All over but the shouting

Updated Thursday at high noon.

I still want all the states to vote.  I still think the campaign's good for the Party, and good for Obama.  Around 1.2 million people voted in the Indiana Democratic primary yesterday.  About a third of that voted in the Republican primary, which isn't surprising, considering McCain's got the nomination all sewed up, but this isn't important as a measure of Republicans' boredom; it's important as a measure of how fired up the Democrats are and I'm convinced their excitement will carry through November.  I'm also pretty sure that sooner or later most of Hillary's supporters will catch Obamamania along the way.  I believe that Clinton will concede on June 4th, after the last votes are counted, and all our fences will be mended by the time of the convention.

There's not much Clinton can hope for now except denying Obama the nomination on the first ballot and the super-delegates are just not going to let that happen.  In fact, I'd bet that plenty of her own delegates don't want to see that either and a lot of those who aren't tied to the mast will jump ship long before Denver.  For a while there, I was kind of looking forward to a floor fight at a convention that would actually decide something.  I thought it would be fun to watch and I thought it would cause lots of folks out there in TV land to tune in and I thought that if they did they would catch the excitement too.  Then I remembered.

A floor fight would make great theater but lousy television.

What would look like democracy in all its glory in action to political junkies like me would look to most normal people like a great big sleep-depriving mess.  And the convention is not going to be covered on TV by the likes of Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley, who would have enjoyed the fun and been careful and smart about explaining what was going on down there on the floor and backstage.  It's going to be covered by Tim Russert and Brian Williams and Charles Gibson and the gasbags from Fox News and MSNBC, all of whom will gleefully tell us how bad all this looks and how it shows the Democrats at their divided, divisive, disorganized, discombobulated, indecisive, internecine worst.

A week later they'll be up in Minneapolis "reporting" on how orderly and united the Republicans are and how the smooth running of their convention shows that the GOP is still the party of the stern daddies who know how to keep their kids in line while those indulgent mommies in the Democratic party let their spoiled brats run wild and how it proves that the Maverick and Commander is in COMMAND.

It's too bad that the conventions have become nothing more than a week-long free campaign ad for the candidates, but that's the way it is and it's not going to change.  I want our Obama ad to be every bit as pretty as their McCain ad will be.

But in case I needed reminding that a contentious convention is a blown opportunity I read an excerpt last night from Rick Perlstein's new book, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America.

Even if I thought Hillary could win on the floor and even if it really and truly mattered to me that she gets the nomination instead of Obama---I feel like I always have to make this clear.  I like Clinton more than I like Obama, but not that much more, and liking her more does not mean I don't like him.  And. please, save yourself the trouble of trying to persuade me not to like her.  You can't do it.  You don't need to do it, unless your own commitment to Obama is so shaky that the slightest doubt about him on anybody else's part causes you to doubt yourself, in which case your arguments just aren't going to be all that persuasive anyway.---as I was saying, even if I cared, I wouldn't want her to be delivering her acceptance speech at 3 in the morning to a roomful of angry and exhausted people and in front of television cameras beaming pictures to millions of turned-off TVs.

Obama in prime time needs to be on everybody's minds when John McCain steps up to the podium in Minneapolis.

Word of warning.  I think some people reading the excerpt from Rick's book might see some unnerving parallels between '72 and now.  The parallels are trivial, though, coming nowheres near to mattering as much as the divergences.

That was then, this is now.

For one thing, John McCain is not an incumbent President who has just opened up China and created a detante with the Soviet Union.  Nixon was ending the war in Vietnam (supposedly) while McCain's promising to keep this one going forever.  Labor's not going to abandon the party.  Abbie Hoffman's dead.  And Barack Obama is no George McGovern.

I don't know if any Democrat could have beaten Nixon that year, but the party couldn't have nominated a more certain loser than George McGovern.  McGovern was a terrible candidate from the get-go.  Obama's been brilliant all along.  McGovern turned out to be no good at pretending he wasn't a politician acting out of political expediency, while Obama has been so smooth at it that an awful lot of people haven't even noticed him doing it (a lot of those people are among the ranks of his own supporters, but that's not surprising since they've invested a great deal of their own vanity in the idea that only the Clintons fight dirty.  In the long run I think they'll be glad to learn that's not true).   Obama is a harder man and his organization's tougher and more skillful than McGovern's was.

Once again, here's the link to the excerpt from Rick Perlstein's book.

Rick's Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus is one of my favorite political histories and I can't wait to read Nixonland. Digby has a posted a  glowing review at Hullabaloo.

Rick Perlstein blogs here.

____________________

Late-breaking:  Just heard from Rick Perlstein who wants folks to know that copies of Before the Storm custom-autographed by the author himself are available through this friendly neighborhood ebay auction.

____________________

Some shouting before it's all over:  Chervokas and Watson make a good case here, but I can't see it happening.  Hillary would make a great Vice-President, assuming she and Obama could work together, but I think she'd be a problem as a running mate:  Too much of a chance of her upstaging Obama, too many openings for McCain's Donut Brigade in the Media and the Right Wing Noise Machine to attack Obama's manhood by pushing the idea he's whipped by his own VP, too little to be gained that can't also be gained by his picking someone like Bill Richardson or Wes Clark or Tim Kaine or Janet Napolitano or Kathleen Sibelius.

________________________

Updated motivated by partisan loyalty:  Disassembling a David Brooks column to reveal the design flaws and built-in bugs, John Sides of the Monkey Cage lays out some numbers that show a couple of very interesting things.

One is this:  In the Pensyvania primary, "voters without a college degree favored Clinton, 58-42.  Voters with a college degree favored Clinton too, 51-49."   Sides says this shows that the lazy stereotyped thinking behind the CW that Clinton is the candidate of the working class and Obama the candidate of the "creative" class is in fact lazy and stereotyped.  Clinton won by winning the votes of both groups.  That would seem to support the argument Clinton's trying to make right now, that she has the broader appeal.  But---and Sides doesn't get into this; he's working on a different point---please notice, as if it isn't obvious, she did not win anywheres close to 100 per cent of either group's votes.  Among the voters without college degrees, which presumably includes much of the white working class he's supposedly not convincing, Obama got 42 per cent of the vote.  That probably includes a disproportionate number of African-Americans, but it still has to include many white blue collar and small-town rural voters.  He couldn't pry enough of them away from Hillary to matter because...they were already committed to voting for Hillary.  They voted for Hillary for the same reason I, with my college edumacation and master's degree, and the 51 per cent of the college grads in Pennsylvania voted for her.  They like her better than they like Obama.  But all these numbers tell us is that Barack Obama cannot win a majority of their votes when his oppenent is Hillary Clinton.  It tells us nothing about how they will vote when his opponent is John McCain.

This is where Sides' argument dovetails with the top portion of this post in which I said, "I'm also pretty sure that sooner or later most of Hillary's supporters will catch Obamamania along the way."

Sides shows that over the last few decades Democrats have become more partisan.  They vote for their party's nominees without splitting their tickets anywhere up and down the line, which very strongly suggests that despite all the grumbling and the fist-shaken to heaven promises never to vote for Obama and the assertions that they will stay home, not pull the lever or punch the button or touch the screen at the top of the ticket, or write in Hillary's name, the odds are that on the second Tuesday of November, Democrats will be voting for the Democratic candidate for President no matter what they're saying now.

Comments

[scottreads]

Re the McGovern comparison, I agree. The thing that killed him and made him look like just another politician was the Eagleton mess, which was significant because it was about who the potential Vice President of the United States was going to be. Obama's biggest flap was about who his pastor was. While I don't want to minimize the Wright issue, my point is that Obama ain't McGovern.

[Michael Bartley]

I agree that it is over. In his speech last night Obama began the careful switch to a general election strategy. Most important, he was gracious to Clinton while reaching out to her supporters and calling for unity. Now, if she chooses to continue and I don't believe she should, Senator Clinton should begin her own transition toward party unity by subtly changing the tone and emphasis of her campaign. Beating McCain and the media, the two headed monster of modern political madness, will take unity and strength. Now is the time to begin to confront the real challenges that face this country and begin to, in RFK's words, seek a newer world.

[Bo Gardiner]

"I'm also pretty sure that sooner or later most of Hillary's supporters will catch Obamamania along the way."

Not while we're remotely conscious. Guess that leaves slipping us some roofies.

[velvet goldmine]

I cannot decide if the voting public is being over-estimated or under-estimated by this received wisdom that the down-to-the-wire battle on the Dem side is handing the election to McCain. All I know is that it's wrong.

There is no way on Allah's green earth that people are going to care this fall how close the Obama-Clinton battle was, or whether they covered each other in dirt in the process (They didn't. The preacher-man thing? That's the best ya got?).

There will be literally months of focus on the Obama (presumably) v. McCain fight, and that's what will be remembered.

I need a little time to grieve, I admit. Aside from what I like about her policies, I felt a warmth and resolve from Clinton and Obama's personality just leaves me cold. But I'll get over it. This is hardly the lesser-of-two evils scenario we've had before.

[lina]

Wow. Everyone sounds so reasonable this morning.

I'll make a motion to select Wes Clark for VP. He's someone Bill and Hill can enthusiastically support.

[scottreads]

Um, at other places in the blogosphere, the hate goes on b/t the two camps and is less reasonable, so that's why I like this place for a little perspective pick-me-up.

[Mike Schilling]

Hillary for Majority Leader. She would (and I say this in full admiration) be the most effective arm-twister since Lyndon Johnson.

[Vir Modestus]

Hillary for Majority Leader.

I second. Reid has been a disaster from the start. We need someone who will fight hard for the bills that Obama will want passed (especially since they are so close on so many of the issues, they're already certain to be *her* bills, too).

Being one of the wild-eyed idealists on the Obama side, I'm hopeful that there *will* be a change in the way things get done in Washington. Replacing all of the leadership positions in both Houses will be a wonderful way to start.

[Chris G.]

The RNC is in St. Paul, not Minneapolis, which makes me glad we wound up living in Minneapolis when we moved out here.

I fear Clinton is in very real danger of running this out so long she loses with no dignity intact.

[Falstaff]

Maybe this is off-topic. I've been thinking a lot about this, lately, and I find myself wanting to ask a HRC-supporter this question, and it might as well be a supporter of hers who I really respect.

How can you vote for someone who voted for the Iraq war, given the choice?

I suppose I'm showing my relative youth (just turned thirty), and I suppose it's not that different than the vote I cast for Kerry in the '04 general. And if, by some political miracle, Clinton does pull off a win in the primary, I will vote for her with a relatively clear conscience. I just don't understand that last part.

I mean, it's not even that she's said she was wrong; she doesn't think she was. And that just kind of kills me. This war is, to my way of thinking, the greatest disaster in modern American politics -- certainly one of the greatest violations of human rights in at least a generation.

And she thinks, or so I remember reading in the wake of those "moveon.org doesn't agree with me" comments, that it was the right thing to do.

I'm curious -- obviously as a pacifist Quaker I come at this from a different angle than most Dems or even most liberal/progressive/whatevers, but I'd really like to see you address that. I mean, if you want to.

[David Parsons]

I'm not planning on voting for either of the center-right candidates who are vying for the The whole "suckered into voting for the B*sh junta's festival of war crimes" bit would have been more of a consideration if Mr. Obama hadn't have tacked vigorously to the right as soon as the ink was dry on the official vote tally. As it sits, when the Democratic party presents me with two basically identical candidates, of course I'd prefer the one who doesn't consort with homophobic scum (which Mr. Obama did in South Carolina.)

[Doghouse Riley]

Barack Obama is no George McGovern.

And more's the pity, really. McGovern was a good and decent man who offered a chance to break with the insanity of the previous twenty years; the current Centrist Democratic choices, surveying the wreckage of the most recent twenty-five years of right-Republican rule, vow not to be George Bush.

McGovern ran a great campaign to get the nomination, and an unspeakably lousy one thereafter, in which he was aided, not just by the Eagleton business--which deserves its own commentary--and by the popular appeal of Nixon's domestic fascism (Vietnam never dropped much below 50% support; despite this a major party candidate ran against it, instead of mumbling when the question came up), but by the Scoop Jackson/George Wallace wing of his own party. The fact that the McGovern campaign has become a sort of touchstone of hopelessness for the Democratic party should be--but somehow never is--viewed in the light of the overwhelming successes it has achieved since, as wave after wave of frontal assaults were led by generals determined to unlose the war two wars ago. (Mainstream liberal Walter Mondale gets slaughtered, mainstream liberal John Kerry loses to the Worst President Ever, and people may criticize their campaigns, but no one ever suggest the Liberal Democrat be taken out and shot.)

And now there's a choice between a woman who facilitated a universally-reviled war and a guy who says it was the wrong one and he'll "finish the fight with al-Qaeda". It's funny, but I don't recall the entire left blogosphere insisting, in the wake of Nancy Pelosi being sworn as Speaker, that the party move to the center, pronto.

[Lance]

Falstaff: How can you vote for someone who voted for the Iraq war, given the choice?

Fair question. I haven't had time to do much blogging today. I'll try to answer it in a post tomorrow.

Doghouse, you will never ever catch me saying anything against McGovern the man. And as for his being the most certain loser in '72, I agree with you that that had a lot to do with the historical and political forces that you point out.

[Andrea G]

If the votes from Florida and Michigan are not counted and their delegates not seated this yellow dog democrat will leave the top of the ticket blank for the first time in her voting life. Democracy means more to me than either candidate.