He's Finished

I've been up to my neck at work and was only able to hear snippets of Obama's big speech on Tuesday. As everyone has said, the speech was fantastic, but will it be effective in regaining the momentum that Obama lost after the Reverend Wright comments were made public? I seriously doubt it. For all of Obama's efforts to stay above it, Reverend Wright did what the Clintons were not able to do to him. They turned him into "the black candidate". They turned him into a hybrid of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. And by giving this speech, which in many ways was necessary, he has fed the narrative that he's now the candidate whose campaign is all about race. Despite the fawning reviews by his cheerleaders on cable news, I can't see how the "waitress grandmas" in Ohio and Pennsylvania, who insist they'll vote for John McCain if Obama gets the nomination, will be persuaded by anything Obama said....or anything he might say from this day forward. They may in fact be more disconnected from Obama after the speech, distancing themselves from the rhetorical parallel of Wright's words with those of the stereotypical "crazy uncle at Thanksgiving dinner" who makes a throwaway racial epithet. Through little fault of his own, Obama's ability to persuade Hillary's voters to his side is likely gone forever.....and I knew this would happen if Obama became the nominee.

The conventional wisdom remains that, in the words of Dick Morris, "this thing is over". Superdelegates will never dare overturn the will of the people and hand the nomination to Hillary. I'm not nearly as sure of that as I was even three days ago. I suspect Obama will continue to lose ground, despite media proclamations of his inevitable resurgence following the speech, and he'll be heading into the convention looking much weaker against McCain than Hillary does. I would give Hillary at least a 50% chance of winning the nomination at this point, even though I maintain she'd still do more long-term damage to the Democratic Party than Obama if she was the nominee.

Either way, it seems pretty obvious to me that John McCain will be America's 44th President. The only lingering suspense is what wedge issue Republicans will exploit to convince working people to vote against their interests in the 2012 election.

A Party Divided

There have been a number of idiotic statements in the last couple of months made by pundits who are supposed to have their fingers on the pulse of the American electorate, but perhaps the stupidest of all is one of the most frequently repeated mythologies that is just now starting to be wholly debunked. The mythology in question is the talking point that "Democrats like BOTH of these candidates" in reference to Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

The real story is that Clinton and Obama have inadvertantly (at least in the beginning) divided Democratic voters into two distinct groups, neither of which particularly likes or trusts the other. The divide was clear as early as the New Hampshire primary when older voters and working-class voters started to show some backlash to Obamamania and attach themselves to Hillary Clinton. The divide really came to the surface on Super Tuesday, where Hillary had built a seemingly impenetrable coalition of older women, Catholics, blue-collar whites, and Latinos contrasting with Obama's coalition of African-Americans, young people, liberal activists, and affluent professionals. A generation ago, it would have been painfully obvious that the numbers would be on the side of Hillary's coalition in any Democratic primary, but the changing nature of the party made the contest jarlid tight as of Super Tuesday.

Then, of course, Obama was on a roll, albeit an artificial one propped up a number of states demographically favorable to him, that made it seem like Clinton's coalition was falling apart. Wisconsin really seemed like the nail in Hillary's coffin, but in retrospect, her decision to write that state off probably cost her more votes than anything positive Barack Obama did. Nonetheless, I was pretty convinced Obama had it in the bag as recently as one week ago, and was grateful for that as Hillary seemed like a sure loser in the general election and her increasingly negative and confrontational tone was angering me....and since it was angering me, I assumed it must be angering every other Democrat.

But the anecdotal evidence even within my personal social contacts pointed to a tremendous problem Obama was having connecting to older voters even in the friendly turf of the Upper Midwest. My dad reported one person out of more than 30 raising their hand at the county Democratic meeting in my working-class home county in Minnesota when asked who supported Barack Obama. My mom has been unimpressed with him throughout the process, seeing him as an empty suit unable or unwilling to talk specifics, even threatening to sit out the 2008 election if he's the nominee. As last Tuesday's big night for Hillary approached, I came across a poll showing 25% of Hillary supporters would vote for McCain if Obama got the nomination, as compared to 11% of Obama supporters in the event of a Hillary nomination. Those are some sobering numbers, and were ultimately confirmed by a set of Survey USA state polls released last week (after Tuesday). http://www.surveyusa.com/ Scroll down to see hypothetical poll results for Obama v. McCain and Hillary v. McCain.

The fault line is painfully clear. The working-class Scots-Irish belt stretching from Pennsylvania to Arkansas is open to voting Hillary, while Obama would lose by 20 points in a number of swing states. Meanwhile, Obama would put a number of crimson red states in the Plains and Rocky Mountain West in play that Hillary would lose by 20 points or more. There really is no serious electability advantage at this stage, and it's pretty clear that Obama was getting way ahead of himself when he expressed confidence about being able to win over Hillary's voters in a way that she wouldn't be able to win over his. Older voters in particular simply do not take him seriously, and the GOP's wise decision to nominate John McCain really helps the GOP frame Obama's lack of experience in terms favorable to them. The fact that working-class Ohioans soundly rejected a man who spent his young life fighting directly for the working-class and Hillary and her husband were the strongest cheerleaders of NAFTA is irrelevant. Perceptions trump reality in our deranged world of identity politics, and the battles lines are drawn.

Does this mean I'm changing horses midstream and hopping aboard the Hillary Comeback Train? Nope. Not for personal nor strategic reasons. The next three months promise to be an ugly knife fight between the rival factions that is likely to tear the party apart before and during the convention. Obama's thin lead in pledged delegates will be meaningless since he won't pass the threshold of 2.025 delegates required for nomination...and Hillary will thus use her "big state" and 11th hour momentum arguments to try to convince superdelegates to swing her way.

Whoever prevails, I can't imagine the two sides reconciling after such a bloody battle, virtually ensuring defeat in November against a unified bloc of Republicans, independents, and disaffected Democrats who are cool with the seemingly benign John McCain. So what it boils down to then is which demographic of Democratic voters do we want to piss off by not nominating their preferred candidate?

By choosing Obama, older working-class Democrats who currently support Hillary defect to John McCain en masse, producing what is likely to be the most generationally polarized election of all-time. The two most senior-heavy states in America, Florida and Pennsylvania, swing to McCain and by themselves ensure mathematical defeat for Obama. But can the GOP remain the party of seniors when they inevitably resurrect their plans to shrink Social Security checks and dismantle Medicare? Not likely. Nominating Obama would most likely not permanently realign nonsupporters into the Republican column, but the same cannot be said for the reverse scenario....

If millions of young Obamamaniacs get their "hope" stolen from them by Hillary Clinton and cigar-chomping party bosses in the backroom of the convention, all those young Democrats become instantly disillusioned with the Democratic Party and politics in general. The 2008 election would become of the lowest-turnout races ever.....a yawner of a battle among the geriatric voters who supported Hillary and McCain in the primaries, or at least those who haven't died or gotten Alzheimer's by November 4. But the consequences would certainly extend beyond November 4 as Obama fans who feel disenfranchised after the "stolen nomination" no longer have a use for the Democratic Party in 2010 or afterward.

The choice is still pretty clear to me that Barack Obama is the stronger candidate at a personal and strategic level, even though I'm bracing for near-certain defeat this fall given the current arrangement. Kind of ironic how Texas, the state that brought us George W. Bush, and Ohio, the state that denied John Kerry the Presidency in 2004, have managed to poison the 2008 elections eight months before the first general elections votes have been cast. All we can do now is sit back and watch the show....and probably still hear residual nonsense from "experts" that "Democrats like BOTH these candidates".

The "Renegotiate NAFTA" Hoax

Both Democratic Presidential candidates are digging themselves a deep hole as they pander to Ohio primary voters by insisting they'll "renegotiate NAFTA" when elected President. They have no intention of doing so, and one of Barack Obama's campaign lieutenants said as much, in winking code words, to Canadian trade officials who warned against backing out of the trade agreements after hearing Clinton and Obama's speeches in Ohio. Making matters worse, Obama and Clinton are shuttling between Ohio and the pro-trade state of Texas due to the primary schedule, and parsing their words very calculatedly while addressing the crowds of southern Texas who largely like NAFTA.

The bottom line is that it'd be virtually impossible to "renegotiate" NAFTA at this stage. The wheels of the agreement are in steady motion and have been for more than a decade, and the backlash consequences of withdrawing now would be far more severe than the downsides of NAFTA. The time to "renegotiate" NAFTA to appease the interests of working people at home was back in 1993....but Hillary Clinton and her husband were too busy offering the moon and the stars to skeptical Democratic Congressmen to sign the accord back in 1993. When Bill Clinton signed the trade treaty into law, any hope of improving the deal for American workers were dashed with the stroke of the pen.

Besides that, NAFTA is merely a symbollic fall guy for the trade wars, and an increasingly insignificant one. America is no longer losing its manufacturing jobs to Mexico, it's losing them to China and elsewhere in Asia. Even if NAFTA was renegotiated, the outflux of American jobs to the Third World would not be slowed. Mexico was merely a speedbump on the race to the bottom, and corporations have long ago discovered a much more abundant selection of warm bodies willing to make the goods that fill the shelves of Wal-Mart for even less money than Mexican laborers were back in 1994. Pretending that a renegotiation of NAFTA would improve the state of affairs in Ohio's abandoned factories makes both Hillary and Obama look like snake oil peddlers.....making them cinches for attacks from Republicans in the general election.

Furthermore, what possible long-term benefit can Clinton or Obama get from saying they plan to renegotiate NAFTA if they have no intention of doing so? Does making a promise during the campaign that they know they won't be able to keep serve the rest of the party well heading into election cycles beyond 2008? Bill Clinton made a similar promise during the 1992 campaign, when he had the whip hand to renegotiate NAFTA BEFORE it was enacted, but refused to even keep that promise, to the detriment of the Democratic Party in the 1994 midterms.

That should be the lesson for Obama and Hillary during this campaign. They should keep the promise Bill failed to, and fight tooth and nail to produce a better deal for American workers in coming trade agreements. And when voters in places like Ohio bemoan the side effects of trade deals with the code word "NAFTA", make the easy case that our erosion of manufacturing jobs has little to do with NAFTA in the year 2008. The target has long ago moved across the Pacific Ocean. And lastly, continue to press the need to fix our health care system. Canada has higher labor costs but is still picking off our manufacturing jobs because the cost of financing individualized health care policies for American workers is even more cost-prohibitive than higher Canadian wages. Disingenuously vowing to undo NAFTA simply sets these same Ohio voters up to hand the Democratic Party a spankin' in 2010 every bit as ferocious as the one they got in 1994 when they last betrayed workers.