Hillary: A Bush in Democrat’s Clothing

Disgusting is the politician who uses his opponent’s skin color and religion to fear people into voting for you.  Hillary became disgusting when she said Obama’s not a Muslim “as far as I know“.

Pathetic is the politician who attacks people because they disagree with him, especially when he is incredibly wrong.  This is what Hillary became today.  From Reuters:

“I’m not going to put my lot in with economists,” Clinton said when asked to name an economist who backed her proposal.

“We’ve got to get out of this mind-set where somehow elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that really disadvantage the vast majority of Americans,” said Clinton, a former first lady who would be the first woman president.

Sadly, the attack-when-wrong tactic is a tried and true method of convincing people that you are right.  But if this is your strategy, then who needs to be right?  Tired is the politician who conforms the world to his worldview, rather than making the adjustments to his worldview that would cause it to fit the world.

“Mission accomplished,” right?

I’ve had enough of this bullshit for the last 8 years to last a lifetime…  how about you?

Domestic observers will monitor PA primary

According to a press release I just received (emphasis mine):

Common Cause’s election reform team will monitor voting problems and concerns that may arise tomorrow during the Democratic presidential primary in Pennsylvania, where an unprecedented turnout is expected, including a huge surge of new voters.

Some 7 million Pennsylvania voters are expected to vote tomorrow on paperless electronic voting machines that lack the ability to do a recount. Common Cause will help monitor problems reported to the Election Protection Coalition’s national voter hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE.

Pennsylvania election officials are bracing for unprecedented turnout in a state with a recent history of voting machine problems, and where voter registration and registration changes have surged in recent months.

How will PA affect the big picture? Not very much, according to PoliBlog:

I must confess, it is difficult to get too excited about the Pennsylvania primary, given that no matter the result, we will be in basically the same position: Obama with more popular votes and pledged delegates, and therefore on the surer footing for the nomination.

Another part of the big picture concerns close elections. As Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004 taught, close elections strain the legitimacy of rules otherwise considered minutiae. Will voting equipment and voter rolls join Michigan and Florida as flash points in the Clinton-Obama saga?

Playing the Momentum Game

The big news out of Wisconsin and Hawaii is that Barak Obama won in two states that he was expected to win. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on whether or not you are “on the hope train,” this news is not very big at all. In fact, most news outlets have decided to focus their articles on Obama’s win streak or what the exit polls tell us or both.

I’d like just to pause for a moment and bask in the meaning of Wisconsin and Hawaii. The fact that Obama won these states expectedly, particularly Wisconsin, which is seen as a swing state, is a very big deal. Had Hillary won, or even come close, the tenor of the post-February-19th-primary news cycle would have been entirely different.

Because Obama won Wisconsin and Hawaii, two weeks of news will focus on the despair and frustration of the HRC campaign rather than the hopeful optimism that might have been. She will fuel this descent by truncating her articulation of purpose and harping the urgency of her cause. Her message of hope, which was over matched by Obama’s in the first place, will be replaced by attacks on his. Hillary will blame the media for taking her statements out of context and for siding with Obama. No, it couldn’t be her fault that she’s struggling to hang on. Maybe she needs a new campaign manager.

Of course, most of the things I’ve written above have been characteristics of Hillary’s campaign for quite some time. They are more descriptive than predictive. Wisconsin and Hawaii prove that Hillary began digging her grave prematurely: despair became her story even though destiny was still something she could control.

Now, all she has is despair. She may want to make some campaign visits to churches, where maybe she can pray for a prayer.

Cementing my anti-Hillary Position

As the Obama movement proceeds to overtake Hillary’s support base, Hillary has done a good job convincing voters that her campaign is struggling. In January, Hillary had to loan her campaign $5 million of her private funds, which contrasts just a bit with the $32 million raised by Obama. Then, Hillary gets trounced in 6 primaries and caucuses over the weekend and her campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle ‘quits.’ Nothing says ‘desperation’ like firing your go-to-gal in the heat of battle. If voters were not convinced enough that the once overwhelming inevitability of a third Clinton White House was all but a memory, she gets a lashing in D.C., Maryland, and Virginia just a few days later.

What is most troubling about Hillary’s demise is her offensive against the nomination system, a system that has its pluses and minuses, but was adopted by the DNC to act as the rules of the game for this primary. Now that she is losing, Hillary does not like these rules very much anymore. Hillary’s excuses for failure wreak of desperation and a callous disregard for the rules of the game when they do not work in her favor. She must have learned this from her husband; a man who thinks he can get away with anything by questioning the definition of the word ‘is.’

According to Politico, Hillary “has sought to cast doubts on the legitimacy of the process by which pledged delegates are chosen, arguing that caucuses aren’t true reflections of the will of the people, and that the exclusion of Florida and Michigan voters because of a dispute over the primary calendar taints the official tallies.”

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Barack Obama – Political Campaign or Mass Political Movement?

Of course, today is Super Tuesday. If you’re in one of the states, please go vote for whomever you support. If you don’t, I reserve the right to ignore your complaints about politics till November and you can redeem yourself.

Anyway, I just received an interesting e-mail from the Obama campaign. It invited me to help make get out the vote (GOTV) calls to voters in Super Tuesday states. Here is the page linked in the e-mail. Having worked on a few campaigns before, this is a typical exercise done in the lead up to election day. However, it is typically done in a campaign headquarters by volunteers that the campaign workers have talked to and know. By having the volunteers sit in their offices, they can monitor the progress of the volunteers and remove people who fail to stick to the script or are not very good at “cold calling” people.

The Obama campaign has taken an approach that is much more like a issue based or social movement. The page allows Obama supporters to log-in and pick a super Tuesday state to call. The volunteer is then given links to 20 voters to call along with an interface to register if the voter is an Obama supporter or not. These decentralized tactics are used by other mass-based groups such as Moveon.org or Sierra Club.

I am pretty impressed by the level of trust that the Obama campaign has for their supporters to make an good case for Obama and get out the vote on their own. It seems that the Obama campaign may have as much faith in their supporters as they do in him.

UPDATE: Clinton and Edwards have similar programs. My friend from the Edwards campaign said that if you wanted to make calls, someone from the campaign would still talk to you first to walk you through the steps and vet volunteers a bit.  Checking the McCain and Romney websites, it doesn’t appear that they have similar programs in place.

The informal nature of the American presidential primaries: momentum vs. delegates

Candidates running for their party’s presidential nomination have two distinct goals.  The first is the formal goal of obtaining party delegates.  The second is winning the informal quest for momentum with the end result of obtaining the status of inevitability.  In previous primaries, the informal pursuit of momentum has led to the attainment of inevitability, and consequently, party delegates.  Candidates’ decisions to embark on this path has been reinforced by the non-stop news cycle that modern technology has rendered ever so hungry.  Even in the Republican race, where, due to the majoritarian system of awarding delegates used in a number of states a candidate can trounce his opponent on Super Tuesday, the rules of the momentum game do not necessitate inevitability.  How is this possible?

In this morning’s New York Times, Adam Nagourney warns that: “the winner of the states is probably going to be known well before the delegate counts are finished, and that is going to color the way the results are reported on television and in newspapers.”  As such, on the Republican side, Nagourney explains that the two most important states to watch are California and Massachusetts: the former because polls show that Romney may pull out a tight victory there, and the latter because a McCain victory in Romney’s home state, combined with some other expected victories by McCain, could spell the end of Romney’s White House bid.  In the Republican race, acquiring delegates is an element in an equation that leads to one candidate’s popular image of inevitability.  Yet, a victory for Romney in California or his defeat in Massachusetts are the pivotal points that are likely to swing momentum in his or his opponent’s favor.

The Democratic race is similarly dependent on momentum, and perhaps even more so due to the PR system of delegate allocation mandated by the party in each state.  As a result, neither candidate is likely to have a significant lead in the delegate count when the results of Super Tuesday are finally tallied.  Thus, the real story is about momentum.  Because Clinton possessed double-digit leads in a number of Super Tuesday states until recently, the question is how close Obama will come to beating Clinton in the popular votes in important states, even though these overall totals do not matter for the delegate race.  If Obama wins, or even comes close to winning, in states like California, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, then he will continue to ride the wave of momentum that has helped him cut into Clinton’s leads across the country.

The power of momentum is in maintaining control of the news cycle.  Consider how the Obama campaign has succeeded in this venture since trouncing Clinton unexpectedly in South Carolina (despite adding marginally to his delegate count).  Obama’s impressive victory speech was embraced by the press and has received over 500,000 hits on youtube.com.  He then received the endorsement of Caroline Kennedy, who called him “A President Like My Father,” and Ted Kennedy, the longtime senator and democratic party institution.  This was followed by the announcement in late January that Obama received donations of $32 million in that month alone.  Since these events, all of which graced the front pages of newspapers and websites as well as taking up valuable airtime on television and radio politics shows, the Obama campaign has continued to dominate the news through reports on the massive crowds he has been able to draw at campaign events and the campaigning of his surrogates, such as Oprah Winfrey and the Kennedys (including Maria Schriver).  Not only has Obama gained momentum, but his momentum has become the actual story. 

In this unusual primary season, delegates may come to play a role if none of the candidates are able to embrace convince Americans of their inevitability.  But, if Obama’s momentum is substantiated by the popular votes in some of the states mentioned, he will have broken the early portrayals of Clinton as the inevitable victor, and could be on his way to embracing the democratic presidential nomination.  Formally, he’ll have to obtain enough delegates for this to happen, but informally, he will already have done so.

For every lie, a touch of hope

The Center for Public Integrity, in what appears to be a liberal conspiracy to stop our politicians from lying, has created a new website for tracking Bush administration officials’ pre-Iraq war statements and their intra-Iraq war veracity.  It appears that the cite is being bombarded by “folks… who are interested… in this.. kinda… thing [read with best Bush accent],” so I have not yet been able to test it out.  According to the New York Times’ John H. Cushman, Jr., who now deserves to be listed as one of the top enemies of freedom,

Warnings about the need to confront Iraq, by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and two White House press secretaries, among others, can be combed line by line, and reviewed alongside detailed critiques published after the fact by official panels, historians, journalists and independent experts.

There is no startling new information in the archive, because all the documents have been published previously. But the new computer tool is remarkable for its scope, and its replay of the crescendo of statements that led to the war. Muckrakers may find browsing the site reminiscent of what Richard M. Nixon used to dismissively call “wallowing in Watergate.”

Of course, such tools cannot help us determine the intentional lies from their unintentional counterparts.  While I do believe that we went into Iraq for the sake of convenience (Iran was too big and too difficult, even though the Iranians have clear links to terrorism, unlike Saddam, who was more likely to be assassinated himself by terrorists than to work with them.), I also believe that our officials really thought that Saddam had WMD, just as Saddam thought he was on route to obtaining them.

Yet, it will be interesting to see what type of impact efforts of this nature will have on our political system, and in particular, such events as the presidential primaries.  I’m a ‘newby’ to the web in regards to the primaries, mostly because I don’t need to listen to people like Hillary and Barak toss recriminations back and forth in order to determine who I will vote for.  But even in the few minutes that I do sit down and watch them bitch, it’s quite difficult to determine who is bitching with more accuracy.   One site that I have found useful is the Washington Posts’ Fact Checker.  Perhaps we at the Democratic Piece can create a list of some of our top fact checking websites… (your welcome, Jack).

How did the pollsters botch New Hampshire?

DISCLAIMER: Credit for this discovery goes to an (as yet) unnamed friend.

Those following the US presidential primaries will recall that, just about 24 hours ago, Obama was predicted to beat Clinton by a landslide. McCain’s win was expected to be much narrower than it was. How did the polls miss Clinton’s win? How did they underestimate McCain’s lead?

One explanation is that politics move quickly during primaries. Preferences change literally overnight. Not only do candidates triangulate with breakneck speed. Note the TV commentators positing women were updating in response to Obama and Edwards’ “ganging up” on Hillary. But discrepancies between the actual and expected seem too large to confirm that story.

Another concerns survey methodology, namely, the double-counting of independents.

Pollsters sample within parties, but they do not separate Republicans, Democrats and unaffiliated voters into discreet categories. To get the list of Republicans, they find all non-Democrats. To get the Democrats, they find the non-Republicans. Both samples can end up with the same independents.

So the same independents were asked whom they preferred in both fields. Their response: Romney among Republicans and Obama among Democrats. Problem one.

Yet New Hampshire’s primary (like most) is closed. Voters there must pick their party by October 12. In practice, not all independents with opinions were able to vote. Problem two.

So McCain voters were registering ‘in name only’ support for Obama, and vice versa. Meanwhile independents registering preferences in the polls were not going to the voting polls. Obama’s projected landslide rested on the preferences of non-Republicans, not Democrats, and McCain’s projected close call with Romney rested on those of non-Democrats, not Republicans.

Having just two viable parties makes it easier to do numbers work. As some of this blog’s readers have noted, though, the binary depiction of reality makes possible critical errors in measurement.

A rolling primary?

Inspired by the preceeding and born of the water cooler is this potential solution to two primary season problems:

1) Why does it make sense to stagger elections by state while forcing residents of the same state to vote on the same day?

2) Forcing everyone to vote on the same day presents a problem for strategic voters in early states; they have little idea what the outcomes will be in later states.

An interesting solution would be an extended, nationwide primary with frequent updates of the running tally. Sincere voters have an incentive to vote early to demonstrate the potential strength of their preferred candidates. Strategic voters, by contrast, face an incentive to follow the tally and vote after sincere voters. This is in order to maximize the effectiveness of their votes.

What, if any, constitutional and legal hurdles exist to implement this reform? Would this violate current interpretations of “one person, one vote?”

Would knowing the race were close in advance present an incentive to turn out?

This post is the product of substantial groupthink.

How the Iowa caucuses mirror preferential voting

Now that Putin has stolen an election and the Venezuelans will keep democracy, TDP can return to more important topics.

The Iowa caucuses are a peculiar institution. Seen globally, primary elections are anomalous enough. Yet Iowa’s delegates to the parties’ nominating conventions are chosen by people walking around a room and revealing their preferences to everyone else. Two features of the Iowa caucuses strikingly mirror the logic of preferential voting systems: iterative preference flows and strategic coordination among rivals.

My old friend at FairVote wrote this overview of how the caucuses work. In a nutshell, candidates must achieve threshold levels of support to win delegates. “Support” or “votes” are the number of people standing in a part of the room that represents a given candidate.

When candidates fail to reach the threshold, deal making and cajoling begins, and things get complicated. In 2004, Dennis Kucinich and John Edwards agreed that if either of them failed to reach threshold in any precinct, their supporters would line up with the other…

In other words, rival candidates bargain for second choice support. When one is eliminated, voters walk across the room, casting “votes” for successive preferences.

Equally interesting is that, depending on the size of the precinct, the threshold to win delegates is about 15-20%. That means the caucuses use a rough form of quota-based proportional representation in which each candidate winning delegates (i.e. “seats”) is analogous to an effective party.