's progressives never did like Bill Clinton's New Democrat ways, but after Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis they needed his epic political gifts to win back the White House. They hated him for their loss of Congress in 1994, but they tolerated Dick Morris and welfare reform to keep the presidency in 1996.

But...

By the time Mrs. Clinton made her famous claim about dodging Bosnian sniper fire, Democrats and their media friends no longer called it a mere gaffe, as they once might have. This time the remark was said to be emblematic of her entire political career. The same folks who had believed her about Whitewater and the rest now claimed she never tells the truth about anything.

As the scales suddenly fell from liberal eyes, the most striking statistic was the one in this week's North Carolina exit poll. Asked if they considered Mrs. Clinton "honest and trustworthy," no fewer than 50% of Democratic primary voters said she was not. In Indiana, the figure was merely 45%.

Slowly but surely, these Prisoners of Bill and Hill are now walking away, urging Mrs. Clinton to leave the race. Chuck Schumer damns her with faint support by saying any decision is up to her. Columnists from the New York Times, which endorsed her when she looked inevitable, now demand that she exit so as not to help John McCain. With Mr. Obama to ride, they no longer need the Arkansas interlopers.

Ouch.  Finally...

If the Clintons play to their historic form, they will ignore all this for as long as they can. They will fight on, hoping that something else turns up about Mr. Obama before the convention. Or they'll try to play the Michigan and Florida cards. Or they'll unleash Harold Ickes on the superdelegates and suggest that if Mr. Obama loses in November she'll be back in 2012 and her revenge will be, well, Clintonian.

The difference between now and the 1990s, however, is that this time the Clinton foes aren't the "vast right-wing conspiracy." This time the conspirators are fellow Democrats. It took 10 years, but you might say Democrats have finally voted to impeach.

Ouch plus.  But I'm not so sure the Dems will slam the door completely on their 1990s couple-of-the decade.  Jack Warner, the movie mogul, used to have a saying:  "I don't want to see that SOB in my office again...unless I need him." 

You never know when the Democrats will think they'll need the Clintons again.  And if they don't, someone else might.  If Obama loses, the Democratic Party could split.  I can easily see Clinton, and Joe Lieberman, and Ed Rendell riding off in one direction, with Obama and Kerry and Howard Dean driving their Prius in the other.  That could be such fun.  Only political death, not the real kind.

May 9, 2008.      Permalink          

DANGER FOR OBAMA

Michael Gerson, the president's former speech writer, has emerged as an astute political columnist.  Here he cautions that Barack Obama has two serious problems heading into the fall campaign.

Barack Obama -- the charismatic, weakened, patronizing, soaring, prickly, historic, inevitable nominee of the Democratic Party -- is now left with two related problems.

First, Obama's own missteps, amplified by Hillary Clinton's negativity, have defined a narrative likely to follow him until Election Day.

In politics, a narrative -- the widely held, sometimes-unfair shorthand that marks a candidate -- is difficult to shift. For Dan Quayle, it was fresh-faced intellectual vacuity. For John Kerry, it was a combination of hauteur and inconstancy.

The Obama narrative is intellectual and ideological (not social) elitism.  Humble roots have never been a guarantee of intellectual humility, especially when a mind comes to flower at Columbia and Harvard. Obama's dismissal of small town views and values as "bitterness," "fear" and "anger" -- his dismissal of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as the relic of an angry generation -- come across as, well, dismissive.

And Obama's second problem?

Obama's disconnect with white religious voters (African-American religious voters are overwhelmingly supportive). He lost the white Protestant vote by 26 points in the Indiana primary and by 37 points in North Carolina. He lost the white Catholic vote by 26 points in Indiana and 17 points in North Carolina. Among Catholics in particular, this represents an improvement over Obama's dismal results in Pennsylvania and Ohio. But this religion gap remains a general election challenge.

It is also a striking reversal of fortunes. Obama is easily the most religiously fluent and informed Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. But, over time, Obama has assumed a much more familiar, Democratic electoral profile -- the candidate of the young, the educated and the secular (he has consistently won religiously nonaligned voters), who also gets nearly universal support from African-Americans.

This is an excellent piece, and I urge you to read the whole thing.  Gerson makes one particularly apt observation, in discussing the wearing of the American-flag lapel pin:  "A president," he says, "is expected to be a patriotic symbol himself, not the arbiter of patriotic symbols."  That is something many self-proclaimed "intellectuals" never understand, that the president is the servant of the culture, not its master.  If the people want the president to wear a flag pin, he wears it.  Period.  It reflects not his political opinion, or even his patriotism, but his service.

Do you think the editorialists at The New York Times understand that?

May 9, 2008.       Permalink          

WE CAN'T WAIT

Finally, a new symbol of greatness emerges.  Prepare to be excited. 

Alec Baldwin may run for public office.  Move over, Abe Lincoln:

A decade ago, Baldwin was interested in politics, but said he was only 39 and all the people who ran the world were in their fifties. Since then, he has publicly dismissed the notion of running for office. A few weeks ago, he changed his mind. "There's other things I want to do [besides acting]. I mean, in a matter of weeks, I'm going to be 50," says Baldwin, who turned 50 on April 3. "There’s no age limit on running for office, to a degree. [It is] something I might do one day," says Baldwin.

The eloquence, the clarity of thought, the Jeffersonian intellect.  And he's really, really thought it over:

Baldwin says he is ready for the public scrutiny and realizes the tact one must use when running for office because he's learned a lesson about what he says and how it can affect others in the nasty divorce-custody battle with his ex-wife, Kim Basinger. The spat resulted in the publication of an embarrassing voicemail to his daughter in which he calls her a "thoughtless little pig."

Look, that quote doesn't have to be on his monument in Washington.  There are other things he's said.

He can run for president on the same ticket with Rosie O'Donnell.  What an inauguration.

Be back later.

May 9, 2008.       Permalink