Entries for May 2008

So Democratic leaders have read the new Pew poll showing Sen. Barack Obama to be the favorite among Democratic voters, and their decision is to ramp up the pressure on Sen. Hillary Clinton to drop out of the presidential nomination race next week. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada will be joined by Democratic Party leader Howard Dean next week in asking uncommitted superdelegates to make up their minds and commit to a candidate. That, so the messy nomination process can be cleaned up and their candidate can proceed into the general election phase unhindered. Is this a wise move or not?

If the Pew poll is right and if its results hold until November (the former less certain than the latter), such a move could alienate Clinton supporters even further from the Democratic Party. The Pew poll shows Obama's negatives are way higher than they were earlier in the campaign, particularly among white women and independents:

If Sen. Barack Obama wants to make nice-nice with the Jewish community, the last person he should be allowing to make public proclamations about Jews, no matter how tenuous that person's connection to the Obama presidential campaign, is Zbigniew Brzezinski. Brzezinski, who was President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, has long been viewed suspiciously by American Jews.

And yet the week after Obama flew to Florida to woo a Jewish audience by extolling Israel's 60th anniversary, Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has endorsed Obama and advised him on foreign policy, accused members of the American Jewish establishment of "McCarthyism" in their attitude toward critics of Israel. Why go nuclear when Brzezinski could have blazed with less destructive weapons?

"Not so fast." That's the message the political action committee WomenCount is sending to the Democratic Party. The PAC ran full-page ads in major U.S. newspapers this week urging Sen. Hillary Clinton to stay in the race until "every vote is counted."

Many of these and other Democratic women blame misogyny in the media and by Democratic Party leaders for tanking Clinton's campaign and say they'll vote Republican in November in retaliation if they do not believe Clinton's supporters are treated fairly. The PAC is also organizing a Washington, D.C., rally for May 31—the date the Democratic National Committee convenes its Rules and Bylaws Committee to make a final decision on how or whether to count the 2.4 million votes cast by Florida and Michigan voters. Meanwhile, this weekend, Sen. John McCain meets with three potential vice presidential nominees, including 36-year-old Indian-American Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who could inoculate the McCain campaign against questions of age and lack of diversity and appeal to Christian conservatives. Jindal is playing coy and saying he won't be offered the VP position and that he "has the job" he wants, anyway. Republicans, according to politico.com, do not have a single candidate of color who has a chance of winning the office of governor, U.S. representative, or senator this fall.

A victory in Oregon, yes, but presumptive Democratic nominee Barack Obama also got a thrashing in Kentucky. Although both states are populated predominantly by white voters, together they prove there are strikingly different shades of white. Oregonians are progressive to a fare-thee-well (I know, I spent two years at Reed College in Portland, Ore., in the 1970s.) Kentucky voters are less affluent, less well educated, and considerably more conservative.

The Kentucky results and the state's impact on the Obama campaign were summed up most succinctly by this L.A. Times blog entry:

The preview post-mortems for Clinton have begun.

Did her gender hurt or help her? Did she run a lousy campaign? Did she assume front-runner status too blithely and therefore doom her own chances?

Although I have blogged on many of these issues throughout the past few months, I have a few more thoughts. First, in response to the question whether Hillary Clinton ran a lousy campaign, I gained a snippet of information on Friday that changes my view of things. At first blush the answer is yes, she did run a weak campaign, for two reasons. She seemed to ignore the caucus states and focus almost exclusively on the bigger primary states, where she did quite well. And she and her husband made wacky remarks about race issues that seemed to come from nowhere and did nothing but damage her image.

This week in politics, the House rejected an Iraq (and Afghanistan) war funding bill, the two remaining contenders for the Democratic presidential nomination sparked a dust-up over an endorsement from the nation's pre-eminent pro-choice lobbying group, and a Democrat picked up the last of three once reliably Republican House seats that were contested this year's special elections.

All that, and California's Supreme Court stamped a big "OK" on the right to gay marriage. Are we back in the 1960s, or am I having a flashback? Is the American public moving left, and, if so, does that boost election chances for almost-nominee and extremely liberal Sen. Barack Obama to win the White House in November?

Terry McAuliffe, Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign manager, was all over the cable news channels last night claiming Clinton's 2-to-1 win in West Virginia is proof that she and only she can win the White House for the Democratic Party in November—because of her support from white, working-class voters.

But an even more telling point about white, working-class voters and how some of them will vote when (and it looks like when, not if) Sen. Barack Obama becomes the Democratic nominee was made in an article in Tuesday's Washington Post. The monster lurking behind the curtain in the Democratic presidential contest is racism. Up to now, Obama's supporters in the extreme left wing of the Democratic Party have tried to ignore its existence. This article is proof that it not only exists; it is unfortunately alive and well, particularly in factory towns: