Howard Dean beats Mark Penn

Yesterday I talked a little bit about Hillary Clinton's big state strategy, whereby she's ceded lots of small states to Obama to focus primarily on the "big" prizes and hoping that they put her over the top. Today we're seeing this strategy bleed over into the rhetorical side of the campaign, which you generally don't want to happen.

Allow me to illustrate. This morning MSNBC let us in on this gem from Clinton's unionbusting campaign architect Mark Penn:

“Could we possibly have a nominee who hasn't won any of the significant states -- outside of Illinois?”

Wow, thanks Mark! Myself and the other tens of millions of people living between Nevada and Virginia will just file that away with all those coastal elitist jokes about "flyover country!"

Other campaign spokespeople have been dismissing many of Obama's wins because they were in caucuses. From the Boston Globe:

But Clinton will not concede the race to Obama if he wins a greater number of pledged delegates by the end of the primary season, and will count on the 796 elected officials and party bigwigs to put her over the top, if necessary, said Clinton's communications director, Howard Wolfson.

"I want to be clear about the fact that neither campaign is in a position to win this nomination without the support of the votes of the superdelegates,'' Wolfson told reporters in a conference call.

"We don't make distinctions between delegates chosen by million of voters in a primary and those chosen between tens of thousands in caucuses,'' Wolfson said. "And we don't make distinctions when it comes to elected officials'' who vote as superdelegates at the convention. [emphasis mine]

Of course, it's primarily small, western states that hold caucuses, and Obama has swept all but one at this point. Interestingly, it's also small western states that have seen the most drift toward the Democratic party in the last 8 years. Montana elected a Dem governor, a Dem Senator, and turned over one of their statehouses. Colorado has done the same, and is likely to flip the second senator this year. Idaho nearly flipped one of its two House seats in '06, and Wyoming came within a handful of votes of doing the same thing with its one lonely seat. New Mexico, a caucus state that will probably go for Clinton, has a Hispanic Dem governor, voted for Bill and for Al and also has a red Senate seat that's likely to flip blue. Iowa and Missouri went for Bill as well (Missouri is considered especially important in presidential races), and Missouri has flipped a senate seat and may flip their governor this year. Even Arizona, John McCain's homestate, flipped a House seat or two and has a governor who's not only a Democrat but a woman, Janet Napolitano (there's also a woman Democratic governor in Kansas).

Needless to say, small western states have proven themselves to be plenty "significant" in the makeup of Congress and even in presidential elections, even the ones with caucuses. Moreover, candidates up and down the ticket are connected to each other and to the party as a whole; when a presidential candidate shows up in a congressional district, it generally boosts the party's congressional/Senate/local candidate, too, and a solidly built and funded party office will help elect Democrats to the school board and the presidency alike. Nevertheless, the penny wise, pound foolish strategy of ceding entire regions of the country to the other side has been a staple of Democratic groupthink for decades. Remember how crazy Howard Dean was for advocating a "50 state strategy?" In May '05 on CNN, for instance, Paul Begala said about Dean's strategy of, ya know, actually contesting elections in red states:

He has raised $74 million and spent $64 million. He says it's a long-term strategy. But what he has spent it on, apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose. That's not how you build a party. You win elections. That's how you build a party.

In the next election, Democrats gained 31 House seats and 6 Senate seats, including House seats in North Carolina, Kentucky, Texas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Kansas, Colorado, and Nevada, plus 3 of Indiana's 9 House seats and Senate seats in Montana, Virginia, Missouri, and Ohio.

The Clinton strategy is a perfect representation of so many previous Democratic candidates' strategies, and perfectly illustrates how they managed to lose elections they should have won. How can a Democrat win almost every big state, California, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Florida, and Michigan, and still lose, Mark Penn asks? Hell, just ask Al Gore and John Kerry.

Clinton takes NH

Well, I feel better having blown it knowing that EVERYONE blew this one. It looks like one of two things (or perhaps both) happened:

1. pollsters noted that they underestimated Obama's performance in Iowa and dramatically overcompensated.

2. something happened today to shift the vote some 10 percentage points.

Maybe Hillary's moment of letting her guard down affected a lot of people, as well as the press' (and John Edwards') callous and misogynistic treatment of Hillary's momentary vulnerability, the revelation that Chris Matthews and the high school popularity police are going to shove her into crass gender stereotypes no matter what she does, alternating between calling her a weakling who throws a tantrum when she loses, a manipulative charlatan who intentionally turns on the waterworks to make people feel sorry for her, and a ball-busting bitch.

I can sympathize; it pissed me off, too.

I wish Obama had won this one, but in all honesty it is nice to see voters openly reject that shit. The one thing that really galls me, though, is that this probably means unionbuster Mark Penn lives on.

Hillary Clinton, the best Republican candidate of this cycle

So here's Hillary, willing to make a nonsensical argument in favor of disenfranchising college students:

In a jab at Obama's efforts to encourage out-of-state students who attend college in Iowa to caucus, Clinton said the caucuses are only for people who live in this state.

"This is a process for Iowans. This needs to be all about Iowa, and people who live here, people who pay taxes here," she told the Clear Lake crowd.

So people who reside in Iowa for 9+months at a time for 4 years (and that's assuming they don't take summer school) don't "live here." And I suppose the college students who work and (one would assume) pay federal AND STATE income taxes, as well as sales taxes, etc. aren't really "paying taxes here."

And what about the working poor, whose taxes are typically refunded by the federal government? Do they deserve to vote if they don't contribute to the annual budget? What about if they actually sap funds via food stamps or WIC?

But Hillary's willing to make these asinine statements and try to discourage youth from voting if it'll cost Obama more votes. Just like she's perfectly willing to deride eliminating the cap on payroll taxes (which is at $90k/year), as a "trillion dollar tax hike on the middle class." Or willing to criticize Obama for having the audacity to say that he wouldn't drop nukes in Pakistan (which, to turn on my broken record, is a nuclear nation) by saying she "wouldn't take any options off the table." Nice FOX News impression there, Hil! Way to fight the good fight against the vast rightwing conspiracy!

Then again, what else should we expect from the candidate who voted for war with Iraq without ever bothering to read the year's NIE and that, even after 4 years of quagmire and staggering incompetence in Iraq, voted to give Bush the crucial pretext for war with Iran. What else should we expect from the candidate who sponsored a constitutional amendment criminalizing flag-burning? The candidate whose campaign is run by union-busting, Blackwater-representing Mark Penn?

it's NOT because she's a woman

Joan Walsh at Salon mentions this ridiculous defense of Clinton, this attempt to frame Tuesday's debate as men beating up on a woman, and ultimately rejects it. I agree with her (obviously). Alternatively, there's a lot of dissing Obama et al. for insinuating that Clinton "played the gender card," as well, but I think they're wrong as well.

This is a very stupid time for Hillary's campaign and supporters to play the gender card (and yes, Mark Penn, her campaign manager, most certainly played the card, and coincidentally on the same day as her speech about the "all-boys' club" of Washington politics), because it's patently bullshit here. The other candidates piled on her for one reason, and one reason alone: she is winning. They're not scared of a woman running the government, they're scared of themselves not winning. This is not a difficult concept to grasp. How many people would have found it appropriate for Obama, if it were him instead, to play the race card as soon as he got attacked?

And as far as li'l Russ goes, yes, yes he did lay an ambush for Hillary. Yes, he was gunning for her and not the other candidates. No, it wasn't very professional, and yes, he is a douchebag for doing it, but there's a much simpler, more obvious explanation than sexism or anti-Hillaryism for why he targetted Clinton yesterday: ratings. Russ is moderating the 827th Democratic debate on the the least-watched cable news channel in a Democratic primary that's looking increasingly like a cage match between Bruce Lee and Dr. Stephen Hawking; he needed to up the ante here to get some people talking about this one. Meanwhile, Obama's been promising all week that he'll finally start bringing in the heavy artillery, giving Russ a shot to draw out some real fireworks from the candidates, so he does what any irresponsible, ratings-driven pundit would do: he eggs them on.

There's nothing new about this: the primary candidates and media ganged up on Howard Dean just as badly (even worse, in my opinion) once he threatened to sow up the nomination before they'd gotten enough of their precious horse race. Again, it didn't hurt that they actually didn't like him, either, but this is business. And more importantly for this post, it worked. So why wouldn't they try it again?

And look, as far as I'm concerned, a lot of the criticisms leveled at her were absolutely accurate and deserving. The ambush by Russert is thus, in a way, irrelevant, because Obama, Edwards, and Dodd walked into the room intending to beat up on her, and they would have no matter what Russert had asked.