Entries for May 2008

Barack Obama's campaign hopes it will. They're putting out the word that they hope to announce on the night of May 20, after the results come in from the Kentucky and Oregon primaries, that their candidate has the 2,025 votes needed for the Democratic nomination. That would mean that the nomination would be settled before the May 31 rules committee meeting on the status of the disqualified Michigan and Florida delegations; this would deprive Clinton of a grievance but would not deprive Obama of the nomination. The June 1 primary in Puerto Rico, in which it seems possible Clinton could win a big popular-vote majority, would become moot. So could the June 3 primaries in South Dakota and Montana, which Obama is expected to win, but not by wide popular-vote margins. But he may not win: On May 13 he won the nonbinding primary in Nebraska by just 49 percent to 47 percent, with a popular vote margin of just 2,665—a vivid contrast with his 68 percent to 32 percent, 13,681-vote margin in the February 9 Nebraska caucus. (Which is more representative? Some 38,571 Nebraskans voted in the caucus, while 93,757 voted in the primary.)

There are a number of reasons to believe that Obama's May 20 scenario won't come to pass.

Obama is not likely to have enough superdelegates lined up by next Tuesday night. As this is written, RealClearpolitics.com has Obama at 1,891 delegates. Current polling gives him 58 percent of the two-candidate vote in Oregon and 34 percent of the two-candidate vote in Kentucky. That should give him, under the proportional representation rules, about 17 delegates in Kentucky and about 30 in Oregon. That puts him at 1,938. That means he needs to add 87 superdelegates between Friday and Tuesday night. He's been getting four or five a day, it seems, even after his bad defeat in West Virginia, but he needs a lot more than that.

In trying to understand news about the conflicts in Iraq, I work to keep in mind the difference between what we know now about decision-making in World War II and what most Americans knew at the time. From the memoirs and documents published after the war, we've learned how leaders made critical judgments. But at the time, even well-informed journalists could only guess at what was going on behind the scenes.

Today we're only beginning to learn about what went on behind the scenes on Iraq. One important new source is the recently published War and Decision by Douglas Feith, the No. 3 civilian at the Pentagon from 2001 to 2005. Feith quotes extensively from unpublished documents and contemporary memorandums, just as in the late 1940s Robert Sherwood did in Roosevelt and Hopkins and Winston Churchill did in his World War II histories. The picture Feith paints is at considerable variance from the narratives with which we've become familiar.

The original Super Tuesday, in the 1988 cycle, was engineered by southern and moderate Democrats with the intention of securing the nomination for a moderate southern candidate in a flurry of southern primaries. It worked that year, but for the other party: George H. W. Bush, after his defining victory in South Carolina (scheduled for the Saturday before Super Tuesday by Lee Atwater), swept the South and won the Republican nomination, while on the Democratic side, Al Gore's five primary wins in the South were matched by Jesse Jackson's five, and Michael Dukakis, winning Florida and Texas, went on to win the party's nomination.

This year, the Republican nomination was effectively settled on Super Tuesday, when John McCain's narrow but decisive wins in several states, together with the party's winner-take-all delegate allocation rules, enabled him to build up an insurmountably big delegate lead over Mitt Romney. Mike Huckabee stayed in the race, but obviously had no chance to win; he and McCain traded compliments, and on subsequent election nights Huckabee delivered gracious concession speeches and McCain delivered victory statements aimed at the general electorate. It served both candidates' interests to pretend that there was still a real contest, and Huckabee actually won the Kansas caucus and was competitive in the Virginia primary during this period. But everyone knew McCain was going to be the party's nominee, and treated him accordingly.

The official results show what Friday's papers were predicting: Conservative Boris Johnson has unseated Labor Mayor Ken Livingstone in London. In the multiparty election, Johnson led in first-choice votes 43 percent to 37 percent. Under the rules, the second-choice votes of those who did not vote for either of the first two candidates are added to their totals. This slightly reduced Johnson's margin: Expressed as a percentage of total first- and second-choice votes for the top two candidates, Johnson won 53 percent to 47 percent. By way of comparison, Livingstone led Conservative Steven Norris by 36 percent to 28 percent in first-choice votes in 2004. This map shows the results in each of London's 14 assembly districts. Conservatives elected Assembly members in eight districts, Labor in six.

Regionally, there are some interesting patterns; I'll give Johnson's percentage of the two-candidate first- and second-choice votes in each. Livingston's strongest areas were City and East (37 percent), Southwark and Lambeth (37 percent), and North East (38 percent). These contain many of the historical slums and public housing estates of London. There's been some gentrification in the City and East, between the City and the Docklands, as financial services professionals upgrade old houses or move into spanking-new flats near their places of work. But there are also a lot of Muslim immigrants in some of these areas. The only other district in which Livingstone won an appreciable majority was Greenwich and Lewisham (44 percent), which is mostly low income.

Will Barack Obama's longtime connection to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright continue to hurt him? Evidence that it will comes from pollster Scott Rasmussen, who finds that only 30 percent of likely voters say Obama denounced Wright because he was outraged, while 58 percent believe he denounced him for political convenience. Only 33 percent believe Obama was surprised by Wright's statements at the National Press Club, while 52 percent say he was not surprised. Some 26 percent say it's very likely that Obama "shares some of Pastor Wright's controversial views about the United States" and 56 percent say it's somewhat likely he does. Only 7 percent of voters and 12 percent of black voters say they share those views. Ouch! These results are more adverse than I would have expected.

Well, it's not quite a trend. But the victory of center-right candidate Gianni Alemanno in Rome last weekend has apparently been followed up by a victory for Conservative Party candidate Boris Johnson in London. Rome had been governed by center-left mayors since 1993; London has had an elected mayor for only eight years, and until this year no Conservative candidate was a serious contender. The London results are not in as I write, but you can find them at this website.

Both new mayors are colorful characters. Alemanno is routinely described as a "former neo-fascist"; he was a member of the Alleanza Nazionale and its predecessor the MSI. But he is no more of a totalitarian than his predecessor as mayor of Rome Walter Veltroni—the candidate of the center-left coalition that lost to Silvio Berlusconi's center-right in the April 13-14 elections—who was a member of Italy's old Communist Party. Both are now solidly respectable democratic politicians. Johnson has been busy as a member of Parliament and sometime editor of the Spectator from 1999 to 2005 and columnist in the Telegraph. His columns were often humorous and politically incorrect. But then the two-term incumbent mayor he has apparently ousted, Ken Livingstone, was politically incorrect in different ways: He lavished praise on Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro and heaped obloquy on the United States. Livingstone nonetheless has had an interesting record as mayor, putting into place congestion pricing in central London (it costs you £8—$15.87—to drive over the line), encouraging commercial development, and preparing for the 2012 Olympics.