This Grady column was entertaining, since she had to do quite a few backflips and contortions to make the comparison between the 1960 West Virginia primary and today’s anything but a horrible omen for Obama.  As the story usually goes, his West Virginia win suggested that anti-Catholic sentiment would not drag Kennedy down and aided him on his way to the nomination, so the obvious point of comparing the two would be to say that the candidate who is likened to JFK on a regular basis is in serious trouble because of deep resistance to his candidacy in this part of the country and the Humphrey-like figure (that would be Clinton) is on the verge of a significant victory.  Just by drawing the comparison people are giving today’s primary significance it may not even deserve, since the winner in 1960 did go on to become President (never mind about how he won the general election).  For that matter, when Clinton says that “it is a fact” that no Democrat since 1916 has won the White House without winning West Virginia in the general, she happens to be telling the truth for a change, and it seems certain that West Virginia will go for McCain if Obama is the nominee.     

Instead, because the outcome is not in doubt and the repudiation of Obama is unmistakable, we get an argument that Clinton can learn from Humphrey how to “bow out gracefully.”  But why would she “bow out gracefully” if, as polls suggest, she is going to win perhaps as much as 75% of the vote and net more than a dozen delegates?  Another problem with the comparison is that, as Grady relates, Kennedy campaigned extensively in the state and fought to win; today was Obama’s second visit to the state during this election cycle.  The reason Obama did not make an effort is that his deficit of 30 or 40 points is much greater than Kennedy’s was, and probably could not have made much of a dent in it had he expended the effort and money.       

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James makes a good point about this Newsweek article (the same one that seems to have bothered Philip Klein so much) that voters are not going to see Obama as “the Other” and most people aren’t going to think of the negative campaign against Obama as an exercise in “othering.”  What some of us in the ivory tower call othering and identity construction, more would simply call “not being able to identify with” such and such a candidate, or they would say that “he doesn’t share my values.”  Put in a less weaselly way, people will simply say, “He’s not one of us” or “he doesn’t belong.”  The irony is that most of the people whom we feel compelled to “other” are those who are, in some way, actually “one of us,” but who must for one reason or another be recast as an interloper or an alien.  What some people dismiss as the “narcissism of small differences” is actually the policing of very fine lines of identity; intra-party and internecine fights are more intense because more is at stake in the competition, namely the definition and direction of the group in the future, while a group can recover from, may even benefit from, a defeat at the hands of diametrically opposed foes.

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Mr. Obama sternly rejected the Hamas endorsement, but the latest Gallup polls suggest he has a significant and growing problem in keeping Jewish voters in the Democratic fold. The latest Gallup polls show that in a contest with Mr. McCain, Mr. Obama would secure 61 percent of the Jewish vote to the Republican’s 32 percent. In 2004 and 2006 elections, by contrast, Jewish voters favored the Democratic Party by a 75 percent to 25 percent margin. This suggests that support for the Democratic Party standard-bearer among Jews could be approaching its lowest levels in decades. The Republicans’ best showing was achieved by Ronald Reagan in 1980, when he won 40 percent of the Jewish vote.

Jews comprise just 2 percent of the American population. But they could play a large role in a close election because they are geographically concentrated and are more likely than other groups to turn out to vote. States with large Jewish populations — such as California, New York, Florida and New Jersey — account for 128 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win. Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio also have large numbers of Jewish voters. Consider two states: Florida, a critical swing state, has 400,000 Jewish voters and Pennsylvania 200,000. In these states, a shift among Jews from one party to the other can determine the overall final result. ~The Washington Times

The Times makes a point of connecting Obama’s “problem” with Jewish voters to his views on Israel and Near East policy.  When a quote from Gen. McPeak was dug up recently, in which he said something very much like this in the context of explaining the political obstacles to changing U.S. Israel policy, he was branded an anti-Semite and opponent of Israel.  The Times is less direct, but is ultimately making the same point: to secure these voters, national politicians have to toe a very specific line on certain policies.  The reason you won’t hear anyone screaming over this statement from the Times about electoral realities is that it isn’t being said by someone attached to Obama.  Even though Obama does not propose to do anything substantively different from the current administration with respect to Israel or Hamas, he has been tagged as being somehow less reliable.  The very pressure that McPeak was describing is being brought to bear on the Obama campaign right now, and until Obama gives in to it by somehow adopting an even more party-line position (which would be hard, since he already holds this position) it will continue.

For the record, Obama runs just five points behind Clinton against McCain among Jewish voters.  McCain has improved on Bush’s level of support in 2004, while both Democrats have lost ground from 2004 and 2006 for one reason or another.  The main thing that would seem to explain that would probably be the Democrats’ opposition to the war in Iraq, but if someone were to suggest that this was the case he would be inundated with outraged protests about stereotyping and so on.

Update: Jeffrey Goldberg makes a related point:

The Hamas episode won’t help Obama’s attempts to win over Jewish voters, particularly those in such places as –- to pull an example from the air –- Palm Beach County, Florida, whose Jewish residents tend to appreciate robust American support for Israel, and worry about whether presidential candidates feel the importance of Israel in their kishkes, or guts.  

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Stanley Crouch misses several things in this column, but the most important thing he misunderstands is the source of hostility to different kinds of elites.  There is always some thread of anti-intellectualism in any reaction against an “academic elite,” but the things that rankle people most are hostility to their cultural values and the presumption by elites to tell them how they should think or how they should live.  Fundamentally, the dissatisfaction with different elites is an expression of dissatisfaction with disparities of power and how that power is being deployed against the majority: the elites have it, they don’t, and the elites use it to their disadvantage.  Even this would not necessarily be so galling for many people, but when it is married to a sneering contempt for the people and their way of life it often sparks a backlash.  It is, of course, ludicrous to say that this dissatisfaction is anti-democratic, since it is what the demos does time and again.  For most of our civilisation’s history it was the philosophers and the educated who rejected democracy, partly because they genuinely thought this type of regime was disordered and partly because they understood that it threatened their position and their ideals.  There have been peoples, including the Byzantines, who valued classical education and accepted fairly great social mobility in the ranks of the bureaucracy and military, but who nonetheless abhorred democracy.  Democracy does not necessarily have anything to do with social mobility, and in its pure form democracy can encourage a culture that despises achievement in the name of equality.  In our culture today there is an excessive disdain for expertise, as if anyone could equally understand any field and those who have spent many years working on a subject are not better qualified than others, and this, too, is a very democratic habit of despising authority and resenting excellence.   

Elites are unavoidable in any system, and democratic polities reconcile themselves to this reality of oligarchy by claiming that the oligarchs are accountable to the people.  The existence of elites is itself non-egalitarian and in that way anti-democratic, but most of us see the absurdity and futility in pursuing such a strict social egalitarianism that we would do away with them.  We not only reward education, but we also reward inborn talent, and both of these work to erode the myth of equality, which is at the heart of justifying democratic government.  Whatever the flaws with complaints against this or that set of elites, they are not anti-democratic flaws. 

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My only follow up would be this: what else can explain Obama’s 40-point deficits in West Virginia and Kentucky? The states are lacking in some of Obama’s most reliable constituencies, but so are states like Nebraska, South Dakota, Idaho, Wyoming, and Alaska, but Obama won each of those contests easily. ~Steve Benen

Benen is kidding, right?  First, South Dakota hasn’t voted yet–North Dakota moved up to 2/5, but not S.D., which votes on June 3.  That’s why Clinton was campaigning in Sioux Falls the other day (it worries me that I know that).  I know that it is probably considered unconscionable pro-Clinton shilling to say this, but the caucuses that Obama won by such ridiculous margins on February 5 are not representative of the broad majority of Democratic voters in those states.  That’s just the nature of a caucus system.  Caucuses go to the candidate with the superior organisation, funding and GOTV efforts, which is why Romney performed so much better in these venues than in most primaries, and why Ron Paul doubled and tripled his normal 8-10% percentage of the vote in some of these same caucus states.  Romney had the money and organisation, and Paul had money and loyal, zealous supporters.  It is a credit to Obama’s political operation (and a lasting mark of shame on Clinton’s) that he cleaned up in these caucuses, but it is not evidence that he used to win the sorts of voters he is now losing. 

In Oklahoma, Clinton won the primary by 22 points, and the electoral map looks a lot like Kentucky’s will in a little over a week: an island of Obama voters (OKC) in a sea of light blue (except that he is unlikely even to win the Louisville area).  My guess is that, if Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska and Idaho had held primaries, Obama’s share of the vote would have been at Oklahoma-like levels, and we would not now be talking about Obama’s victory lap.  Instead, they held caucuses–those are the breaks.  This is not to argue that those caucus results “don’t count” or “shouldn’t count as much,” but it is true that a caucus format disproportionately attracts certain kinds of voters (those with more income, more education and more information), and these tend to be the voters who are more likely to prefer Obama.  Obviously, it helps even more when only one campaign actively competes and the other pretends that these elections don’t matter, which is another reason why Obama’s margins in some places were so huge.  A caucus format does not involve ”disenfranchisement,” as some lame Clintonites have tried to argue, but it rewards the campaign that can mobilise better-informed, highly-motivated supporters and punishes the campaigns that have supporters who are either less activist (and generally less obsessed with politics) or too busy to participate.  We don’t know whether race was a factor in Oklahoma voting, for example, because no one even bothered to investigate the question, but it is not necessarily obvious that race, much less race alone, explains the size of Clinton’s lead in Kentucky and West Virginia.  Caucus results from Super Tuesday definitely don’t tell us what we want to know, because a caucus is an entirely different kind of process. 

P.S. South Dakota and Montana are both holding their primaries in June, so at that point we might be able to compare apples to apples when we see the results next month.

Update: Oklahoma’s exit polling seems to confirm that the patterns people started obsessing over in March and April were quite evident by early February in all their particulars.

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 If Obama’s biography and appeal affect global opinion and therefore foreign policy, the subject should be on the table - as a weapon in pursuit of national self-interest. If we cannot have a debate in a democracy about this impact without fostering xenophobia, ignorance and fear, then democracy cannot work. Which, I suspect, is partly Larison’s point. I’m not as defeatist - and it’s telling that many criticisms of Obama - Carole Simpson’s for example - fall into this trap. ~Andrew Sullivan

There’s not really a question whether the subject should be on the table, but whether, having been raised, it works to the advantage of someone like Obama.  We can have the debate, but what I want to stress is that if the debate is framed as it has been those who are perceived to be less nationalistic are going to lose.  I do not consider this to be a desirable or healthy development, given my objections to nationalism, but I think it does describe political reality.  My point was more that ignorance is an unavoidable part of mass democracy, as is identitarianism, so that a politician whose candidacy is defined to some large degree by connections to the rest of the world and his unusual biography is going to be at a special disadvantage.  The larger point is that I don’t think democracy works the way Obama’s supporters assume it does, and that they will view a repudiation of Obama to some extent as evidence of a breakdown or failure of democracy, while I take it to be the natural and logical expression of what democracy is.  Perhaps this is a pessimistic view of democracy, but I am a pessimist and someone who sees a great many flaws in mass democracy.

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Obama is a South Sider and does not hail from Camelot or Mt. Olympus or the lush forests of mythical Narnia. 

I’ve joked that reporters feel compelled to hug him, in their copy, as if he were the cuddly faun, the Mr. Tumnus of American politics. But I was only kidding. The real Mr. Tumnus never had Billy Daley or Ted Kennedy carving up Cabinet appointments. ~John Kass

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If this is right, speculation about Clinton receiving the VP slot is pointless, but where would blogging be if we stopped speculating about things that aren’t going to happen? 

Reihan’s take on the possibility is still an interesting read.  Obviously Reihan is far from being sympathetic to Clinton, that much is certain, but even so this passage seemed to overstate things a bit:

Barack Obama’s appeal lies in his promise to move beyond the divisive politics of the past. Though this often appears to be an anodyne and content-free sentiment, one hopes there is at least something to it. A backroom deal with Clinton would make a mockery of Obama’s language of hope and change. It would make Obama appear weak, and it would reward Clinton for running a campaign more vicious than anything Lee Atwater could have cooked up [bold mine-DL].

There is a strange tension in this paragraph, and this tension is present in a lot of commentary about Obama.  On the one hand, Reihan hopes that there is more than “content-free sentiment” behind the appeal to unity and change, but then says that the real-world, practical business of politicking that might very well involve making alliances of convenience with parts of the old machine to achieve said change would “make a mockery” of the goal.  To refute charges of inexperience or naivete, the Obamas often emphasise that they came up through Chicago politics, and are therefore quite capable of the kinds of maneuvering and politicking necessary to push their agenda, but while they want the credit for this experience they don’t really want people to draw the obvious conclusion that Obama is a political operator (and perhaps a reasonably good one).  There seems to be an idea–one actually promoted to a degree by the campaign and Obama’s supporters–that if Obama is “just a politician” the entire exercise was in vain.  If he is “just a politician,” he will choose a VP nominee based in calculation of political need and carried out through the brokering of deals, some of which may indeed take place towards the rear of a building.  The Transcender would not stoop to make deals with such people, but if Washington is filled with such people (and it is), how would he go about accomplishing anything?  In other words, if Obama’s appeal is not ultimately content-free, it has to involve the kind of deal-making that a lot of observers seem to assume contradicts the “new politics.”  This means that the “new politics,” so defined, is guaranteed to fail. 

Supporters and sympathetic observers are rigging the game against Obama in some ways, and some of his rhetoric has provided them with the means to do this.  We saw how the “new politics” temporarily paralysed Obama during 2007 and prevented him from critiquing his opponents, because he had permitted his opponents to interpret his “new politics” mantra as the abandonment of anything that might remotely be defined as negative campaigning.  Now it seems as if the “new politics” is again going to trip up the campaign as it tries to unite the Democratic Party and engage in the sort of wheeling and dealing without which Democratic (or any kind of partisan) unity is almost unimaginable, because people are taking it for granted that there is something inappropriate for the “new politics” in such dealing. 

At the same time, there is an assumption in Reihan’s piece that giving the nod to Clinton would make Obama appear weak, yet this is just the sort of olive branch-offering that the proponent of a politics of “unity” ought to be able to offer in the confidence that he will be in charge of the campaign and the future administration.  (Having the head of your VP selection team choose himself makes you look weak, because it shows that you already delegated the decision-making to someone else, but choosing to keep your worst intra-party enemy close could be very shrewd.)  It might also very easily be argued that a refusal to do so demonstrates that Obama fears being undermined or overshadowed in some way by the more established political name and that this denotes greater weakness.  As for the matter of rewarding Clinton, rewards of this kind benefit the patron as much as, maybe more than, the recipient, because they reveal both magnanimity and generosity on the one hand and make a demonstration that he is the one in the position to give rewards on the other. 

Reihan anticipates this:

Magnanimity is one thing. Spinelessness is another. Yes, there will be a place for Clinton loyalists in any Democratic administration, even the most craven Clinton loyalists. But surely there has to be some limit.  

Perhaps there does have to be a limit, but this brings us to the worse-than-Atwater charge and the claim that the Clintons and their allies have launched “aggressive, hateful attacks” on Obama.  Allowing some exaggeration for effect, this is overkill.  More “vicious” than Atwater?  Even most of Atwater’s ads have not struck me as especially “vicious,” and by comparison with him Clinton’s campaign has played the role of pushover.  Even including Clinton’s recent clumsy, ham-fisted reference to “hard-working Americans, white Americans,” the Clinton campaign has not launched “aggressive, hateful attacks” on Obama.  More to the point, if the promise of Obama is to overcome divisions (whatever this is supposed to mean!), what would it say about his ability to do this to advance his agenda if he is unwilling or unable to patch up intra-party divisions?  After the pretty meager buffeting he has received, which has been gentle by almost any modern political standard, he is now so irreconcilably opposed to Clinton that he could not work alongside her in the same administration?  Reihan mentions the contest between Reagan and Bush, which seems to me from what I understand about it to have been every bit as bitterly fought as this one and probably more so.  “Change you can Xerox” is hardly the kind of boomerang charge that “voodoo economics” was; some of her critiques of his national security views will probably be reused by the GOP, but they were going to make these kinds of arguments anyway.  The fury directed at the Clintons by Obama supporters is not an encouraging sign for a future Obama administration, should there be one, since it suggests hypersensitivity about even the mildest criticisms of their candidate and an increasingly tiresome and alienating tendency to claim that arguments against him are “racially-tinged,” when there has been almost nothing that could be appropriately described as such.        

The real question ought to be whether adding her to the ticket offers a real advantage in the general election, or if it will become a distraction or burden for the campaign.  In the end, he won’t choose her, but he would be very smart to choose someone from her side of the party.  Strickland’s name has been mentioned many times, and that would probably be a good choice.  He shouldn’t need Rendell, but he might have to select him if it seems that Pennsylvania could slip away and if Rendell could really deliver the state (a daunting proposition for any politician these days, no matter how popular). 

That said, I think Reihan’s concluding statement also goes too far:

If Obama really does select Clinton as his running mate, he will have demonstrated that he doesn’t have the capacity for judgment we expect from a president.

Let’s test this proposition.  It’s true that Clinton is unpopular, and that may be a good reason not to choose her, but for the role of VP nominee and then Vice President is she really “weak”?  I think it is widely acknowledged even by people who loathe her (count me as one of those) that she consistently performs better in debates and demonstrates small-bore policy knowledge pretty effectively, and the two main roles of a VP nominee in a campaign are serving as the attack dog and facing off in debates against the other party’s VP nominee.  She is almost ideally suited to the attack dog role, and she would probably handle the Republican VP nominee well enough.  Are there states that Obama would lose because of a Clinton VP pick?  I don’t know, and I tend to doubt it (except for Johnson and maybe Eagleton, VP selections don’t usually have much electoral importance in the modern era), but we do know that she does receive more of a hearing in some important swing and old border states where resistance to Obama is tremendously strong.  Would adding her weaken that resistance, or make no difference?  Again, no one knows, but it is not nearly so self-evident that she would make a ”weak” selection for VP, and choosing her would not necessarily mark Obama as lacking in judgement. 

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Yglesias points to George Will’s review of Nixonland, noting Will’s complaint that Perlstein dismissively referred to ARVN as a “joke.”  That must mean that George Will was a vehement, outspoken critic of Fred Thompson when he insultingly ignored or belittled the sacrifices of allied war dead in his regular stump speech routine (”This country has shed more blood for the liberty of other countries than all other countries put together”), right?  That would be incorrect.  As far as I can determine, Will never said anything about this, even though the Post ran a much-maligned and somewhat flawed critique of this claim.  So the rules are clear: repeatedly ignoring and belittling the sacrifice of British and Commonwealth forces (among others) in two wars to engage in national preening are fine, but making one passing remark about a South Vietnamese army that actually was pretty ineffective in defending its country is a terrible insult. 

P.S. Other things in Will’s review are more worthwhile.

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Looking at the praise being heaped on David Cameron lately, you’d think he had done a great deal.  Obviously, I have been very critical of Cameron since he first ascended to the leadership, and it seems to me that he still has yet to prove that he can lead the Tories to general election success.  It is true that Labour was routed in local council elections (again), and it is true that Brown avoided calling a general election last year out of fear of a severely reduced majority or outright defeat.  It is also true that Cameron raked him over the coals in very satisfying fashion in the weeks that followed, and Cameron saved himself from being ousted last year in yet another round of Tory bloodletting by giving a bravura performance at Blackpool.  That he was in some real danger of a revolt on the eve of party conference should remind us that the veneer of unity and success that the Tories have at the moment is extremely thin and will not endure many setbacks.  Whether or not the “modernisers” in the party are successful in making the Tories electable again (I will believe it when I see it in a general election win), it is much more open to question whether their model has any bearing for Republicans.  Brooks thinks that it does, while casually ignoring all those areas in which the Tories are taking positions on the war and crime that might actually help revive the GOP over here if the latter imitated them.  Boris Johnson’s fairly remarkable mayoral victory is a good example of the differences between the British and American cases: the sort of candidate who can win the mayoralty of a major European city is not going to translate readily to most parts of America.  Meanwhile, Brooks acknowledges:

Some of this is famously gauzy, and Cameron is often disdained as a mere charmer. But politically it works. 

Yes, politically it works because for the moment it is still just on paper and has not been tried, and the Tories have the fortune to be facing one of the most unpopular governments in recent decades.  Yet what the brief revival in Tory fortunes shows is how much the Tories have simply conceded to the legacy of New Labour, just as the success of Democrats here in closely divided and conservative districts reveals how much they have conceded to cultural conservatism in recruiting their candidates.  Me-tooism can and will win elections, at least for a while, but ultimately it leaves no legacy and empowers the other party by endorsing or being seen to endorse its principles.

Where I think Hague, Duncan-Smith and Howard continually went wrong was in their absolute insistence on aping most of the worst trends in the Bush Era, particularly as regards foreign policy, and the conscious cultivation of a kind of Tory neoconservatism in some circles.  Where Cameron has seemed to go wrong in the last two years is in his obsession with striking poses and engaging in symbolic repudiations of the old Thatcherite model.  I can hardly disagree in principle with the goal of “denser social networks” or the promotion of decentralism, assuming that these are what they seem to be and not codes for government initiatives akin to Blair’s devolution and regionalism, but it seems to me that the constant talk about “society” carries within it a misguided hostility to Thatcher and forgets that every half-baked scheme of the left has employed rhetoric about society that prompted Thatcher’s famous rejection of the abstraction.

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Undoubtedly, many people would place all Christians in this category, because of the Emperor Constantine and the state-sponsored oppression he inaugurated [bold mine-DL], leading to the dangerous alliance between church and state continued in European church-state relations down to the present. ~An Evangelical Manifesto

Most of the manifesto is actually pretty unremarkable and even a little dull, to be quite honest, but this single passage reveals such a stunning ignorance of history that something needs to be said.  Constantine, whom we in the Orthodox Church venerate as a saint, did not inaugurate “state-sponsored oppression.”  It is a lie to say that he did, but it is one that you will hear repeated frequently in liberal (and sometimes conservative) Protestant polemics against “Constantinianism” or the “Constantinian Church” as something opposed to the Church of Christ.  Under Constantine, pagan temples were not closed, nor were pagan practices proscribed by law.  Unless you were a recalcitrant Arian or Donatist bishop (or St. Athanasios!), Constantine did not bother with punishing or exiling you.  Two points should be made very clearly: the later model of church-state relations was principally a legacy of Theodosios I and later Byzantine emperors, and this should be balanced by a recognition of just how little oppression there was under most Byzantine emperors.  There were legal disabilities imposed on pagans and heretics, but there was no programmatic persecution or regular use of force against dissenters.  Orthodox effectively received preferential treatment under law, but in practice dissenting Christians were mostly left in peace.  Almost everything people think they know about the “dangerous alliance of church and state” is interpreted through the lens of the Wars of Religion in early modernity, which they mistake as typical or representative of how church-state relations functioned in previous eras. 

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“Viva Obamus“?  I like phony Latin as much as anyone, but it can’t be this silly.

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