I sent in my absentee ballot in California late last week and voted for John Edwards in the Democratic primary. He's got the best position on the Iraq War of the three remaining candidates (pull out all American troops), he has the best health care plan, he's raising the issue of concentrated corporate power in the kind of Jacksonian way it needs to be addressed, and he's worked to put the issue of poverty as such back high on the national agenda. Edwards after the South Carolina primary has sounded like he's shifting to stress his role as a convention power broker and as a major influence on how the issues are handled in the fall campaign.
If Christopher Dodd had still been officially in the race, I would have picked him because of his strong position on the war and his leadership - which he's showing in the Senate today - in pushing the Democrats to take a principled stand in favor of the Constitution against Cheney's police-state telecom immunity bill. It's also a popular stand, which makes you really wonder why Harry Reid has been so willing to go along with this horrible thing.
I had occasion to watch far more CNN coverage than I normally do over the last two days. TV news commentary is bad. Just bad. I'm beginning to think that Bob "the Daily Howler" Somerby may have been understating his case for the last nine years or so on how broken our Establishment press really is. And that would really be saying something.
For one thing, the CNN coverage of the South Carolina results was obsessively focused on race. Now, racial breakdowns in the vote are an important factor. The Republicans have been campaigning against black people since 1964. And as time goes on that becomes more and more and more of their brand identity. (See Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul.) And since the mid-1990s, the Reps have been building up hostility to Latino immigrants and to Latinos and Spanish-speakers generally as part of the brand, too. So, guess what? African-American and Latino voters tend to favor Democratic candidates. To distinguished Republican thinkers like Pat Buchanan, this is evidence that these suspect minorities are voting on "identity politics" if not out-and-out racism.
Now, I knew that the Big Pundits have been focusing on race in the Presidential primaries, trying very hard to squeeze racial implications out of any comment by Candidate Clinton or her husband. But hearing the full-on obsession with the racial breakdown of the vote in South Carolina pouring out of CNN was kind of stunning to me.
What the South Carolina results say to me is that Obama showed that he has strong support among African-American voters in that primary. I haven't seen or heard any polling that showed that race - in the sense of "I voted for Obama because he's black" - was a major factor in their decisions. Based on the numbers, I would say that it's a reasonable supposition that black voters particularly identified with Obama. And it's likely that the option of a credible African-American candidate for President appealed to some sense of group pride. There are also white voters who would take particular pride at the opportunity to vote in the general election for a strong and credible African-American Presidential candidate. I'm one of them myself. Although if one of the African-American candidates were Republican, you would have to waterboard me to get me to actually vote for them.
But black voters generally have not shown a strong tendency to vote primarily on the basis of race. If they did, we would have seen the African-American vote in Obama's 2004 Illinois Senate election split heavily between Obama and Alan Keyes. In general, African-American Republicans generally don't do very well at all among black voters. Because they can see that a black Republican who supports the Republican Party is supporting a Party and a set of policies that work very much to the disadvantage of African-Americans.
I don't see anything sinister in those trends. Rush Limbaugh hucking it up like any cheap bigot about Obama and his "spade" and "hoe", that's disgusting and plainly racist.
What was also noticeable, or really unmistakable, about the CNN commentary was the animosity of most of the commentators toward Bill and Hillary Clinton. One of them cited a statistic that said 58% of South Carolina voters had a significant effect on their vote. Then she cited some statistic of people who said Bill Clinton's campaigning had encouraged them to vote for Hillary Clinton, and some smaller percentage that said it had discouraged them from voting for her. But those two figures added up to something like 80%. It really didn't make sense, though none of the other talking heads challenged her comment or asked her to clarify. But she rattled right on about how Clinton's role was so damaging, blah, blah, blah.
Bill Clinton is one of the most popular political figures in America. But the punditocracy almost universally despise him and his wife. And it was reflected in the post-SC-primary commentary. Check out this TPM video rounding up the anti-Clinton bile from the Sunday news shows:
There are two issues that are connected but distinct: Bill's actual effect as a marketing factor in Hillary Clinton campaign for convention delegates, and the Establishment press' general hostility to both Clinton's. I'm not at all convinced of the former. From what I've seen at this point, I would say that Hillary Clinton would be crazy not to make maximum use of the campaign resource that Bill Clinton is. The upside of the hostility of the press is that nothing either of them could do or say could make the bulk of the national polictical "press corps" more hostile to her and her candidacy.
The latter phenemenon is beyond serious dispute. And given the kind of anti-Clinton attitudes represented in the samples included in the video above, I'm completely confident that if Bill Clinton were to dramatically reduce his campaign role now, the punditocracy would immediately start obsessing about how this shows what a domineering, castrating b**** Hillary Clinton is. And they will dress it up as a "character" issue, as in, you know, you'd much rather have a beer with a regular guy like Mike Huckabee than with a ball-busting broad like Clinton with her mean spirit and bad personality and all. Now, Brother Huck as a Southern Baptist minister could well be a teetotaler for all I know, so you might have settle for non-alcoholic beer with him.
My comfort level is rising a little about Obama's willingness and ability to fight hard against an aggessive campaign by the Republians in the fall. But Obama's has based his bring-us-together pitch for the last four years on showing he's willing to criticize Democrats using favorite Republican memes, e.g., Democrats hate God, the Republicans had the good ideas for the last 15 years.
The commentariat is trying to make it sound like the Clintons are using race as a campaign issue as part of a "Southern strategy" against Obama. But when you look at the last four years, both Obama and Clinton have been foolishly willing to pander to Republicans, such as Clinton with the flag-burning non-issue, or Obama with the Democrats are against "people of faith" nonsense. I'm still more confident about Clinton's ability to fight the Republicans in the fall election than I am of Obama's.
Because Obama and the Democrats have to keep in mind that the media love affair with him will end approximately the second it becomes clear that he will be the Democratic nominee. Then for months, they will repeat and promote and give credibility to the general Republican line of attack, which is that Obama is Obambi who's too weak and sissy to protect us from The Terrorists, and at the same time he's a closet Muslim fundamentalist who is secretly a top operative the Black Muslim Terrorist League to Destroy White People and Exterminate Christianity.
That's not a reason not to vote for him in the primary. The Reps will run an equally sleazy and intense campaign against Clinton or Edwards. It is a reason for Obama to get aggressive in fighting Republicans. His willingness to go to the Senate along with Clinton to support Dodd's filibuster against the Cheney police-state bill is a good example of what he needs to do much more often along those lines. He's not going to find much of that nicey-nice bipartisan support in the telecom immunity debate that he seems to think will be so appealing to voters in the general election.
If we had a reasonably competent mainstream press that could and would actually do journalism instead of, well, whatever it is they do, a Democratic sweep in the fall elections would be practically inevitable. But we don't have that kind of press corps. With our real existing "press corps", it will be a hard fight for the Dems this fall, especially for the Presidency.
