Super Tuesday Morning

I am waiting for the coffee to do its work prior to getting on the treadmill for a couple of hours (yuck!). We are supposed to get more ice and snow tonight (double yuck) so I might not get to swim tomorrow morning. Unfortunately, my wife’s plane might not make it out either; she is flying to Florida for, ahem, a “business conference” (yeah, right. )

Workout notes 10 miles (walking) on the treadmill in 1:59; got bored and varied the incline a bit. Then 30 minutes of yoga.

Some interesting (to me) election stuff:

Religion wise, who votes for who? There is a nice breakdown here; to no one’s surprise:

[...]The report did list “Seculars” as a group, comprised of the non-religious, atheists and agnostics, and accounting for 10.6% of the voting-age population. According to the description:

74% of Seculars voted for Kerry, accounting for 16% of his total vote, while 26% voted for Bush, making up 5% of his total vote.

This report also talks about the other religious groups.

Website traffic: who gets more, Obama or Clinton? Interestingly enough, it depends on how you measure it. Obama gets more unique visitors, but Clinton traffic tends to stay longer. Of course, some of it could be function of the type of software used to browse.

Right now, trying to analyze support by the measuring of website traffic is far from being a science, but this might provide some interesting data.

Which campaign gets financial support from where? This article talks about the available maps which can pinpoint a candidate’s financial support. The actual link to the map is here; and yes, you can tell who gave to who. My data is only updated though April of 2007 though. I have the map set for Peoria, but you can set it for any city that you like.

Hillary Hate Clinton backers point to the fact that she has “withstood the test” of being hated for a long time. Where it it true that she has won the Senate race in heavily Democratic New York even after having getting creamed in the press, I am not so sure what else that is supposed to mean. But here are some articles about this: 3-quarks daily and The American Conservative.

I’ll quote from the latter article, where they argue that Hatred of Hillary Clinton will not be enough to help the Republicans win even if she is the nominee:

It’s a balmy, beer-drinking evening in the middle of August, and the conservatives trickling in to a meeting of the Robert A. Taft Club can’t enjoy it. They’re mostly under-30 Washington professionals, and they’re fed up with the Republican Party. They think George W. Bush’s bumbling and ideological hat-trading have reduced the conservative movement to a pitiable, piddling state. If Karl Rove stepped inside, he’d come out looking like Oscar de la Hoya after a bout gone wrong.

They settle into a debate about the future of the conservative movement and the Republican Party. Panelists take turns whipping the party for its sins. “We beat them on immigration,” says Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail pioneer, “but right now, we just don’t have the strength or the resources to affect public policy the way we want to.” He beseeches the crowd to help save the movement, but that gets a muted reaction. So he steps it up: “I still think that in the short term, as many problems as we have right now, Hillary Clinton can bring conservatives back together.”

The name does the trick: soft laughter moves around the room. Keeping Hillary out of the White House is literally the only motivation some conservatives have to pull the Republican lever in 2008, especially if their party nominates a pro-choice candidate for the first time since 1976. “Just enough people might go to the polls next November nursing one conviction that trumps all others,” Terence Jeffrey wrote a few weeks after the panel (which he also appeared on). “There’s no way they would vote for Hillary Clinton.” Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard executive editor and a sturdy weathervane for Republican popular opinion, expressed the same thing in a late-September column: “Nearly all Republicans, plus a lot of independents, rally around the need to defeat Senator Hillary Clinton and keep her away from the presidency. So it follows, not entirely logically, that they wish for her to win the Democratic nomination.”

Is this wishful thinking from a party and a movement on the ropes? Not according to pollsters. There are voters who have given up on the GOP over the last few years and utterly loathe the Clintons in general or Hillary in particular. Americans are aching to vote Democratic, and polls that test a generic Republican candidate against a generic Democrat give Clinton’s party a double-digit lead. But their enthusiasm flags when they ponder the flesh-and-blood Democratic frontrunner. Pollster Scott Rasmussen points out that at least 45 percent of Americans don’t like Clinton personally. She simply rubs them the wrong way—in every way. Despite that generic lead, she only ties or narrowly outpaces Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson, and John McCain.

“Of the top three Democratic candidates, she’s absolutely the weakest in the general election,” Rasmussen says. “Hillary is a unifying factor for Republicans, and Republicans aren’t otherwise unified. If Hillary is the nominee, this is a competitive race.”

But see if you can spot the problem. Conservatives are fraught, angry at their traditional party, unable to decide on a standard-bearer, unsure even what they stand for. They don’t think this is the year to sort those problems out. They’re counting on a short-cut when the Democrats nominate an unelectable cold fish who has infuriated the Right for a decade and a half. Millions remember how they felt when she belittled other wives for “staying home and baking cookies,” and Bill Clinton promised voters “two for the price of one” if they sent his family to the White House.

On the Right, the list of grievances was even longer. Both Clintons were seen as ambassadors of 1960s radicalism and cultural decadence, and Hillary was the worse of the two: a pro-choice feminist who didn’t take her husband’s name until pollsters told her it would help him make a political comeback.

Yet for all of that outrage, Republicans lost that election to the Clintons. And the hope that voters will see what they see and reject what the Clintons stand for resembles the plan Democrats clung to in 2004. They choose John Kerry on the theory he would be the least controversial general-election candidate, then counted on an electorate fed up with George W. Bush to deliver the election. [...]

Obama: some nay-saying. There are some who think that Obama can’t win the general election. The point is mostly this: the Republicans would quickly slam him on things like his middle name, his race, and the fact that he is, well, “too much of a citizen of the world” and not enough “apple pie”, so to speak. In short, much of what I like about him will be hatted by the -dumm…er, the less informed voters:

Here is an article from the American Conservative:

National polls show Obama running as well or better than Clinton in match-ups against Republicans. The conventional pundit wisdom is that while a dissolving GOP coalition could be re-united against Hillary, Obama would have greater appeal to independents and restless Republicans. Such prognoses come not only from progressives, happy to tell you that leading Republicans have no idea how to run against a black candidate, but from conservatives, too. David Brooks has touted Obama’s moderate, consensus-seeking character in language so glowing some liberals interpreted it as a prelude to endorsement.

There is another opinion about this, however. It is held by some traditional conservatives who oppose Bush’s Iraq and Iran policies, those most open to supporting a Democrat if the Republicans, as seems likely, promise a foreign policy of more of the same. In a nutshell, this view is that Hillary would face a difficult race, but would probably prevail, as could have Edwards or Joe Biden or a fairly generic Democrat in a year when the Dems have a major tailwind. Obama would be their weakest candidate, who could lead his party into an electoral disaster.

This is not because of Obama’s race, which—other factors held equal—probably attracts more voters than it puts off. The weakness is the other major quality that progressive intellectuals find appealing in him: his cosmopolitanism, his relative unrootedness, the sense that he is harbinger not only of a new America where race doesn’t matter but of a globalized world where national sentiment is on the way out. He would not only be the United States’ first black president, but, to borrow immigration activist Mark Krikorian’s useful term, its first post-American one as well.

In his foreign-policy address before the Chicago Council on Global Affairs last April, Obama asserted that America’s security is “inextricably linked to the security of all people,” a recipe for global interventionism so promiscuous as to make neoconservatives almost prudent by comparison. He is a proponent of global free trade and high levels of immigration. Much of his memoir is devoted to his quest to connect with an extended family in Africa. This world-man aura is not without appeal, especially after eight years of a president deaf to what foreigners think and feel. But taken as far as Obama does, it would be an electoral liability.

One must also consider that the Republicans—perhaps especially those now overflowing with praise for Obama—might actually want to win the presidential election. In Obama, they would have an opponent who has never faced a well-funded foe in a tough one-on-one race, never encountered a barrage of negative TV advertising. He might be able to take a political punch well, he may not have a glass jaw. But there is no evidence for it. Obama’s one statewide campaign was a romp over Alan Keyes, prompting one wag to remark that Obama’s general-election prospects would indeed be excellent if the Republicans nominated Alan Keyes.

Obama has never faced a white opponent who hit hard or low or who struck at the very quality that makes him most appealing to the Left blogosphere, his exoticism. He won’t face that test in the primaries: the nearest the Hillary camp might come is former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey’s probably disingenuous claim that he “liked” Obama’s name and background and presumed ability to connect with the world’s one billion Muslims. Liberal bloggers slammed Kerrey for propagating a vicious “smear,” reminding one and all that multicultural good manners and political correctness are still the single factor that unites Democrats.

Republicans would not necessarily share such qualms. What might their campaign look like? You needn’t be a political consultant to imagine a pretty effective one. The natural point of approach, of course, would be the name. Can we acknowledge that no contemporary Trollope or Allen Drury seeking to dramatize the emergence of a talented half-African presidential contender would consider burdening his hero with a name that evokes both of America’s best-known enemies in the War on Terror? It would be far too over the top for social realism.

As the Democratic presidential nominee, Obama could quickly become known as Barack Hussein Obama. Republican commercials and talk radio would guarantee it. Negative TV spots could be relatively banal, pointing to some liberal highlights from Obama’s state legislature record—one very strong pro-abortion vote and another against people who used unregistered guns to protect their homes against intruders would do the trick. And then, a voiceover, intoning something like “Barack Hussein Obama—Right for America?”

A colleague asserts that this would be seen as no more than a childish playground taunt, that by autumn Americans will be so acclimated to Obama’s name that no repetition of it could weaken him. I doubt this. The political class, far more cosmopolitan than the rest of the country, has been intrigued with Obama for years. But by this summer, both parties will be playing to a broad electorate, in most cases more than twice the percentage of voters who turn out for a contested early state primary. Compared to primary voters, November voters are lower on the political awareness scale, less educated, less prosperous, less tuned in. Many will be forming an opinion about Barack Obama for the first time during and after the conventions, and branding him could be done comparatively quickly. Democrats in 1988 were astonished at how rapidly Michael Dukakis was “defined” by Willie Horton and how fast the Duke’s double-digit lead in national polls evaporated. They of course knew that Dukakis was a competent and tested governor, a proven debater, no slouch on law and order. How could blue-collar voters not see this? Similarly, John Kerry’s team found the Swiftboat charges so ludicrous they didn’t deign to answer them. But, to the campaign’s remorse, many voters found them believable enough. On what basis should we assume that white working-class voters (precisely those most resistant to Obama’s electoral appeal thus far) would be completely unmoved by a campaign geared to question Obama’s “American-ness”?

There is another vulnerability to Obama that his Democratic opponents would never exploit. Shelby Steele is right that America is more than ready for a black president and that Obama, in his present persona, does indeed embody “something that no other presidential candidate possibly can: the idealism that race is but a negligible human difference.” [...]

But this claim to “rootedness” in black America is nonsense. Dreams From My Father is a sometimes fascinating story of a sensitive young man trying to graft for himself an African-American identity, with very limited opportunities to do so. Obama was raised by his white mother, by an Indonesian stepfather, and then by his maternal grandparents in multiracial but not very black Hawaii. His efforts to become “black” without the context of any serious African-American community are labored. One of the book’s charms is that Obama the writer sometimes seems to recognize this, describing his self-absorbed quest, then stepping outside to ever so faintly mock the character trying so earnestly to be black.

But while the quest for black identity is interesting on a human level, it is not necessarily the fodder of a mainstream presidential campaign.

There is much more there.