I'm With Her

In 2008, I supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries. I would have backed Hillary in the general, happily. But I saw Obama as somewhat to Hillary's left, and I saw him as a superior campaigner who would make a stronger candidate.

This year, I am voting for Hillary Clinton. She is strongest general election candidate the Democrats have this year, she will make a more effective president than any other Democrat in the field, and she is far better qualified than any other candidate in either party. My decision could not be simpler.

I am to Hillary Clinton's left myself, just as I was and am to Barack Obama's left. (Nor have I ever been surprised to find myself on Obama's left. I knew who I was voting for in 2008, and Obama has proved to be pretty much who I thought he was.) I accept that I am much more liberal than the median American voter. If I want to see a president of the United States as liberal as I am, the whole country has to move left first. That movement will never happen during a presidential election; the presidential election will ratify a movement that has already happened.

Do Hillary's centrist instincts sometimes frustrate me? Yup. Absolutely. But the way to move her left is to shift the terms of debate left. And Hillary's long political track record demonstrates, without question, that she moves to the left as the progressive policy consensus moves left. She has done it repeatedly, on issues across the spectrum. Some of Hillary's critics point to positions she once took, often twenty years ago, that contradict her positions today. But that is one of the reasons I'm voting for her. She has moved left. And she does not cling to her former positions out of any rigidity or misguided pride. She will continue to move left as our policy debates evolve. America has real problems that need solving, and almost all the best solutions lie in the left side of the spectrum (simply because almost every workable conservative idea, and more than one unworkable conservative idea, has already been tried). The center is going to move to the left because of reality's liberal bias. Hillary Clinton's realism will move her further to the left over time.

Bernie Sanders is much closer to me ideologically. I agree with him about where we ought to go as a country, and where we should end up. But he is not great about explaining the details off how we get there, and I am not persuaded that Bernie would get us there. He is no Barack Obama. He has virtues that Obama doesn't, and Obama has strengths that Bernie doesn't. Bernie is not nearly the same campaigner. And Bernie's policy proposals are not built around what he can actually achieve in the near or intermediate future. Bernie's campaign is great about what we ought to do, but much fuzzier about the means. I have more faith in Hillary to get me as much progress as the next four years allow.
What about the scandals? What about them? I'm old enough at this point to remember twenty-four years of persistent talk about Hillary scandals, scandals that never quite turn into anything solid.

Some people say that Hillary isn't trustworthy, that where there is so much smoke there must be some fire. But it's been a quarter century of smoke without fire, so it's fair to ask if the endless smoke isn't something else entirely. It's not that "people" don't trust Hillary. It's that people, specific individuals, work very hard to paint Hillary as untrustworthy. That isn't a reason for me not to trust her. It's a reason for me to rally around her. I'm tired of her being attacked. And after years of all-out, scorched-earth political warfare, I am not about to abandon a seasoned warrior. We're going to fight for everything we get, no matter how big we win in November. And Hillary is the best fighter. She's the best choice, and I'm with her.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

The Republicans' Choice: It's Trump or the Convention

Donald Trump is now, after South Carolina, clearly leading the Republican primaries. Donald Trump has also been unable to get much beyond 35% of the vote in any primary or caucus. He has the largest share of support, but that share is only about a third of the Republican vote, and sometimes less. None of the other candidates can beat Trump, but that doesn't mean he's going to win.

There are four scenarios left for the Republican nomination, two likely and two not. The unlikely scenarios are the ones getting the most attention, because they resemble the normal election cycle. What most people would expect, because it's what usually happens, is that the front-runner (Trump) would expand and consolidate his support to 50%+ (or at least 45%+), or else that the rest of the field will consolidate around a single opponent who will go on to beat him (most people suggest Marquito Rubio). Those events would represent a reversion to the usual pattern, but I suspect they're not going to happen. They should be happening already, and they haven't been.

Trump is winning, but his support is not expanding. And he's not modulating the key; getting into a public beef with the Pope is not how you expand beyond your base, and the fight with the Pope was only one strange-but-typical day in that campaign, which traffics in that level of vitriol and weirdness all the time. And even with Jeb (;) Bush gone, the field isn't consolidating around Marco Rubio much. If Trump can't get to 40%, Marquito hasn't even gotten to 25% so far. Chris Christie dropping out didn't move Rubio past his previous ceiling. He's not suddenly going to get 40% of the vote because Bush is gone. And some other people, including Cruz, aren't going anywhere for a while.

The two most likely scenarios are a minority victory for Trump, where he gets more than 50% of the delegates and the nomination with only a smallish plurality of the actual votes, and a brokered convention in Cleveland, where Trump falls short of 50% of the delegates, while Rubio, Cruz, et al each net some smaller number, and the convention becomes about, ah, the art of the deal.

How could Trump win with only one-third of the actual votes? A lot comes down to delegate math. Each state doles out delegates by its own rules: some split them up proportionately between a number of vote-getters, while others give most or all of their delegates to whoever's first past the post. As we get further into spring, more and more states will be winner-takes-all or winner-takes-most. In a typical primary year, this works out pretty much right: the early, proportional states divide the delegates between a number of candidates, and later the winner-take-all states help decide between the top two. But this year, the Republican field won't be narrowed to two leaders by the time the winner-take-alls begin on March 15; the field may not be down to two by the convention. So those states, some of them big states, may end up giving all of their delegates to a candidates who only gets 30-something-percent of the vote. If the field stays broken, Trump may never need to get to forty percent. Remember, he just got ALL of South Carolina's delegates with less than one-third of the votes.

The other scenario also involves a broken field, with three different candidates, and maybe a fourth, getting significant shares of the delegates, so that no Republican has the required 1237 delegates before the convention. For this to work, though, it's not enough for Cruz and Marquito to keep showing "strong seconds" and "strong thirds." They have to win states. And in the later proportional states (because even late in the game a few are proportional), they have to put up strong numbers, at least a third of the total vote in that state, or else to run very strongly in particular sections of the state (because lots of state allocate by Congressional district). If that happens, there is going to be some back-room dealing in Cleveland that would make Marcus Hanna proud.

There are two things to keep in mind as things go forward. First, there is the twenty-percent rule. A candidate has to get at least twenty percent of the vote in a state (or sometimes in a Congressional district) to get ANY delegates. A beats-expectations 17% may get pundits chattering about your momentum, but it nets you exactly bupkis. I would point out that both Rubio and Cruz only polled in the low twenties in South Carolina, nearly tied between 22% and 23%, and (because of South Carolina's delegate rules) neither of them got any delegates at all. And Rubio hasn't gotten out of the twenties in any race so far. Rubio and Cruz are just above the cut-off point where they get nothing. They have to make stronger showings even to play spoiler.

This rule means that a candidate like Ben Carson may not get even one more delegate, not even if he stays in the campaign until June. If he picks up a dozen more, he will have done fairly well. But that doesn't mean that Carson doesn't have an effect on the race. A vote for Carson is a vote that the front-runner in that particular state doesn't need to get to win. It reduces the percentage of votes needed to carry the state. And it's a vote none of the challengers get; it may help keep the other candidates from hitting the number they need to get a delegate. A vote for Carson isn't a wasted vote; starting next week, it's effectively a vote for Trump.

The second thing to remember is the effect of favorite sons on state-wide races. Candidates carrying their home states can pick up big stashes of delegates. John Kasich is clearly banking on winning Ohio's winner-take-all primary on March 15. Marquito Rubio is planning to win Florida's winner-take-all primary the same day. Cruz hopes to rack up a large number of the delegates at play in Texas. If Rubio, Cruz, and maybe Kasich put together decent overall showings (with Kasich as essentially a regional candidate in the Northeast and industrial Midwest) added to some of this home cooking, we're moving closer to a scenario where Trump misses clinching the nomination and the others go to Cleveland with delegates to trade. On the other hand, if these guys lose their home states to Trump, we're not going to be in suspense very long.

The brokered-convention probably requires Little Marco to win a few states by the end of March, and for Cruz to roll up good numbers of delegates in the proportional states (because Cruz's best states turn out to be proportional and not winner-take-all). If Kasich wins Ohio and another state or two (Michigan, say, or Connecticut), then the game gets harder for any one candidate to win before the convention. If, on the other hand, you see Trump roll up everything on Super Tuesday, or if you see Trump starting to win states with a 45% share, then you can start forgetting who Kasich and Rubio are early.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

Praying for Nino, and Planning for What's Next

This morning in church I prayed for the soul of Antonin Scalia, and asked for him to receive God's mercy. I disagreed with him sharply during his lifetime, and sometimes judged him harshly, which made prayer all the more incumbent on me. Some of my friends have argued with me about this on social media, taking it as some sign of approval or absolution. Let me be very clear: I believe that Scalia is very much in need of mercy. (I have a beloved aunt, a former Sister of St. Joseph, who passed away a few years ago, and I almost never pray for her, because I strongly doubt God needs me to vouch for her.) I believe, I fear, that Scalia has done things that require God's forgiveness.

But on the other hand, Scalia was a human being with a moral self, capable of both good and evil, and I need to recognize his humanity. Nor is it for me to judge his soul. Scalia was subject to some of the temptations -- a sharp tongue, a weakness for partisan conflict, pride in his intellectual abilities -- that I have wrestled with for many years. And my chief grievance against Justice Scalia in the exercise of his office was that he sometimes failed to respect others' humanity as fully as he ought, that he did not render the compassion or mercy that others were owed. But if those were his failings, they will not be mended by aping him. Dehumanizing Nino Scalia and hardening our hearts against him would mean taking on the worst of his failings and perpetuating them.

I was appalled to see people cheering Scalia's death on the internet. I was never going to be sorry the day he left the Court, but I can't rejoice in the way he left it. I was ashamed of many of my fellow liberals. But I was just as appalled to see conservatives playing partisan games within an hour of the sad news.

I can't imagine a sorrier monument to Scalia's "originalist" approach than to openly defy the plain reading of the Constitution. A President of the United States with 11 months left in his term is President of the United States. Apparently, even those basic facts are unacceptable to the current Republican Party, so we're going to spend the rest of the election year in the Thunderdome.

But I think the Republicans, in their current disarray, just Thunderdomed themselves. One result of McConnell and Cruz's open obstructionism is that the Senate elections just got nationalized. Every Republican senator running for election in a swing state can now be painted as an obstructionist for not giving the President's nominee an up-or-down vote. Just choosing to find fault with a particular nominee, the safe and obvious strategy, has been taken off the table because McConnell gave the game away by announcing that Obama had no right to nominate anyone.

(There's a special circle of political hell for Republican senators who are running for re-election in swing states but who haven't had their primary yet, which is to say all of the swing-state Republicans but Kelly Ayotte. Those senators can be attacked on the right unless they commit to NOT approving ANY nominee, and then attacked in the general for being partisan hacks. Mitch McConnell, political genius, just threw his own senators into that circle of hell.)

Meanwhile, Obama is free to nominate a potential justice he genuinely wants to see on the court. If his pick gets nominated, he wins. If the Republicans block his nominee (or a series of his nominees; he has time to nominate at least three), he can make the Republicans look like the hacks they are. Meanwhile, the stalemated Court won't be able to make any precedent without at least one of the liberal judges agreeing. (The sole exception is the odious Fisher v. Texas case, where the conservatives might overturn affirmative action in college admissions of a 4-3 vote because Justice Kagan has recused herself. Chief Justice Roberts has to ask himself if he's willing to do that, and possibly damage the Court's reputation, with only four votes.)

The biggest surprise in this political chaos is that we're surprised. It's been a long time since a Supreme Court Justice passed away in office. And in many ways, our political elite has begun to presume upon modern medicine and extreme longevity. Antonin Scalia was clearly planning to hang on into his eighties. We now expect Supreme Court Justices to hang on into their eighties if they choose, as if it were simply a matter of choice. When the death of a 79-year-old comes as such a drastic surprise, we all need to recalibrate our response to mortality.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

New Hampshire Primaries: Slouching Toward the Brokered Convention

It's still early, with only two-fifths of the returns in from New Hampshire tonight. But Sanders is comfortably ahead of Clinton and, on the Republican side, chaos is comfortably ahead of consensus.
Recently, on one of Mike W's threads, I argued that:

The most chaos-inducing result for the Republicans in New Hampshire probably goes 1. Trump 2. Kasich 3. Bush 4. Rubio 5. Cruz. In that situation, and in a few other permutations close to that, all five of them have enough reason not to drop out of the race.

Currently, with 40% of the vote in, it's: 1. Trump 2. Kasich 3. Cruz 4. Bush 5. Rubio. (Cruz and Bush are less than half a percentage point apart, and have already flipped places once; they may flip again. Pretty close to the nightmare result, if you're looking for closure, or the dream result, if you're a civics geek/media nerd yearning for a brokered convention.

Basically, what this means for the GOP is that only Chris Christie is dropping out tomorrow. (Maybe Carson and Fiorina, maybe not; they're so far behind it doesn't matter.)

Rubio is very unlikely to drop out before South Carolina. Bush, with his deep warchest and stubborn pride, is going to call a third- or nearly-third place showing good enough to stay in. Kasich's second place is exactly what he hoped for to keep him in the race. So all three of the Bush/Kasich/Rubio troika are staying in; even if one dropped out, the party would not immediately coalesce behind one of the other two.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side it's simpler: Hillary will fight a pitched battle to defeat Bernie in Nevada and South Carolina, and hope to finish him off on Super Tuesday.

The day to look for is the Ides of March, March 15th, when Florida, Ohio, and Illinois vote. Any primary that isn't essentially wrapped up by that point is probably going the whole distance.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

A New Hampshire Primary Memory

It's the New Hampshire primary today. I grew up in New Hampshire, and I remember those elections fondly.
One of my my favorite memories, which I've blogged about a few years back, involves my Mom getting into it with Al Haig on the campaign trail back in the 80s. Haig was, of course, a retired general, former Supreme NATO commander, Nixon's last Chief of Staff and Reagan's first Secretary of State. Mom was a police lieutenant.
So, Mom, who was interested in the question, asked Haig a question about women playing combat roles in the military.

Haig responds with a story about a female war correspondent who was covering Vietnam (an irrelevant story, to Mom's mind, because it involves an unarmed woman with no military training). And Haig wound up his story with his big clincher: "As soon as the shooting started, my instinct was to throw that girl over my shoulder and run for the nearest helicopter."

Mom said, "I carry a weapon every day. Don't you call me girl."

And that's how they were quoted in the newspaper.

Sorry to repeat that story. I do love it.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at,  Dagblog