Liberal Thought

Well, I have to admit that it’s a little funny how much coverage an essentially meaningless primary is getting tonight. Sure, Obama is losing really, really badly in West Virginia (like, totally, really badly), but it seemed all week as though all the media outlets had agreed that WV and on were just show contests. Now nytimes.com has gone so far as to create a bar graph graphic on its front page showing Clinton’s margin of victory, county by county. She appears to have won them all. By a lot. Seriously, it looks like some West Virginians founded new counties of their own just so they could then vote for Clinton in them.

I suppose this is news, that the presumptive Democratic nominee is being roundly trounced by a candidate who most of us think won’t be in the race a month from now, even if we knew it was going to happen. But the utter…thoroughness…of this coverage is intimidating. I suppose it would be less fascinating if it weren’t inexplicably sharing the headlines with the earthquake and cyclone that have killed tens of thousands of people in the past week and a half.

Meredith, apparently Sergio Vieira de Mello’s death caused the President to give up golf. Nice to know he cares.

A couple of things I learned from that last post:

1) Tagging “HuckaBurgers” four times will only yield you a count of one in the tag cloud.

2) The full excecution of this revolution in Tag Cloud Theory (I call it this in the hope that one day, I will be able to earn a PhD in it) will require more posts than I think are tasteful. But let me make one plea: tag your posts! And do it in the “code” window of your writing thingy, or else it seems that it won’t work! Together we can change the tag cloud. I hope.

3) [bonus] The day Ryan figures out how to get italics into the tag cloud will mark the beginning of the deconstructive period of Tag Cloud Theory. May that day come soon.

I don’t know about you, but I’m getting pretty tired of seeing Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in big, bold letters every time I open AmhPub. (This from the Liberal Thoughter, and that’s another story.) So I’ve decided to do something about it. This post is tagged with anything I could think of that would add…variety…to the tag cloud. Am I defeating the purpose of the tag cloud? Maybe. Do I feel bad about it?

Well?

Sorry for the Slate obsession. But I love that they did this. If you’re freaking out as much as I am about Gary, Indiana, get on it.

[Update, 1:04 a.m.] Eric Schultz gives his math below. Union County is all out, and there are 7,000 or so residents, which translates to 1900-3800 votes and a likely margin of a few hundred for Clinton. Apparently Gary is mostly in, so the margin for the rest of Lake could conceivably be below 65, or 75, his total in the first 28% of returns there. It’s going to be Rush Limbaugh thin–but the damage, I think, is done. Huffington Post has the headline “The Presumptive Nominee”; Drudge has “The Nominee”; Tim Russert just declared Obama the Heir Presumptive on MSNBC…Win or lose by just a few thousand, which we may not know until morning, Senator Clinton looks like she’s well on her way to remaining Senator Clinton. Or–gasp!–Vice President Clinton? As an Obama supporter who once thought that an Obama-Clinton ticket would have been asinine, I must admit I’ve changed my mind. I can’t think of another VP candidate with more draw to the ticket than Hillary Clinton. The question would be: would she want it, and would he have her? Both open questions, as of now.

[Update, 1:09 a.m.] Looks like Gary was all in by 1. The rest of Lake is in, and Obama’s margin there is only 55-35 overall. Clinton will win Indiana by about 22,000 votes overall, not a Rush Limbaugh-thin margin, but thin enough, to the tune of 50.9%-49.1%. 1.8% won’t net her nearly any delegates, and her popular vote gains from Pennsylvania are almost entirely gone. More in the morning, I’m sure, once we hear from the Clinton camp.

A couple of dumb Op-Eds in this morning’s New York Times: one by Bill Kristol, which is actually not that dumb, but includes this infuriating remark:

Some voters might think it would have been nice if Obama had been as angry in March at Wright’s disrespect to the United States of America as he was in April at Wright’s disrespect to Barack Obama.

Kristol is referring to Obama’s annoyance that Rev. Wright had attributed political motives to the distance Obama has now forced between them. I was originally going to equivocate as to the merits of the sentence quoted above, but let’s not. I’m tired of politicians taking umbrage on behalf of the United States of America abstracted, or telling us what the “American people” think, or telling us who’s “out of the mainstream.” Republicans and Democrats alike persist in this kind of nonsense, but when a pundit tries to pass off such stuff as analysis, it’s enough to make you upchuck the HuckaBurger you had for lunch. I don’t think that Obama was ever “angry…at Wright’s disrespect to the United States of America;” if he had been, his anger would have been unjustified. Obama was, however, very justifiably concerned with Wright’s disrespect to the growth of the American people, who have contended with the persistent evils of racism in every generation, and in every generation anew. Those who were outraged by Wright’s disrespect towards the United States in abstract were abstractly outraged. Let’s call it the Flagpin Fallacy: If one proclaims adoration for American symbols, and defends every slight against them as they were idols, then one must be especially attuned to the spirit of the people of America, and be their most resolute defender. Right? Wait, shouldn’t that go the other way? What was the American flag worth when Benedict Arnold rode beneath it? And is George W. Bush, flag pin firmly fitted to lapel, more of the spirit of the republic than Abraham Lincoln, who so boldly eschewed the stovepipe hat-pin? If you ask me, one of the few things about which Barack Obama can take legitimate umbrage is Barack Obama. Most anything else, and it’s a bit patronizing, which I’ve written about before.

The second piece, also admittedly not that dumb, is by Rhodes Cook, and tells us all why Hillary Clinton can win by amassing a lead in the popular vote. (Quick aside: she can’t, at least not without the Elder Wand, or perhaps some magic beans.) Well, I agree that it sure would be helpful as far as convincing superdelegates is concerned, but unfortunately for Senator Clinton, most superdelegates can count. Cook can, too, but oddly:

…Mrs. Clinton boasts that she has the lead already, but her count includes the votes in the unsanctioned primaries in Florida and Michigan. A fairer calculation would eliminate the ballots cast in those two states, as well as the votes from caucuses where no statewide tally of the actual vote was compiled. (Those states are Iowa, Maine, Nevada and Washington; Mr. Obama won three of them.) Territories that do not possess any Electoral College votes should be ruled out, too.

Time for a list:

1) In the first place, Cook conflates the unfairness of counting states whose vote tallies were not compiled with the manifest injustice (yeah, it’s really bad) of counting a state in which Obama was not on the ballot (Michigan) and one in which, by Democratic party rule, no campaign was allowed to take place (Florida). While it might not be possible to add their tallies to the popular vote total, the Iowa, Maine, Nevada and Washington caucuses were all legitimate primaries under Democratic party rules, and can’t be left out of consideration just because it’s inconvenient.

2) As for the last little part about ruling out “territories that do not possess any Electoral College votes.” Why? This isn’t the general election, and the Electoral College doesn’t apply. It’s true that it would be awfully smart of the Democratic party to calibrate their primary system in order to deliver the best general election candidate, but they are under no obligation to do so. So why not count them? Cook doesn’t justify it.

3) 1) and 2) add up to this: it becomes pretty clear that when you have to qualify a popular vote total by not counting certain caucus states and territories, the popular vote doesn’t mean much anymore. Wait–isn’t the race decided by delegates? Oh, yeah: the popular vote never meant anything to begin with! There’s really no fair way to tally the popular vote, because nobody ever agreed on any rules to do so in advance. Fortunately, we did agree on how we’d count delegates, and we also agreed that the candidate with the most of thosewould be the nominee. Of course, we also agreed that superdelegates could choose their candidate based on whatever criteria they choose–and if the bogus method proposed above does it for them, may they live and be well, but they were asking to be sold.

Meredith Case points out yet another fine piece on Slate, this one by Timothy Noah: apparently we’re all delusional.

Bruce Ackerman and Jennifer Nou have an interesting piece on Slate about that Indiana voting rights case. 24th Amendment intrigue–including the suggestion that originalist interpretations can only claim to work if you’re willing to consult all the relevant text.

(Correction: In my original post I had only attributed the piece to Bruce Ackerman. Call it LJST-03 bias. Mea culpa.)

On Tuesday night, Congressman John Olver of our Massachusetts 1st congressional district came to talk to a group of students in Paino Lecture Hall. Here’s a brief recap of what happened, and some impressions of our congressman (who also happens to be the husband of Professor Rose Olver, Amherst College’s first female tenure-track professor):

1. Questions swirled, of course, about the primary campaign. Congressman Olver explained his rationale for waiting to endorse (he, like the other Democrats in Congress, is a superdelegate, but unlike most, is uncommitted), which amounted to what you might expect: He’s waiting to see what happens, and also because he didn’t want to get out in front of his own district (which voted on February 5th, admittedly a long time ago). In his discussion, the congressman didn’t make any conclusive statements–he said he’d been called by both Clintons and Ted Kennedy on behalf of each campaign (respectively, obviously. Bill has not, as far as anyone knows, made calls on Obama’s behalf). Some folks listening really really carefully thought they could detect a hint of a preference for Obama, but that’s pure speculation and ought to be treated as such. In any event, it was encouraging to meet a responsible steward of the party’s fate. I stress responsible.

2. Iraq came up, along with the issue of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s command of the neophyte Democratic majority in Congress. Congressman Olver spoke highly of the Speaker’s emergent leadership of the Democratic caucus, a harder trick than we might expect, as he explained. As we know, plenty of the freshmen/women Dems in Congress are in centrist and center-right districts–so getting them to vote in a bloc with the liberal wing of the party on issues like Iraq puts them in direct electoral peril, and thus is very hard to do. Again, we kind of knew this already, and what else was he going to say–but it was still cool.

3. But not the coolest. This was the coolest: After two hours of questions and answers, and a brief discussion of Democratic trade policy, my buddy Meredith Case stopped the congressman and asked him about the failed Colombian trade deal, which the Democrats more or less killed (for now) a couple of weeks ago. Now, I don’t think the congressman was expecting to run into anyone with such frightening command of the facts of the situation. But he did. And the cool part was, he took it quite well. While doing his best to explain his position, and its origins, Congressman Olver kept stressing that he was constantly reassessing his own position on trade–and when Meredith was done, he scratched his head and earnestly said, “Maybe I need to reassess again.” How many times in your life do you get to witness a politician admit that he or she–perish the thought–might be wrong? Well, I can now count to one.

Their discussion touched on a divide within the Democratic party that has been broiling for a good while, both in Congress and in the electorate. On the one hand, segments of the party’s labor and working-class support often favor protectionist policies to keep production and jobs here; on the other, plenty subscribe to the Ec-11 mantra that trade makes everyone better off, even though it can have painful consequences in the short run. (That’s my simplistic summary–I’m not an economist, although I’m working on it.)

What troubles me and interests me all at once regarding this divide is that it’s not limited to trade– there’s a class divide within the Democratic Party, and if you ask me, Senator Hillary Clinton is on to it. I can’t think of any other reason she’d propose lifting the gas tax for the summer. Economic populism is one way to stir up votes among a big section of the party’s base.

So: that was a little scattered. But what are your thoughts? Take a position on the gas tax “holiday.” Take a position on the Colombian trade deal, and on free trade in general. Bring some facts to bear (please). These are debates essential to the continuing health of the Democratic party. Might as well have em out.

I’m sorry to do this, but it’s getting to be the time of year when the US Supreme Court hands down most of its decisions for the term… I know that Supreme Court opinions aren’t much fun to read, but that’s a pity, because with the judiciary as political as it’s become, some of the most immediate and often irreversible changes in the structure and character of our citizenship come from the high Court. The end of June can see a lot of constitutional mush in rapid fire…and if you don’t mind mixing metaphors, imagine firing mush rapidly across a room, perhaps through a fan, and you’ll get a picture of what I think we can expect from the big nine this term. One came out today: Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, an Indiana case involving a statute which required that voters present a government-issued photo ID at the polls. The problem was, of course, that not everyone has a government-issued photo ID, nor the time nor means to get one, and those people tend to be poorer than those who do. The Court upheld the statute 6-3.  More later, once I’ve read the darn thing, or nothing, depending on my level of agreement or outrage. I post it now to emphasize that many of the most important Supreme Court decisions have nothing to do with Roe v. Wade or other newsy constitutional culture wars. We would all do well, I think, to pay a little more attention than good taste would demand to these often boring, always overwritten opinions. The Republican party has…which brings us to where we are today.   

Incidentally, the petitioner (that’s Crawford) was represented at oral argument by Paul M. Smith, Amherst College class of 1976.

As for the title, I couldn’t decide between “The Whoosier State,” “The Choosier State” or “Carry Indiana,” nor can I believe that I just admitted as much in writing.