Yay, Politics
In the way that they are the suck. They provide interesting articles, though.
The Myth of Clinton's Popular Vote Lead
By Paul Rogat Loeb
Given the disappointment of so many Hillary Clinton supporters that the woman they thought would be America's first female president will not be, the more they hear the suggestion that Sen. Barack Obama's win is illegitimate the more likely they are to bolt. If Senator Clinton's voters embrace that story that "a man took it away from a woman," denying her a victory she rightly deserved, they're at risk of staying home come November, or holding back from the volunteering and the get-out-the-vote efforts necessary for the Democrats to prevail.
That's why it's so unfortunate that Clinton continues to claim that "we are winning the popular vote." Because that statement is a lie - and it undermines every word she has spoken about the need for the party to come together.
Look at Clinton's math. She leads only if you give her 328,000 votes for the Soviet-style Michigan election, while giving Obama zero for not being on the ballot. And we count her full Florida margin, though Obama couldn't campaign there and do what he did in state after state by erasing all or most of once-massive Clinton leads once he began to campaign.
But Clinton needs more than claim Michigan and Florida to get her alleged lead. She also has to discard the caucuses of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and my own state of Washington, where a record quarter million people turned out to participate. Had our delegates been determined by a primary, Obama’s margin would have actually been larger. If he'd gotten the same vote share as then less demographically receptive state of Oregon and the same percentage of voters turned out, he'd have had a margin of 187,000 votes. Yet our votes don't count either way under Clinton's math. She disappears them down the memory hole of history in an argument that invents reality as much as her earlier story about running the gauntlet of Bosnian sniper fire, or her recent claim that her husband Bill won the nomination in June, even though his only competition, Paul Tsongas, had dropped out months before..
If the media corrected this, it would be less of a problem, but they haven't, or at least not in the same stories where they repeat her claim. The AP story in my local Seattle newspaper reported Clinton's claim without question, saying only that it included contested Florida and Michigan votes and excluded the Iowa caucuses. An otherwise excellent New York Times story included not even the slightest corrections or caveats. Neither mentioned that polls actually have Obama doing marginally better in Michigan than Clinton. They also didn't explore the impact of roughly 60,000 Democratic voters who crossed over in Michigan to vote Republican, many of whom were participating in an effort by liberal bloggers, anticipating Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" campaign, where they encouraged Democrats to vote for Mitt Romney to continue the Republican blood-letting. Had these crossovers all voted for Uncommitted, Clinton wouldn't have even gotten a majority in that uncontested race.
Clinton's popular vote argument also ignores that this wasn't how the rules were set up, and that if they had been, Obama would have made time, following the Iowa victory that made voters take him seriously, to have made more than three brief visits to California and one to New York, given the size of those states.
Every time Mrs. Clinton claims she has a popular majority, she's shattering whatever fragile ceasefire exists and making it that much more likely that her supporters stay home, come November. If she really wants a united party, she needs to stop, and the media and the superdelegates need to hold her accountable.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, and Soul of a Citizen. See www.paulloeb.org
Did the Limbaugh Effect Also Flip Michigan?
By Paul Rogat Loeb
With Hillary Clinton rejecting the compromise that Michigan Democratic leaders just crafted, the Democratic Rules Committee has a dilemma. Clinton keeps demanding that Michigan's delegates be apportioned according to the January 15 vote, where she was the sole major candidate on the Democratic ballot. But there's another twist that no one has raised-the impact of a Rush Limbaugh-style crossover on the Michigan vote. Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" quite likely gave Clinton Indiana, provided much of her 4-point Texas margin, buttressed her Ohio win, and decreased Obama's margin in Mississippi. But no one talks about the impact of crossovers on Clinton's self-proclaimed Michigan victory, without which her unopposed candidacy would still have gotten less than 50 percent.
Of course the entire Michigan vote was a charade. Former Michigan Senator Donald Riegle compared it to Soviet elections: "a sham" she, Bill, and her supporters "rigged to give the nation the impression that she's the leading candidate in Michigan." In an October 2007 New Hampshire Public Radio interview that every delegate should hear, Clinton justified her staying on the Michigan ballot by explaining, "this election they're having is not going to count for anything." As Michigan Public Radio commentator Jack Lessenberry pointed out, fewer than 600,000 voted in the state's Democratic primary, compared to 867,000 Republican votes (and 2.5 million votes for John Kerry in 2004). So Michigan and Florida are among just a handful of states where Republican turnout exceeded that of the Democrats in this year's primaries. The vast bulk of Michigan Democrats stayed home, with way fewer voting than in far smaller states.
All this so profoundly taints the Michigan primary result that the only reasonable solution is to split the state's delegates down the middle. But another factor makes the taint still worse--the 60,000 Democrats who crossed over to vote Republican, based on their 7 percent share of the Republican vote. (In comparison, in South Carolina's contested primary, 11 days later, just 2% of the Republican voters were Democrats. Add in the vote for "uncommitted," and for Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, and Chris Dodd (who'd already dropped out), plus the 27,000 votes that Lori Hansen Riegle (Senator Riegle's wife), says were discarded because of write-ins, and the non-Clinton total climbs to 353,686, or 25,000 more than Hillary's 328,151. Michigan Democrats who felt the vote was meaningless were in fact encouraged to cross over. Since everyone (including Clinton) said the results wouldn't count, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsis suggested Michigan Democrats vote for Mitt Romney to prolong the Republican race, keep the Republican candidates at each others' throats, and perhaps help nominate the presumably less-electable Mitt Romney. In other words, pretty much what Rush Limbaugh and his allies ended up doing, except that unlike Indiana and Ohio, Michigan had no laws even theoretically prohibiting such an action. No one thought Clinton would have the chutzpah to retroactively claim a Soviet-style victory. Other progressive bloggers picked up on the idea as well. I also heard it discussed on my local Air America affiliate. These strategic voters, whether inspired by the blogs or self-initiated, combined with other Democrats who simply figured McCain was less fundamentalist than Huckabee and had more substance than Romney's empty-suit puffery, so would still be a better choice for America if the Democratic candidate lost. Had all of them stayed in the Democratic primary and voted against Hillary, it would have tipped her to 48 percent.
Kos and his site do valuable work, and I suspect Limbaugh would have launched his campaign without the precedent. But in both cases, Clinton benefited. As soon as McCain had clinched the nomination, Limbaugh and allies like Laura Ingraham began encouraging Republicans to further an increasingly nasty Democratic fight. Obama had been gaining legitimate support from Republicans simply inspired by his message, sick of Bush, and therefore open to changing. A conservative Mormon accounting professor me saying "Paul, you aren't going to believe this. Obama is way too liberal for me, but I'm going to vote for him because I think he has integrity." Post-Limbaugh, those who switched included a substantial number of Republicans trying to disrupt the Democratic primary. As the Boston Globe reported, "In Ohio and Texas on March 4, Republicans comprised 9 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, more than twice the average GOP share of the turnout in the earlier contests where exit polling was conducted. Clinton ran about even with Obama among Republicans in both states, a far more favorable showing among GOP voters than in the early races." A Wall Street Journal story found similar results. Twelve percent of Mississippi's Democratic primary voters were Republicans, breaking three to one for Clinton, but 31% of that group said she wasn't honest and trustworthy, which hardly suggested they'd be voting for her come November. In Indiana, Huffington Post staff reporter Sam Stein points out that seven percent of those who voted for Clinton in the primary say they wouldn't vote for her in November. But without those voters, she wouldn't have had her two-percentage-point victory.
This resonates with my experience. I've gotten emails from people throughout these states who've described coworkers, neighbors, or friends who they witnessed bragging or laughing about being part of Rush's crossover legions. I've read many similar first-person accounts on various blogs. Given the size of Limbaugh's audience and that of his allies in this effort, it seems perfectly conceivable that he shifted 2-3 percent of the vote in each of the states that he targeted. Those jumping on the Daily Kos campaign in Michigan had a far smaller megaphone, but operated under similar strategic assumptions. They were hardly Hillary supporters, or they'd have voted for her, but the numbers suggest their votes made a difference, helping give her the "victory" she now clings to.
Clinton's negligible hopes require both massive superdelegate shifts and seating both Michigan and Florida according to her fantasy projections, where Obama gets zero Michigan delegates because he wasn't on the ballot, and where Obama loses in a Florida vote he never had a chance to contest. The Rules Committee decision-makers would do well to remember the conscious interventions of those who tried to game the primary system. In the case of Michigan, they hardly intended to benefit Hillary, but without their switch, she wouldn't have been able to make even the hollow claims on which she now rests so much of her last-stand campaign.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles
The Myth of Clinton's Popular Vote Lead
By Paul Rogat Loeb
Given the disappointment of so many Hillary Clinton supporters that the woman they thought would be America's first female president will not be, the more they hear the suggestion that Sen. Barack Obama's win is illegitimate the more likely they are to bolt. If Senator Clinton's voters embrace that story that "a man took it away from a woman," denying her a victory she rightly deserved, they're at risk of staying home come November, or holding back from the volunteering and the get-out-the-vote efforts necessary for the Democrats to prevail.
That's why it's so unfortunate that Clinton continues to claim that "we are winning the popular vote." Because that statement is a lie - and it undermines every word she has spoken about the need for the party to come together.
Look at Clinton's math. She leads only if you give her 328,000 votes for the Soviet-style Michigan election, while giving Obama zero for not being on the ballot. And we count her full Florida margin, though Obama couldn't campaign there and do what he did in state after state by erasing all or most of once-massive Clinton leads once he began to campaign.
But Clinton needs more than claim Michigan and Florida to get her alleged lead. She also has to discard the caucuses of Iowa, Nevada, Maine, and my own state of Washington, where a record quarter million people turned out to participate. Had our delegates been determined by a primary, Obama’s margin would have actually been larger. If he'd gotten the same vote share as then less demographically receptive state of Oregon and the same percentage of voters turned out, he'd have had a margin of 187,000 votes. Yet our votes don't count either way under Clinton's math. She disappears them down the memory hole of history in an argument that invents reality as much as her earlier story about running the gauntlet of Bosnian sniper fire, or her recent claim that her husband Bill won the nomination in June, even though his only competition, Paul Tsongas, had dropped out months before..
If the media corrected this, it would be less of a problem, but they haven't, or at least not in the same stories where they repeat her claim. The AP story in my local Seattle newspaper reported Clinton's claim without question, saying only that it included contested Florida and Michigan votes and excluded the Iowa caucuses. An otherwise excellent New York Times story included not even the slightest corrections or caveats. Neither mentioned that polls actually have Obama doing marginally better in Michigan than Clinton. They also didn't explore the impact of roughly 60,000 Democratic voters who crossed over in Michigan to vote Republican, many of whom were participating in an effort by liberal bloggers, anticipating Rush Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" campaign, where they encouraged Democrats to vote for Mitt Romney to continue the Republican blood-letting. Had these crossovers all voted for Uncommitted, Clinton wouldn't have even gotten a majority in that uncontested race.
Clinton's popular vote argument also ignores that this wasn't how the rules were set up, and that if they had been, Obama would have made time, following the Iowa victory that made voters take him seriously, to have made more than three brief visits to California and one to New York, given the size of those states.
Every time Mrs. Clinton claims she has a popular majority, she's shattering whatever fragile ceasefire exists and making it that much more likely that her supporters stay home, come November. If she really wants a united party, she needs to stop, and the media and the superdelegates need to hold her accountable.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, and Soul of a Citizen. See www.paulloeb.org
Did the Limbaugh Effect Also Flip Michigan?
By Paul Rogat Loeb
With Hillary Clinton rejecting the compromise that Michigan Democratic leaders just crafted, the Democratic Rules Committee has a dilemma. Clinton keeps demanding that Michigan's delegates be apportioned according to the January 15 vote, where she was the sole major candidate on the Democratic ballot. But there's another twist that no one has raised-the impact of a Rush Limbaugh-style crossover on the Michigan vote. Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos" quite likely gave Clinton Indiana, provided much of her 4-point Texas margin, buttressed her Ohio win, and decreased Obama's margin in Mississippi. But no one talks about the impact of crossovers on Clinton's self-proclaimed Michigan victory, without which her unopposed candidacy would still have gotten less than 50 percent.
Of course the entire Michigan vote was a charade. Former Michigan Senator Donald Riegle compared it to Soviet elections: "a sham" she, Bill, and her supporters "rigged to give the nation the impression that she's the leading candidate in Michigan." In an October 2007 New Hampshire Public Radio interview that every delegate should hear, Clinton justified her staying on the Michigan ballot by explaining, "this election they're having is not going to count for anything." As Michigan Public Radio commentator Jack Lessenberry pointed out, fewer than 600,000 voted in the state's Democratic primary, compared to 867,000 Republican votes (and 2.5 million votes for John Kerry in 2004). So Michigan and Florida are among just a handful of states where Republican turnout exceeded that of the Democrats in this year's primaries. The vast bulk of Michigan Democrats stayed home, with way fewer voting than in far smaller states.
All this so profoundly taints the Michigan primary result that the only reasonable solution is to split the state's delegates down the middle. But another factor makes the taint still worse--the 60,000 Democrats who crossed over to vote Republican, based on their 7 percent share of the Republican vote. (In comparison, in South Carolina's contested primary, 11 days later, just 2% of the Republican voters were Democrats. Add in the vote for "uncommitted," and for Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, and Chris Dodd (who'd already dropped out), plus the 27,000 votes that Lori Hansen Riegle (Senator Riegle's wife), says were discarded because of write-ins, and the non-Clinton total climbs to 353,686, or 25,000 more than Hillary's 328,151. Michigan Democrats who felt the vote was meaningless were in fact encouraged to cross over. Since everyone (including Clinton) said the results wouldn't count, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsis suggested Michigan Democrats vote for Mitt Romney to prolong the Republican race, keep the Republican candidates at each others' throats, and perhaps help nominate the presumably less-electable Mitt Romney. In other words, pretty much what Rush Limbaugh and his allies ended up doing, except that unlike Indiana and Ohio, Michigan had no laws even theoretically prohibiting such an action. No one thought Clinton would have the chutzpah to retroactively claim a Soviet-style victory. Other progressive bloggers picked up on the idea as well. I also heard it discussed on my local Air America affiliate. These strategic voters, whether inspired by the blogs or self-initiated, combined with other Democrats who simply figured McCain was less fundamentalist than Huckabee and had more substance than Romney's empty-suit puffery, so would still be a better choice for America if the Democratic candidate lost. Had all of them stayed in the Democratic primary and voted against Hillary, it would have tipped her to 48 percent.
Kos and his site do valuable work, and I suspect Limbaugh would have launched his campaign without the precedent. But in both cases, Clinton benefited. As soon as McCain had clinched the nomination, Limbaugh and allies like Laura Ingraham began encouraging Republicans to further an increasingly nasty Democratic fight. Obama had been gaining legitimate support from Republicans simply inspired by his message, sick of Bush, and therefore open to changing. A conservative Mormon accounting professor me saying "Paul, you aren't going to believe this. Obama is way too liberal for me, but I'm going to vote for him because I think he has integrity." Post-Limbaugh, those who switched included a substantial number of Republicans trying to disrupt the Democratic primary. As the Boston Globe reported, "In Ohio and Texas on March 4, Republicans comprised 9 percent of the Democratic primary electorate, more than twice the average GOP share of the turnout in the earlier contests where exit polling was conducted. Clinton ran about even with Obama among Republicans in both states, a far more favorable showing among GOP voters than in the early races." A Wall Street Journal story found similar results. Twelve percent of Mississippi's Democratic primary voters were Republicans, breaking three to one for Clinton, but 31% of that group said she wasn't honest and trustworthy, which hardly suggested they'd be voting for her come November. In Indiana, Huffington Post staff reporter Sam Stein points out that seven percent of those who voted for Clinton in the primary say they wouldn't vote for her in November. But without those voters, she wouldn't have had her two-percentage-point victory.
This resonates with my experience. I've gotten emails from people throughout these states who've described coworkers, neighbors, or friends who they witnessed bragging or laughing about being part of Rush's crossover legions. I've read many similar first-person accounts on various blogs. Given the size of Limbaugh's audience and that of his allies in this effort, it seems perfectly conceivable that he shifted 2-3 percent of the vote in each of the states that he targeted. Those jumping on the Daily Kos campaign in Michigan had a far smaller megaphone, but operated under similar strategic assumptions. They were hardly Hillary supporters, or they'd have voted for her, but the numbers suggest their votes made a difference, helping give her the "victory" she now clings to.
Clinton's negligible hopes require both massive superdelegate shifts and seating both Michigan and Florida according to her fantasy projections, where Obama gets zero Michigan delegates because he wasn't on the ballot, and where Obama loses in a Florida vote he never had a chance to contest. The Rules Committee decision-makers would do well to remember the conscious interventions of those who tried to game the primary system. In the case of Michigan, they hardly intended to benefit Hillary, but without their switch, she wouldn't have been able to make even the hollow claims on which she now rests so much of her last-stand campaign.
Paul Rogat Loeb is the author of The Impossible Will Take a Little While: A Citizen's Guide to Hope in a Time of Fear, named the #3 political book of 2004 by the History Channel and the American Book Association. His previous books include Soul of a Citizen: Living With Conviction in a Cynical Time. See www.paulloeb.org To receive his articles directly email sympa@lists.onenw.org with the subject line: subscribe paulloeb-articles