Why We Need Obama

Friday, March 7, 2008

The Implications of This Election

I just read a new piece over on Andrew Sullivan's blog that sums up a lot of the feelings I've been having lately. So, I'll let him say it for me because he's just that much more eloquent than me:

From Andrew Sullivan, The Clinton Rules:

The new meme is that politics has returned to normal and that this election will now be run by Clinton rules. Many are relieved by this. You could sense the palpable discomfort among many in Washington that their world might actually shift a little next year. But if elections are primarily about fear and mud, and who best operates in a street fight, Beltway comfort returns. This we know. This we understand. This we already have the language to describe. And, the feeling goes, the Clintons can win back the White House in this atmosphere. What she is doing to Obama she can try to do to McCain. Maybe Limbaugh will help her out again.

What I think this misses are the cultural and social consequences of beating Obama (or McCain) this way. I don't mean beating Obama because the Clintons' message is more persuasive, or because the Clintons' healthcare plan is better, or because she has a better approach to Iraq. I mean: beating him by a barrage of petty attacks, by impugning his clear ability to be commander-in-chief, by toying with questions about his "Muslim past", by subtle invocation of the race card, by intermittent reliance on gender identity politics, by taking faux offense to keep the news cycle busy ("shame on you, Barack Obama!") and so on.

If the Clintons beat Obama this way, I have a simple prediction. It will mean a mass flight from the process. It will alter the political consciousness of an entire generation of young voters - against any positive interaction with the political process for the foreseeable future. I'm not sure that Washington yet understands the risk the Clintons are taking with their own party and the future of American politics.

The reason so many people have re-engaged with politics this year is because many sense their country is in a desperate state and because only one candidate has articulated a vision and a politics big enough to address it without dividing the country down the middle again. For the first time in decades, a candidate has emerged who seems able to address the country's and the world's needs with a message that does not rely on Clintonian parsing or Rovian sleaze. For the first time since the 1960s, we have a potential president able to transcend the victim-mongering identity politics so skillfully used by the Clintons.

If this promise is eclipsed because the old political system conspires to strangle it at birth, the reaction from the new influx of voters will be severe. The Clintons will all but guarantee they will lose a hefty amount of it in the fall, as they richly deserve to. Some will gravitate to McCain; others will be so disillusioned they will withdraw from politics for another generation. If the Clintons grind up and kill the most promising young leader since Kennedy, and if they do it not on the strength of their arguments, but by the kind of politics we have seen them deploy, the backlash will be deep and severe and long. As it should be.

He has a million little donors. He has brought many, many Republicans and Independents to the brink of re-thinking their relationship with the Democratic party. And he has won the majority of primaries and caucuses and has a majority of the delegates and popular vote. This has been a staggering achievement - one that has already made campaign history.

If the Clintons, after having already enjoyed presidential power for eight long years, destroy this movement in order to preserve their own grip on privilege and influence in Democratic circles, it will be more than old-fashioned politics. It will be a generational moment - as formative as 1968. Killing it will be remembered for a very, very long time. And everyone will remember who did it - and why.

Monitor: Any emphasis above is mine.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Obama Beats McCain by 12 in New Poll

There is a new Washington Post/ABC News poll. The title of the article is a bit misleading, however, as Obama has a 12-point advantage while Clinton only has a 6-point "edge":

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) leads McCain, who captured the delegates needed to claim the Republican nomination Tuesday night, by 12 percentage points among all adults in the poll; Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) holds a six-point lead over the GOP nominee. Both Democrats are buoyed by moderates and independents when going head to head with McCain and benefit from sustained negative public assessments of President Bush and the war in Iraq.

Clinton's "Big State" Myth - Why Obama is Still the Most Electable

New must-read article on the Huffington Post that discusses Clinton's "Big State" Myth and why Obama is still the most electable candidate. The Clinton Campaign's post March 4th message is to forget about the delegate count and nominate Hillary because she can win the big states Democrats need in November. See the article for the various reasons why this doesn't hold water. For example:

Most of the "Big States" she has won are not battleground states in the fall. New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and California are solid blue states where Obama would do as well or better than Clinton in a general election against McCain.

Obama puts in play a panoply of states where Clinton would have a much tougher time. Obama could potentially win Virginia (13 electoral votes), Missouri (11 electoral votes) and even Mississippi (whose population is 40% African American -- 6 electoral votes). He would be considerably more competitive than Clinton in other battleground states like Colorado (9 electoral votes), Iowa (7 electoral votes), Wisconsin (10 electoral votes), Minnesota (10 electoral votes) and Michigan (17 electoral votes). The same goes for New Hampshire (4 electoral votes) -- a state where McCain will work hard to woo independents among whom Obama did much better than Clinton in this year's primary.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Rolling Stone Endorses Obama

New must-read cover article in Rolling Stone:

It's Presidents day, two weeks before the Texas primary, and Adam Ukman has come to the small city of San Marcos to train precinct captains for Barack Obama...

This evening, more than eighty residents of San Marcos have crammed into a yellow clapboard recreation center on a street dotted with shacks that date from the Jim Crow era. "Our job is not to run in here to tell you how it's going to be," Ukman tells them. "This is your campaign. Not our campaign"...

[T]he Obama campaign has shattered the top-down, command-and-control, broadcast-TV model that has dominated American politics since the early 1960s. "They have taken the bottom-up campaign and absolutely perfected it," says Joe Trippi, who masterminded Dean's Internet campaign in 2004. "It's light-years ahead of where we were four years ago. They'll have 100,000 people in a state who have signed up on their Web site and put in their zip code. Now, paid organizers can get in touch with people at the precinct level and help them build the organization bottom up. That's never happened before. It never was possible before."

Football Analogy: Obama Going to the Playoffs

From a reader over at Andrew Sullivan:

While last night was disheartening, its a bit like losing a football game at the end of the season when you have mathematically clinched a playoff spot. Sure a win would have been nice, you always play to win. But everyone knows your going to the playoffs and your main goal is to try and stay healthy and thats what Obama will do. Its the other team that tries trick plays and dirty tactics because their chances are gone.

Obama's Strong Delegate Lead

I just received an e-mail from the Obama campaign with a really compelling analysis of the delegate math from last night's contest. It is really striking:

Our projections show the most likely outcome of yesterday's elections will be that Hillary Clinton gained 187 delegates, and we gained 183.
That's a net gain of 4 delegates out of more than 370 delegates available from all the states that voted.
For comparison, that's less than half our net gain of 9 delegates from the District of Columbia alone. It's also less than our net gain of 8 from Nebraska, or 12 from Washington State. And it's considerably less than our net gain of 33 delegates from Georgia.

Here's the rest of the email:

The task for the Clinton campaign yesterday was clear. In order to have a plausible path to the nomination, they needed to score huge delegate victories and cut into our lead.
They failed.

It's clear, though, that Senator Clinton wants to continue an increasingly desperate, increasingly negative -- and increasingly expensive -- campaign to tear us down.
That's her decision. But it's not stopping John McCain, who clinched the Republican nomination last night, from going on the offensive. He's already made news attacking Barack, and that will only become more frequent in the coming days.
Right now, it's essential for every single supporter of Barack Obama to step up and help fight this two-front battle. In the face of attacks from Hillary Clinton and John McCain, we need to be ready to take them on.
Will you make an online donation of $250 right now?
https://donate.barackobama.com/delegatemath
The chatter among pundits may have gotten better for the Clinton campaign after last night, but by failing to cut into our lead, the math -- and their chances of winning -- got considerably worse.

Today, we still have a lead of more than 150 delegates, and there are only 611 pledged delegates left to win in the upcoming contests.
By a week from today, we will have competed in Wyoming and Mississippi. Two more states and 45 more delegates will be off the table.
But if Senator Clinton wants to continue this, let's show that we're ready.

Make an online donation of $250 now to show you're willing to fight for this:
https://donate.barackobama.com/delegatemath

This nomination process is an opportunity to decide what our party needs to stand for in this election.
We can either take on John McCain with a candidate who's already united Republicans and Independents against us, or we can do it with a campaign that's united Americans from all parties around a common purpose.

We can debate John McCain about who can clean up Washington by nominating a candidate who's taken more money from lobbyists than he has, or we can do it with a campaign that hasn't taken a dime of their money because we've been funded by you.

We can present the American people with a candidate who stood shoulder-to-shoulder with McCain on the worst foreign policy disaster of our generation, and agrees with him that George Bush deserves the benefit of the doubt on Iran, or we can nominate someone who opposed the war in Iraq from the beginning and will not support a march to war with Iran.

John McCain may have a long history of straight talk and independent thinking, but he has made the decision in this campaign to offer four more years of the very same policies that have failed us for the last eight.

We need a Democratic candidate who will present the starkest contrast to those failed policies of the past.

And that candidate is Barack Obama.

The Clinton Death March

I usually try to keep this blog mostly about Obama's positives and steer clear of some of the Clinton-bashing you might otherwise see. But, after last night, I have a ball of angst in my gut and I need some catharsis.

So, here you go, from The Huffington Post:

To watch Hillary Clinton's "victory" speech last night in which she extravagantly celebrated coming from 20 points ahead one month ago in Ohio was to see personified everything the Clintons are.
It's not that the speech was full of their typical pettiness -- "No candidate in recent history Democratic or Republican has won the White House without winning the Ohio primary" -- or the pathetic warping of Obama's Yes We Can into Yes We Will. It was more a general feeling of numbness. Of being in a parallel universe where the only relevance is a news cycle.

There is nothing to celebrate in the way Clinton won last night. A ringing phone at 3AM, accusations of being a Muslim, and mocking the power of words to achieve what? Democrats are supposed to rally round because this is what's needed to defeat the myriad evils that comprise Bushism? Nope...this is what's needed by the Clintons to stay quasi-mathematically alive to distort reality another day.

OK maybe we're fools (for some of you there's no maybe), but where has Obama ever attacked Clinton with even one tenth the unfairness she employs daily? What unfounded media attacks has she suffered? Hasn't anyone seen Dan Abrams doing the same show night after god awful night charging media bias against Hillary because they have the temerity to report when she loses? Or Tom Brokaw droning hosannas to Clinton's warrior mentality?

Yet now, if Obama finally stands up and fights back measure for measure...oh the hue and cry that shall rain down upon the land as Ann Lewis scurries from camera to camera to file a PFA (Protection From Analysis).

The bottom line is, just like the Bush administration, facts do not matter to the Clintons. Neither do words nor basic decency. The Clinton machine will spout scum 24/7 all the way to Denver and she still won't win the nomination democratically, let alone defeat McCain. Yet perhaps by the convention, the ultimate irony for the Taylor Marsh Vagina Uber Alles-types who populate this site will be clear even to them...Hillary Clinton is a dick.

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Friday, March 7, 2008

The Implications of This Election

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Obama Beats McCain by 12 in New Poll

Clinton's "Big State" Myth - Why Obama is Still the Most Electable

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Rolling Stone Endorses Obama

Football Analogy: Obama Going to the Playoffs

Obama's Strong Delegate Lead

The Clinton Death March

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