CONTINUOUS BLOGGING:  JUNE 3,  2008

11:39 p.m.  The most intriguing question of the night, if my monitoring of commentators is typical, is whether Hillary Clinton will literally try to force herself onto the Democratic ticket.  Bob Beckel, commenting at Fox, reported that Clinton had said to supporters in a phone earlier today that she would acknowledge Obama as the nominee tonight.  She didn't.  Is this a strategy to hold back until he selects her?  I just can't imagine Obama knuckling under to this.  And yet, a CNN analysis tonight showed that an Obama/Clinton ticket would be more powerful than Obama running with someone else.  The prospect of victory may bring Obama around. 

11:29 p.m.  Jimmah Carter has now officially endorsed Barack Obama.  I know you wouldn't be able to sleep tonight without that news.  There is no response yet from the Obama camp.  I suspect the private reaction is, "Go away."

10:45 p.m.  Obama has finished.  He ended very strong, maybe too strong.  He seemed to present himself as a religious figure.  That may inspire some, but turn off many others.  However, as Mort Kondracke just said at Fox, the oratorical gap between McCain and Obama is vast.  It's a real danger for McCain.

10:33 p.m.  Obama continues.  He is attacking John McCain, I think a bit too stridently.  One problem with strong, eloquent speakers is that they can wear you out after a time.  Obama, after a strong start, is continuing at a very high energy level.  A few quiet sentences might provide a good contrast.  But he is remarkably effective.  Can't deny that. 

10:25 p.m.  Well now, Obama has started to discuss Iraq, and his speech is sliding downhill.  This surprises me.  I thought he'd be smarter than to repeat the line that Iraq is a war that never should have been fought.  Americans instinctively know the effect this has on troop morale.  The beginning of his speech was better.  He continues.

10:23 p.m.  One point:  Thus far Obama hasn't touched foreign policy in his speech.  Clinton mentioned it only briefly.  That is McCain's strong point, but he'd better learn how to exploit it.  He certainly didn't tonight. 

10:19 p.m.  Obama has eloquently praised Hillary Clinton.  Very good style.  A lot of class.  He has a great audience.  This man will be very tough to beat.

10:15 p.m.  Obama is now speaking.  He has just declared that he will be the Democratic nominee.  His rally is superbly organized, unlike McCain's poor effort earlier tonight.  We have work to do. 

9:58 p.m.  We await Obama's speech.  There's an advance text that apparently praises Hillary, but Hillary just made a speech and refused to concede.  Maybe there's some rewriting going on.  It's easy with word processors. 

9:56 p.m.  Clinton has just finished.  What the hell did she say?  She didn't concede anything.  She sounded like someone beginning a new phase of a campaign.  I don't know.  I've not seen anything like this.

9:50 p.m.  Clinton just said she will make no decisions about her future tonight.  Well now, that's a surprise.  We thought she'd at least hint that Obama might be the nominee.  She's inviting her supporters to send her messages of guidance.  Geez. 

9:46 p.m.  Hillary continues.  Sounds like a campaign speech.  Actually, it's one of her better speeches.  But no concession yet.  The Obama people must be fainting. 

9:35 p.m.  Clinton is now speaking.  Congratules Obama.  No concession yet.

9:32 p.m.  Bill Kristol, on Fox, just echoed what we've been saying about McCain's speech.  Not successful. 

9:29 p.m.  Polls close in Montana in 31 minutes.  We are awaiting a speech by Hillary Clinton.

9:10 p.m.  Fox News has just declared South Dakota for Hillary Clinton.  Kind of takes a bit of the wind out of Obama's night.

9:08 p.m.  McCain is still speaking.  The prose is okay, but there's no poetry, and campaigns are about poetry as well as prose.  McCain has taken a surprising number of swipes at President Bush.  He is declaring his independence.  His message is convincing, but needs a better coat of polish.  And he must connect with the audience. 

8:50 p.m.  McCain continues.  It's not good.  Advance work was poor.  Either microphones are badly placed in the audience, or the audience consists of ten people.  That's what it sounds like when people applaud.  The speech, the start of the general campaign, is average.  McCain makes excellent points.  He's just got to make them better, and more vigorously.  He's now warming up a bit.  It's a bit better.   

8:44 p.m.  Senator McCain has just been introduced by Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana.  McCain first paid a warm tribute to Hillary Clinton, although the audience didn't applaud.  McCain speaks fairly well, but, and this is maddening, he makes no particular connection with his audience.  He's reading from a teleprompter.  He makes no eye contact with the camera.  He seems stiff.  This is trouble because Obama, no matter how empty his suit, is a superb and personal speaker.  McCain, by far the best qualified of the two candidates, needs some polishing.  He's got to win, for the sake of this country's future. 

8:34 p.m.  Some commentators are saying that Hillary Clinton "stole" Obama's story today by hinting that she'd take the vice presidential spot, if offered.  I don't buy that.  The campaign is still under way.  Wolf Blitzer, at CNN, suggested to a McCain operative that McCain may be taking away from Obama's "night" by scheduling a speech tonight.  My heart bleeds.  As the McCain guy said, the national campaign begins tonight.  McCain happens to be a candidate. 

7:56 p.m.  A few nuts and bolts:  Chris Wallace just reminded the audience that the Democratic convention will take place before the Republican convention, allowing McCain, if he chooses, to name his v.p. pick after the Dems name theirs, giving him a tactical advantage.  Also, a note:  Polls in today's primaries have not yet closed.  Polls in South Dakota close at 9 p.m. ET, and in Montana an hour later. 

7:41 p.m.  Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, N.M. Gov. Bill Richardson, Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sibelius, and Hillary Clinton are the top names being discussed in Democratic circles as possibilities for the second spot on an Obama ticket, according to Fox News. 

7:33  Senator McCain will launch his campaign with a speech from New Orleans tonight.

7:24 p.m.  Karl Rove was just commenting on Fox, expressing doubt that Obama can make stick his charge that a McCain victory would mean a Bush third term.  I agree.  McCain ain't Bush, and this is where his independent reputation, which sometimes makes us grind our teeth, comes in handy.

June 3, 2008.      Permalink          

AFTERNOON POST:  JUNE 3,  2008

Posted at 3:16 p.m. ET

TROUBLE FOR OBAMA

Obama may be clinching the nomination, but there's trouble ahead.  Scott Helman of The Boston Globe has a thoughtful analysis of the problems Obama faces:

Fifty-six contests. Hundreds of millions of dollars raised and spent. More than 35 million votes cast. And, finally, five months later, one apparent winner.

Barely.

As the epic Democratic presidential primary battle finally comes to conclusion today with votes in South Dakota and Montana, Senator Barack Obama is trying to round up enough superdelegate endorsements so he can declare victory by reaching the threshold of 2,118 delegates required to seal the nomination. He was 41.5 short as of last night, with 31 at stake in today's contests.

But even as Hillary Clinton sends mixed signals about her willingness to leave the race, Obama, unlike his counterparts in recent presidential cycles, is not exactly sprinting across the finish line.

And...

"Usually there's this I-want-to-be-with-the-winner mentality, and you're not seeing that this time," said David Johnson, a Republican pollster who heads the firm Strategic Vision.

And...

The real concern, Johnson said, is the story behind Obama's recent losses: his lackluster showing among white, blue-collar voters, who are key voting blocs in states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania that Democrats have always had to win.

Indeed, the divided nature of the Democratic electorate is a chief concern for Obama, one he has begun going out of his way to address.

But many remain optimistic...

Dean Lacy, a professor of government at Dartmouth College, said the recent primary results suggest that Obama has work to do among the white working class, and Lacy said he was surprised that Obama did not fare better in Puerto Rico, which Clinton won by a more than 2-to-1 margin. But in the end, he said, what really matters is that Obama would win the nomination, not how.

My own sense, and I've said it here before, is that Obama is the favorite in November, and possibly the heavy favorite, because of press bias and the fact that African-American voter participation, understandably, will be much higher than usual.  I think McCain will have a difficult time.  But if Obama wins, the nation will have a difficult time.

June 3, 2008.      Permalink          

EARLY AFTERNOON POST:  JUNE 3,  2008

Posted at 1:05 p.m. ET

POLLS

A new USA Today/Gallup poll provides encouragement for Senator Obama.  It has Obama up five against McCain in the general election, a small but significant lead.  But Rasmussen's tracker has the two tied.

The USA/Gallup survey has Clinton up four against McCain.  Rasmussen has McCain up two over Clinton.

Are we starting to see the shift away from Clinton and toward Obama that many observers have predicted?  If so, it's very slight.  But if Obama clearly emerges as the winner of the nomination tonight, or in the next few days, the trend may accelerate.  Some polls might not even include Clinton any longer.  (Polls are expensive to run.)  In an Obama/McCain matchup, with Clinton no longer a factor, Obama is likely to get a bounce, if only (we pray) temporarily. 

June 3, 2008.      Permalink          

TUESDAY:  JUNE 3,  2008

Posted at 6:49 a.m. ET

THE END?

Montana and South Dakota vote today in the last primaries of this election cycle.  After that, according to the conventional script, Hillary Clinton will graciously withdraw, and Barack Obama will be lifted up, a new Moses to lead us leftward toward the Promised Land.

But no one has followed scripts this season.  There's a lot of anger in the Democratic Party, and at least south Dakota might provide Clinton with an upset, a reason to go on, if only symbolically.

And there's something else:  The dignified, tons-of-style Barack Obama has turned out to be considerably less dignified and to have considerably less style than many imagined.  The behavior of his "people" at the weekend meeting of the Democratic Party's rules committee was upsetting to some.  Important eyebrows were raised.  Even superdelegates who drink the potion and dive into the tank for Obama can, legally, climb out by convention time.  Roger Simon in The Politico reports:

Don Fowler is a member of the rules committee and committed to Hillary Clinton. He is a former chairman of the Democratic Party and a soft-spoken Southern gentleman who is highly respected within the party.

And he is troubled. He is not an extreme partisan — he actually voted for a measure that helped Obama — but he thinks the Obama people pushed too hard for their victory Saturday and are making a mistake.

“If the Obama people don’t let up, they are giving Clinton people an excuse to not cooperate,” Fowler told me Monday. “And I mean cooperate in a full range of things: whether we will have a good convention and whether they will be supporting the nominee in the fall.”

After the rules committee meeting was finally over and the shouts had died away, Fowler did the sensible thing. “I went to the bar and had a drink or two,” he said. “But I was disappointed. I thought the Obama people behaved very poorly. They could have made things a lot easier and behaved more magnanimously.”

It could be argued, of course, that when you are going to win the nomination anyway, you don’t have to bother about being magnanimous.

Unless you want to win in November, that is.

Hmm.  Now, if you're Hillary, and you think you've got a majority of the actual votes cast, and you're not the nominee, and your people are furious, and you really don't want Obama to be president, then...

You fill it in.  But let's wait and see.  We'll be on tonight with the results.

June 3, 2008.      Permalink          

BARONE

Nobody does it better than Michael Barone. In commenting on Fox News over the weekend, he even proved that he understood voting districts in Puerto Rico.  Now he suggests - from his mouth to you-know-whose-ears - that the Dems may snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in this year's presidential election, recalling 1948, when Dewey had it in the bag with no bottom:

It is taken as a general rule in political commentary that after one party holds the presidency for eight years, it is very hard for its nominee to make it three in a row. Only one party, after all, has done it in the last 60 years. The Democrats lost in 1968, Republicans lost in 1976, Democrats lost in 2000; only the Republicans won in 1988.

And...

But is the rule so ironclad at the presidential level? At the terrific Gay Patriot blog, Daniel Blatt reminds us of something that I had not focused on, that in the eighth year in which one party held the presidency in recent years, the out-party candidate had a huge advantage in May and June polls—and either didn't win in November or came close to losing. And I note that in vivid contrast to that, putative Democratic nominee Barack Obama leads presumptive Republican nominee John McCain by exactly 1 percent.

And...

The rule that a party has a hard time winning a third presidential term is one of those political science rules that seems less ironclad after close inspection. Hubert Humphrey nearly won the popular vote in 1968 despite the debacle of the Democratic Party that year... Gerald Ford would have been elected (without winning the popular vote) if he had gotten about 12,000 more votes in Ohio in 1976. Al Gore did win the popular vote nationally in 2000, even if you believe as I do that Florida did indeed vote for George W. Bush; 1,000 or so votes the other way there, and Gore would have been president.

Finally...

John McCain faces headwinds in George W. Bush's low job rating, but not some historically inexorable rule. And, as Daniel Blatt's insight suggests, those headwinds may not be so strong as conventional wisdom suggests. Obama against McCain isn't where Dukakis was against Bush 20 years ago. Interesting, eh?

Very.  It will be hard fought.  The one factor that I wish Barone had considered, and I'm sure will consider in future columns, is the role of the media, which has become increasingly fact-unfriendly in recent years, and is in the tank for a particular candidate this year.  If Obama wins, that may well be the key factor.

June 3, 2008.      Permalink          

HITCHENS

Christopher Hitchens, who is actually a leftist, has emerged in the years since 9/11 as a courageously independent writer who calls them as other leftists refuse to see them.  Now he compares two books - the "memoir" by the pathetic ex-presidential press secretary Scott McClellan, and something more serious:

Bertrand Russell's principle of evidence against interest—if the pope has doubts about Jesus, his doubts are by definition more newsworthy than the next person's—doesn't really justify the ocean of coverage in which the talentless McClellan is currently so far out of his depth. For one thing, he doesn't supply anything that can really be called evidence. For another, having not noticed any "propaganda machine" at the time he was perspiring his way through his simple job, he has a clear mercenary interest in discovering one in retrospect.

Okay, that says it.  But there is that other book:

If you want to read a serious book about the origins and consequences of the intervention in Iraq in 2003, you owe it to yourself to get hold of a copy of Douglas Feith's War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. As undersecretary of defense for policy, Feith was one of those most intimately involved in the argument about whether to and, if so, how to put an end to the regime of Saddam Hussein. His book contains notes made in real time at the National Security Council, a trove of declassified documentation, and a thoroughly well-organized catalog of sources and papers and memos. Feith has also done us the service of establishing a Web site where you can go and follow up all his sources and check them for yourself against his analysis and explanation. There is more of value in any chapter of this archive than in any of the ramblings of McClellan.

And...

...this absorbing account of the interdepartmental and ideological quarrels within the Bush administration, on the Afghanistan and Guantanamo fronts as well as about Iraq, will make it difficult if not impossible for people to go on claiming that, for instance:

1.  There was no rational reason to suspect a continuing Iraqi WMD threat. Feith's citations from the Duelfer Report alone are stunning in their implications.

2.  That alternatives to war were never discussed and that the administration was out to "get" Saddam Hussein from the start.

3.  That the advocates of regime change hoped and indeed planned to anoint Ahmad Chalabi as a figurehead leader in Baghdad.

4.  That there was no consideration given to postwar planning.

And...

Without explicitly saying so, Feith makes a huge contribution to the growing case for considering the Central Intelligence Agency to be well beyond salvage. Its role as a highly politicized and bewilderingly incompetent body, disastrous enough in having left us under open skies before Sept. 11, 2001, became something more like catastrophic with the gross mishandling of Iraq. For these revelations alone, this book is well worth the acquisition. (I might add that, unlike McClellan, Feith is contributing all his earnings and royalties to charities that care for our men and women in uniform.)

Hitchens notes that the Feith book, although a serious, thoughtful effort, has been essentially ignored by the establishment media, which dotes on McClellan.  Feith has not been reviewed in either The New York Times or the Washington Post.  And the press wonders why it's losing credibility.

The left-wing media hates one thing above all - a well-presented case by its opposition.  That's why it must ignore Feith.  It ignored the devastating study of the misreporting of the Tet offensive in Vietnam by Pulitzer-prize-winning Peter Braestrup; it ignored the Venona intercepts; it ignored the official North Vietnamese history of the war, which did not conform to the Walter Cronkite musical-comedy version.  Feith is in good company.

I'll attend a briefing by Douglas Feith at the Hudson Institute on Thursday.  If it's on-the-record, and has some new revelations, I'll report.

June 3, 2008.       Permalink