The Democratic Primaries are over

It says something about the whole process that I have not read a single report of who actually won the last two Primary contests held today. Instead the news has been replete with reporting that Barack Obama has finally gained the majority of pledged delegates and superdelegates that he needed to win. He now appears to have a lock on the nomination.

Hillary Clinton has not yet conceded, and used tonight to deliver a speech in which she once again raised the hotly disputed claim that she won the popular vote, asserting that more people have voted for her than for any Democratic candidate for the nomination in history. She then asked people to go to her website and make suggestions about where she ought to go from here. News reports had earlier quoted her as saying that she is open to the possibility of being Obama's VP.

All three candidates gave speeches tonight, although at the time of writing the full versions have not yet shown up on Youtube. I admit my daily blog diet has an overabundance of strong Obama supporters in it, but this is the short summary of their impressions of each speech:

McCain's: Yawn-worthy
Clinton's: Tacky and graceless
Obama's: HOLY SHIT THIS GUY IS GOOD!!

In any case, the first stage of the interminable process of replacing George W Bush at is nearly over. Here is an electoral map of where things currently stand for the actual Presidential election itself.

Apropos of nothing in particular, something I've been wondering for a while now: why does DailyKos have the nickname "Great Orange Satan"?

The people's choice?

What the Daily Show has for some time been calling the Long, Flat, Seemingly Endless Bataan Death March to the White House proceeds apace.

Today was a meeting to decide the fate of the delegates in Michigan and Florida. Look it up if you want to find the exact details, I'm getting thoroughly sick of the whole thing. Bottom line: the two states will have delegates seated, but the number of delegates will be cut by 50% for each. Some Michigan delegates will also be apportioned to Obama, although Hillary still gets the majority of them.

To summarise the objections from the Clinton camp to Obama's nomination that still exist, as well as some brand new ones:
1) Hillary Clinton is leading in the popular vote
2) Hillary Clinton beats in John McCain in the general, while Obama loses
3) A black, racist liberal elitist like Obama cannot possibly win the general under any circumstances.
4) Awarding any Michigan delegates to Obama at all is unfair and undemocratic because he chose to remove his name from the ballot, therefore receiving no delegates is entirely his own fault.

Argh.

For now, I only want to deal with (1), and mainly because what I'm about to say is I think one of those unpopular things that needs to be said: the popular vote in these Democratic Primaries is not a valid metric of what the majority of people want. You can think Michigan and Florida for that.

Because Obama was not on the ballot in Michigan, people who wanted to vote for him were not able to do so. I have also personally communicated with people who chose not to vote at all in either the Florida or Michigan Primaries because they had been told in advance that their votes would not count. Without these two groups voting, the existing vote tallies in those two states do not accurately reflect the will of the people in those two states. Therefore, including them in the overall popular vote tally, as Hillary Clinton does, is wrong. The fix? There isn't one: an accurate "popular vote" tally that includes all 50 states and sundry other competitions (Puerto Rico, Guam, Democrats Abroad, etc.) is no longer possible.

Actually it'd be enough to discredit the "popular vote tally" as a valid metric just by pointing out the absurdity of including a state in which 0% of all votes were awarded to Obama, but (a) I wanted to be thorough, and (b) as stated above, many Clinton supporters are now saying that it's Obama's own fault that he received no votes in Michigan.

Hillary Clinton should not drop out....yet

An editorial from Motherjones is getting some well-deserved linkage around a lot of blogs. The most important bit is where it highlights what Clinton's three options are now, and the ramifications of them:

First, keep fighting like nothing has changed. When their candidate is challenged, Clinton supporters respond with huge monetary shows of support. And when their careers are challenged, the Clintons themselves kick it into another gear. Hillary Clinton can double down on the upcoming primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky (where she leads by large margins), ratchet up the calls to seat Michigan and Florida, make a zillion phone calls to superdelegates every day, and hope that Obama gets caught in another Reverend Wright-esque sandstorm. (It wouldn't hurt to drop the gas tax pander.) Rumors persist about one last piece of truly nuclear opposition research the Clinton campaign has held back about Obama. It could release some such thing; the only danger is that if Clinton does not win the nomination, the Democratic nominee may be fatally wounded. But wounding the nominee is obviously not a concern if the Clinton campaign chooses this option, anyway.

Second, she can drop out immediately. Despite the calls for this that are certain to ring through Obama-friendly parts of the blogosphere today, this may not be the best option for Obama. If Clinton drops out this week, Obama may lose the upcoming primaries in West Virginia and Kentucky to someone who is not on the ballot.

Third, lay the groundwork for a graceful exit in a few weeks. Assuming that Clinton sees the end of the road on the horizon, this choice has several advantages over option number two. First, the Clintons have donated a lot of their own money to the campaign; staying in and continuing to raise funds allows them to retire some of that debt. Second, the last two weeks of the campaign can take a conciliatory tone, attempting to convince Democratic voters who have cast their lot with Clinton that Obama ain't so bad after all. This would go a long way in rehabilitating Bill and Hillary Clinton's reputations within the Democratic Party, and position Hillary for a vice presidential selection, should she be interested. If she hopes to be a future Senate Majority Leader or a candidate in 2012, this route may be the necessary one.

I find myself thinking that option three is indeed the best one, politically speaking. So, I suspect, would most Democratic powerbrokers. Should Obama be the nominee, the realpolitik of it is that he most likely cannot within the general election without the support of people who are currently supporting Hillary Clinton. The terms of Hillary Clinton's exit would have to be such that there is no perception of being unfairly forced out, and that there is a call for Democratic supporters of Hillary to be Democrat supporters first and Hillary supporters second. Ideally such a call would come from Hillary Clinton herself.

The first, not being forced out, requires all remaining primaries to be held. Yes, it's tough, but as someone else once told me, the best way for Obama to win the primaries is to, simply, win the primaries. There must be no doubt who came first overall.

The second, the call for unity, reminds me of just how ugly and dirty a game politics can be. How would it go? The Democratic powerbrokers would be having a little conversation with Hillary, saying something like "you can stay in, frankly we don't think you're going to win, but we're not going to subject you to the humiliation of a lockout. We'll even throw in a nice little earner for you later down the track: how does Senate Majority Leader sound? In return for us being so nice and not chucking you out on your ear, you stop playing attack politics on Obama and start saying good things about him every chance you get. You'll endorse him when he wins, right? Make sure your supporters will back him even though he's not you? Good. Then you can stay in, and keep telling people you're in it to win it, although of course we all know different (*evil chuckles*)."

That last bit was gratuitous, but I do think politics can get that nasty. I'm under no illusions that Barack Obama will magically stop things being nasty, but of course I don't think it's down to him to stop it. It's down to us.

Maybe the Democratic Party ought to split in two....

This is one of my more crackheaded ideas I think, but there's a certain seductive logic to it....

With the Republican Party so discredited in the electorate, and with the reins of power within the Republican Party so tightly held by the far right, is it possible, as I've seen suggested, that the Republican Party is actually dying? Will this be the final election in which they compete as a serious contender?

If the Republican Party is dying, the Democratic Party would be poised to become the only major political party in existence. I instinctively distrust one party rule, no matter which party. I assume that most voters in democratic societies feel much the same way, and would look for a way to redress the balance. A new political party would eventually spring up - perhaps forming when, say, a large and dissatisfied bloc within the existing single party tears away and strikes out on their own.

Which brings me to the rift in the Democratic Party between supporters of Obama and supporters of Clinton. And the crackheaded idea that, if all the above is going to happen eventually, why wait? Divide the party between the two candidates now, circumventing the problem of trying to get the two sides to line up behind one candidate, and get on with it.

The problem of course is that the Republican party is not completely discredited in the eyes of the vast majority of the American voting public. Not yet, anyway. And fielding both Obama and Clinton under separate party banners could, in the winner takes all system of the US Presidential election, very easily hand the presidency to McCain by default.

And yet....I have yet to see a poll which offers people a choice between three preferred candidates rather than two. I wonder if such a poll would paint a slightly different picture to the two-person preferred question that every pollster has been asking. Plus with optional voting, turnout matters, and in the 2008 primaries the Democrats have been absolutely killing the Republicans in turnout, even long before McCain finally clinched the nomination. More democrats are motivated to take part in this election. A lot more.

Interestingly, the rivalry between Clinton and Obama is also at least partially responsible for the massive increase in turnout for the Democrats. If both continued to run under separate party banners, would that still result in increased turnout for both at the presidential election? Enough for both of them to gain more votes than McCain? Could a continuing focus on Obama vs Clinton conceivably turn the resulting lack of media focus on John McCain into a positive for Obama and Clinton, as "lack of investigation of McCain" turns into "McCain's campaign founders due to lack of media interest"?

Like I said, crackheaded, and the actual effect of such an official split would most likely be to end up handing the presidency to John McCain by default (which would at least be slightly amusing given that he only really won the Republican nomination by default when all the other candidates proved too sucky). But still...

Hillary's gas tax holiday: why she's really pushing it

First, I have to give Hillary Clinton credit for successfully hijacking the issue from John McCain and making herself get identified in the media as the most prominent proponent of it.

But yes, the gas tax holiday idea is economically stupid, not least because, as Harvard professor N. Gregory Mankiw said in this article: "What you learn in Economics 101 is that if producers can't produce much more, when you cut the tax on that good the tax is kept . . . by the suppliers and is not passed on to consumers". Cut the tax and the oil companies will continue to charge what the market can bear, which means they'll jack up the price so that it was exactly the same as it was before the tax was cut.

But it's not at all politically stupid once you figure out what the real goal is: it's not to reduce gas prices, it's to make Hillary Clinton more popular.

So the oil companies will raise their prices if the tax goes away? Then it's not Hillary Clinton's fault that the gas tax holiday hasn't reduced the price, it's the fault of the evil old oil companies for "denying hard-working Americans the relief of the Hillary Clinton[tm] gas tax holiday". The fact that such "denying of relief" is an economic inevitability must be carefully ignored, indeed must be actively suppressed. Hence you see Hillary painting all those pointing out the truth of what will happen as "elitists" who are "working against the interests of ordinary Americans".

The image she's aiming for is one of Hillary Clinton heroically sticking up for the little guy in the face of evil special interest groups that are putting profit before people. The actual result of the gas tax holiday is irrelevant to the effort of painting this image. Criticism of the results of the policy, while important to make, won't make the slightest difference in whether she pushes this idea or not. Indeed, they can be helpful in painting the picture she's trying to create if she can get the objectors identified with the evil special interest groups she's presenting herself as opposing. It's all about the image, not the policy.

What's really disturbing about this is such an image strategy depends very heavily not just on voters not being well-versed in how the gas tax holiday would actually play out, but on making a virtue of ignorance: people must not know what would actually happen and why. The ramifications of that are a little too disturbing for me to contemplate right now.

US politics: the Obamaniacs vs the Clintonistas

For the last few weeks I've been scouting about the blogosphere, reading opinions and comments about the US Presidential Primaries, particularly as regards the two Democratic front-runners, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The last day or two things seem to have gotten really ugly between their online supporters. There was much less disagreement over principle and much more name-calling, mud-slinging and disgust at the alleged negative traits of all the followers of the opposing candidate.

I'm trying not to get sucked in, but I have two observations to make based on the existence of this acrimony, and on the candidates involved:
1. it seems Hillary Clinton is living up to her reputation as a polarising and divisive figure.
2. It seems Barack Obama is not living up to his reputation as a unifying and transcendant one.

US politics: the Deomcratic candidates and the Press

I think I've come up with a way to figure out how to predict the outcome of the Democratic Primaries: examine what the American press says, and whatever the opposite of what they're saying is, that's what'll happen.

Obaman winning Iowa was a "surprise win". Clinton winning New Hampshire was a "shock comeback". Now the story appears to be that the race will be a tightly-fought contest between the two of them. If the pattern holds, then the Democratic candidate for the Presidency is going to be John Edwards. The media just doesn't seem to think his campaign is worth covering. On that basis, it's probably the one most worth watching.

This isn't just some contrarian tendency on my part. I think there's a significant perception amongst some American voters that the American press is trying to actively determine who should be the next President rather than simply report on the race. At least that's the impression I get from one of Andrew Sullivan's readers who stated:

I think Obama won Iowa because voters resented Hillary's coronation.

I think Hillary won New Hampshire because voters resented Obama's coronation.

Are Americans actively trying to go against the media narratives that are being pushed upon them?