Romney Should Have Been A Democrat
Posted on May 19th, 2008 by Daniel Larison
Obama has picked up a net 145 delegate advantage in caucuses and a net delegate advantage of exactly seven delegates in primaries. Seven. And as the article also notes and as I noted above, Obama did much better in caucuses than in nonbinding primaries in the two states that held both, Washington and Nebraska. Obama and many, possibly most, superdelegates believe that he has a moral claim on superdelegate votes by virtue of his lead in pledged delegates. But that lead comes almost entirely from caucuses, which have many fewer participants and are presumably less accurately representative of the mass of Democratic voters than primaries. ~Michael Barone
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32 Responses to “Romney Should Have Been A Democrat”
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Agreed, but to be fair to Obama the caucus-states do tend to be in parts of the country that he appeals to. His lead in primaries would be larger than 7 if Iowa had one, for instance.
“Agreed, but to be fair to Obama the caucus-states do tend to be in parts of the country that he appeals to.”
Idaho?
Iowa?
Alaska?
Wyoming?
I’m sure there’s a theme to this pudding,..
Thesis of this post: If Republicans don’t like the candidate, Democrats should just throw out their own rules? Utterly stupid.
If one is skeptical of mass democracy, there is at least something to be said for the caucus system. At least the participants are self-selected for a bit more political awarness than the average adult.
I suppose the self-seclection also tends to favor the more ideologically committed (”extreme”?) participants, as well.
A point in favor of this: Ron Paul did much better in the Iowa (!) caucus than he did in the New Hampshire primary, something no one expected in the least in 2007.
“Thesis of this post: If Republicans don’t like the candidate, Democrats should just throw out their own rules? Utterly stupid.”
You obviously have no idea what the post is about, so you might want to refrain from making sweeping judgements about the intelligence of others’ statements.
The point, as the others have gathered, is that Romney was a candidate who performed very well in caucuses and did not do as well in primaries. Had Romney been a Democrat, his strength in caucus states would have given him a significant advantage over his rivals. As it was, under the winner-take-all rules on the Republican side his caucus victories netted him less than McCain’s various primary victories that he won fairly narrowly. Had Romney been on the Democratic side, hypothetically, he would have been able, had he wished, to last much longer and possibly take an insurmountable lead in the same way Obama actually did. This follows up on an earlier point that I have made that Romney and Obama have tended to perform best in many of the same kinds of contests in the same parts of the country, and they have likewise tended to do less well in many of the same places. This has to do with the strengths of their campaign organisation, their strength among activists and their weaknesses with the broader electorates of many states. So, yes, I am utterly stupid and know nothing.
See?! I told you!!
What is not mentioned here is that virtually everyone, on all sides, assumed that Clinton would have an overwhelming advantage in caucus states going into the election. This is because caucuses are usually dominated by those with entrenched institutional support, which Hillary had in spades. What Obama did was completely overturn this situation by exciting a broad swath of voters to turn out for caucuses, based not on the usual patronage programs, but on actually being an exciting and attractive candidate. Ideology was NOT the factor, as some suggest, at least not in the conventional sense of the term.
It should also be mentioned that much of Hillary’s advantage in the primaries did, indeed, come from her greater name recognition and institutional support, and the fact that most of the big primaries were bunched together on SuperTuesday, making it much, much harder for an insurgent candidate like Obama who lacked that institutional support to gather enough momentum to carry off victories in those states. Hillary won California by almost 10 pts, but if current polls are accurate, Obama would win California by about the same amount if it were held in its traditional early June slot. THe miracle Obama pulled off was to stay even with Hillary on Super Tuesday.
Much is made of Obama’s string of victories in caucuses and primaries in February, as if this were a mistake on Hillary’s part to ignore these. The problem with this analysis is that by all rights, anyone looking at that map before the cycle began would have said Hillary ought to sweep those states with her eyes closed. The caucuses should have been hers without hardly a fight, relying on the support of the local politicos. THe primaries should have been hers by name recognition and more institutional support. What Obama has done looks easy now, but it’s nothing short of miraculous. It shows the kind of stuff he’s made of, and the kind of enthusiasm he can generated. As mentioned, no one ever thought that caucuses could by won by grass roots enthusiasm like this, because we have never seen grass roots enthusiasm like this. No wonder Republicans want to run against Hillary. No wonder eltitist conservatives like Daniel can’t understand or appreciate it. (Sorry dude, a spade is a spade).
Well, it was a mistake. And given that she made that mistake, and that he managed to do so incredibly - “miraculously”, if you must - well in the caucuses while underperforming (relative to that standard) in the states with primaries and having two states where Clinton was likely to have done especially well taken off the electoral map, it is ludicrous to deny that there were aspects of the set-up that ended up playing to his advantage.
Moreover, for Democrats to continue to refuse to acknowledge that the fact that Obama is still getting outright creamed in his own party’s primaries in these Middle American states, and indeed doing so after having locked up the nomination, sheds light on some serious areas of concern for their party (not just in the Presidential election, but overall), suggests willful blindness to me. In the present political climate, and with as charismatic a candidate as Obama, the Democrats are almost sure to gain outright control of Washington in 2008 despite the fact that they are overwhelmingly the party only of the cities. This will not, however, make for a long-term political coalition. Something more than anti-Bush animus is going to be needed for that.
Also, isnt it obvious Hillary should have been a Republican? She’s got the support of Limbaugh and FOX news already. At the very least she could be McCain’s VP.
John,
It’s an obvious mistake in retrospect, but not in foresight. Who, in October of last year, gave Obama a serious chance of winning much of anything? The people who are now saying she made collossal blunders were then saying Obama was finished. What I do notice about this election is that no one is willing to give Obama real credit where it is do. Everything is always and only about Hillary. If she loses, it is she who made a mistake. If she wins something, it’s because she’s strong.
Now it’s true that Obama has trouble with Appallachia. But let’s be honest, the problem there isn’t “blue collar, hard-working, white Americans”. The problem is the high degree of racism still present in these areas. The only “elite” he belongs to that matters, is the “African-American” elite. Hillary is killing him for that reason, but that doesn’t mean she can kill McCain in those regions. He’s likely to pick up a lot of those states. And OBama’s likely to continue to pick up PA, and possibly VA and NC, which Hillary could not win.
Dems who support Obama are going for a game changer. Rather than setting up for field goals, which is what a Hillary candidacy is about, we are driving for big points with a whole new offensive plan. Seeing as how we’ve lost two straight elections using the old plan, it seems like a good idea to me. But then, I wouldn’t expect Republicans and conservatives to understand. As you say, running on an anti-Bush platform isn’t enough. That’s why Obama is a superior candidate to Hillary. He may not be the perfect candidate, but he doesn’t have to be. He’s running against a very flawed candidate in McCain.
I suppose that this is where I’m skeptical. Obama is a great politician, but not - at least not obviously - a real game-changer. He’ll win and lose pretty much the same demographics as Gore and Kerry, but by greater and lesser margins respectively; the big differences are that (1) he’s a far better politician and (2) the Republicans are in staggeringly awful shape. But at some point, if the Democrats want to become a national party, they will have to start appealing to Southerners and Middle Americans - and I disagree, by the way, that Obama’s struggles among these voters can be credited entirely to racism, though obviously that has something to do with it.
Apologies, Daniel. I didn’t mean “thesis of the post”; I meant “thesis of the quote”. As of now, I have no particular desire to cast you as a Republican, even if you are essentially a shill for a general anti-Obama force that benefits the GOP. Barone, on the other hand, is certainly a Republican. And he has about as much credibility on the rules of the Democratic primary as Mr. Spock.
Your point is well-taken: had Romney been a Democrat, he would have been in a better position to win the nomination. That said, if he had been less transparently phony, he also might have had a better shot. Or at least he would have lost and kept his dignity in the process.
I should apologise for jumping to conclusions. I misunderstood the comment. Obviously, I don’t think I am a “shill” for anyone, but I don’t mind if people take my objections to Obama in any number of ways. I’d like to think that my opposition to both Obama and McCain benefits America.
Barone is no doubt now at some level a hack who has made it his mission to run down Obama–hence his riisble “academic vs. Jacksonian” argument–but on the numbers I think he has a point. Obama’s lead did come disproportionately from the caucus results. Make of that what you will, but that much is correct.
Well, I make of it that he understood the game better than all the Queen’s horses and all the Queen’s men. And now, it all amounts to exactly jack squat. The general is as completely divorced from the primary as it has been in every other election. In the general, all these states, caucus, primary, red, blue, purple, will choose between a tired old man carrying on the policies of one of the most despised presidents in history and a fresh new (admittedly dusky) face. Outside of the old confederacy, it’s a walk.
“Outside of the old confederacy, it’s a walk.”
Hey, believe whatever you want to believe. If you think Obama is going to “walk” to victory in Ohio and Missouri, among other places, there’s nothing I can say. There are a lot of states outside the “old Confederacy” that aren’t going to vote for Obama, starting with Kentucky and West Virginia, but I have been reliably informed that these are irrelevant.
John wrote: “Obama is a great politician, but not - at least not obviously - a real game-changer. He’ll win and lose pretty much the same demographics as Gore and Kerry . . . .”
I suppose this could be a matter of personal perspective. For me, what’s important about Obama isn’t Obama the person, but rather Obama-the-organization, which I think IS game-changing, because the Obama Machine is slowly destroying the Clinton Machine, guys like McAuliffe, Morris, Penn and Carville.
Broadly speaking, the Clinton Machine was built in the years after Michael Dukakis got laughed out of politics for looking silly in a tank. This was a defining moment in politics, I think. And for the next 20 years, we’ve been playing this gotcha-game, on the cable news networks and talk radio. It’s the only game the Clinton Machine knows. Whatever the Clintons may have intended in 1992, by 2008 all they stand for is unprincipled triangulation, shrill media manipulation, and an inability to recognize, much less seize, the initiative.
I don’t think this approach has very much to do with Senator Clinton as a person–rather, it’s the professional response of a generation of handlers, operators, strategists, etc., which explains why the 2006 Congress has been pretty limp. Their handlers are insisting the thing to do is to keep giving the Bush administration more rope, so Bush can hang the Republican Party. It may not be bad advice, but in the meantime it’s enabled a national disaster.
It’s not that Obama is offering anything substantively different. Rather, Obama is running on the premise that the whole Dukakis-in-a-Tank school of politics is indescribably stupid and unworthy of us as a people. If someone calls you a liberal, the response isn’t, “Am not!” but rather, “Yes, and?” This is enormously refreshing, even if Obama’s policy positions aren’t all I could hope for.
So Mr. Larison is right that Obama’s simply offering hot air–but at least it’s not the musty stench of Clinton’s incompetent clique. The DLC is getting ventilated, and it’s about time.
(Sorry for the long post!)
Ohio will certainly go for Obama over McCain. Hell, they probably went for John Kerry, or at least got very close. Can I get in on this taco thing?
Winning is one thing; winning in a “walk” implies wide margins of victory. Those Michigan tacos are more of a gamble than tacos tied to the Ohio result. How many tacos for Ohio?
James Nostack makes a point that is often overlooked in the universal admiration of Obama as a politician, which is that his team has run a far more organized, thoughtful, and embracing campaign than the supposedly top-notch Clinton team.
But I don’t think it’s a case of one or the other. Yes, Obama is a remarkably good candidate (as he is demonstrating this weekend in his drubbing of McCain over the Iranian issue). And yes, he has put together a remarkably good organization. And those two facts are not mutually exclusive. Quite the contrary…
Name your price in tacos, General Lee. And let’s end this thing.
To give Ohio its due, I think it should be seven tacos if Michigan counts for five.
Fine. Seven tacos it is. If there was such a thing as an Orthodox joke, I’d make one here. As it is, I owe you seven tacos if McCain wins Ohio, and you owe me if Obama does the inevitable. Muchas gracias.
John,
What I mean by a “game-changer” isn’t limited to the election itself, but is meant to indicate that an Obama Presidency has the chance to change the game quite dramatically, at least as dramatically as Reagan in 1980, and perhaps with a more lasting legacy. A Hillary Presidency means more of the same. It’s precisely because the Dems have an inherent advantage this year that I’d like to see someone like Obama, who has more potential than Hillary, use the situation not just to put the Presidency in Dem hands, but in the hands of a Dem who can do much more to change the party and the country.
Also, I second everything James said.
I’m glad I’ve started a trend. Taco-betting will be all the rage by the end of this election.
totally unrelated, but here’s this might be a taste of what the future holds for europe: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnWUy8uFL1w
massively popular in france and throughout the continent now
But this is what I just don’t see. Policy-wise, Obama isn’t all that different from the traditional Democratic establishment as it took shape under Clinton the First. (Or have I missed something?) As a politician, he appeals in incredible ways to pretty much the same portions of the electorate that went for Gore and Kerry anyway, while alienating - or at least leaving cold - startling numbers of others. Reagan won 44 states with a 10-percent lead in the nationwide popular vote in 1980, and 49 states with an 18-percent margin in 1984; even with Bush’s staggering unpopularity, the tanking economy, the quagmire in the Middle East, and so on, Obama isn’t going to come anywhere close to those numbers. Meanwhile, any longer-term realignment toward the Democrats, which is of course inevitable given what has happened to the Republican brand, will be promptly squandered within a couple of decades’ worth of political mismanagement, just as the Republicans ran their coalition into the ground after 1993. I’d be happy to put a couple of tacos on that.
BHO could be a McGovern, or this could be an epochal election. I don’t have any tacos stashed away, but I’m beginning to think the latter is more likely.
Or he could just be a Clinton. That’s where my tacos lie.
John,
I would disagree about the practial differences between an Obama and a Clinton Presidency (past and proposed). Recall that the first Clinton came into office with Dems controlling both houses of congress. Within two years, by sheer ineptitude, inability to lead the Dems, and Hillary’s health care debacle, this was gone for good, rendering him incapable of actually doing much of anything except within the executive branch over the rest of his term. Hence, no game changer. I am betting that Hillary would end up similarly squandering the Dems gains in favor of her own political advantage by continuing her triangulation game. It’s all she knows how to do.
Obama, on the other hand, is a far more skillful politician who - in part because he’s leading the ticket - come into office with lots of momentum, including big gains in congress. As President I think he knows how to work with his own party - which Hillary does not - in a cooperative way to both consolidate and grow the gains the Dems have made. I also think he will institute policies and propose legislation in a manner that attracts sponsorship and is able to grow coalitions around it, rather than alienate through top-down autocratic leadership such as HIllary displayed on health care. In short, the difference between Obama and Hillary is not so much ideological as practical. Despite her claims, he’s the guy who I think can get stuff done in the political and legislative process. He’s also the guy who has already shown that he knows how to change the way the game is playing, by organizing a huge base of participating grass roots organizers. This is a new wave coming to our political process which most people are hardly grasping as yet. And yes, it’s a potential game-changer. I don’t know if it will translate into giant electoral vote victories, but that isn’t the point. As you say, Reagan got those, and it didn’t actually change the game all that much. What Obama is doing is trying to actually change the way politics is played in an age of internet technology and a vastly horizontal playing field, rather than the vertical one in place during Reagan’s time. Old paleocons seem to be missing this, they think it’s some nebuous “change” mantra because it’s not based on a new ideology. It’s not changing the color of the uniforms , it’s changing the rules of the game itself to conform to a changing society. A whole lot of people out there are way ahead on this, and some are way behind.
btw, Survery USA’s latest Pennsylvania poll has Obama +8. Kind of puts a dent in Daniel’s theory that as goes Kentucky and WV, so goes PA.
conradg,
I see where you’re coming from, but I remain skeptical. We’ll see. That is all I have to say about that. But see here and here and here.