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.

P.S. Meanwhile, in some good news for House Republicans in North Carolina that most of you will already know about, Walter Jones won his primary last Tuesday, which gives the GOP a much better chance of resisting Democratic efforts to add any more seats to what is very likely to be a huge number of pick-ups.

 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.

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

Neil Gillies, an Obama supporter who runs a local environmental nonprofit group, glumly recounted the gibes that his wife, a schoolteacher, hears regularly from her students. “They’re convinced [Obama] is a Muslim, a terrorist, a guy who’s coming to take away their guns,” Gillies said. “It’s just sad.”

I tend to agree, but I find it sad mostly because of what it says about the deplorable ignorance of vast numbers of voters and the inevitability of such ignorance in a mass democracy.  Why we should want to export this kind of government to other parts of the world has never been clear to me, when it isn’t clear that it contributes to either good government or healthy politics in this country.  Democracy is identitarian and necessarily so.  Democracy is dangerous to liberty for several reasons, but one reason is that it contributes to collectivist attitudes and what Kuehnelt-Leddihn called “nostrism,” one form of which is nationalism.     

No one who has been paying attention for more than an hour to this campaign could conclude that Obama is a Muslim, but that’s just the problem: millions and tens of millions of voters haven’t paid and won’t pay that much attention until later this year, and by then these memes will have spread far and wide through chain e-mails and word of mouth, by which time it will be too late and attitudes will have become settled.  One of the key things about memes is that they do not need to be true to be reproduced; they need only be memorable or notable.  This is one of the reasons why I have never understood the enthusiasm of Obama boosters to stress his background and biography as selling points or talk about how enthusiastically Muslims around the world will respond to his election.  You begin to see how this sort of thing backfires on Obama when McCain or his supporters can say, accurately if rather demagogically, that Hamas wants Obama to win–there’s some enthusiasm from overseas that Obama could do without.  This is why there should never have been an emphasis on whether or how many foreign nations would cheer an Obama win–there may be nations whose endorsement that might be politically damaging that you don’t want, but once you go down the road of touting popularity abroad you take on the undesirable supporters with the rest.  This sort of argument reinforces the impression, cultivated by Obama’s enemies, that he and his associates are lacking in their embrace of Americanism.  To be labeled “vaguely French” was part of what brought down Kerry, and yet for reasons I will never understand Obama and his backers have made Obama’s foreign experiences and connections a centerpiece of his public persona.     

You could not have concocted a more insidious anti-Obama campaign than what many of his supporters (as well as the candidate and campaign) have managed to do in constantly talking up all the foreign places he lived, his relatives in Kenya, and on and on.  From a certain perspective, Obama’s background and biography must seem to be undeniable political assets, but slowly it is beginning to dawn on his boosters that a great many, probably most, Americans do not share that perspective.  Furthermore, the emphasis on Obama’s background and biography has always meant that the ‘08 election would become a culture clash, and it is one that I suspect the Democrats still cannot win. 

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. 

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

But this is actually a sticking point in the Paul campaign: Some people in his circle want him to swing his weight behind McCain once the primaries are over. At the moment, they’re being overruled. ~Dave Weigel

I have to assume that they will keep being overruled, and the idea of Paul endorsing McCain is risible.  But it is telling that there are some in the campaign who want this to happen.  My first guess would be that they are the same ones who wanted throw long-time Paul loyalists to wolves like Kirchick* over the newsletters business to satisfy squeamish supporters.  I can think of few things that would wreck the grassroots enthusiasm Rep. Paul has stirred up, but an endorsement of McCain might do it.    

* Wolves are actually decent animals, so it’s not really fair to compare them to Kirchick.

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.

We Evangelicals trace our heritage, not to Constantine, but to the very different stance of Jesus of Nazareth. ~An Evangelical Manifesto

Related to the previous post, this is an attitude in the manifesto that strikes me as far more troubling and obnoxious than any perceived defensiveness.  No Christians today trace their heritage to Constantine (nor have any Christians at any other time done this).  Indeed, the implicit claim is that there are Christians who do trace their heritage to Constantine, and so are actually schismatics who supposedly reject Christ and prefer Constantine.  (It is an old polemical move to identify oneself with Christ and others with another individual to demonstrate the sectarian, rather than catholic, nature of the opposition.)  Obviously, I’m Orthodox, so I am bound to be unsympathetic to certain myths and conceits that are at the heart of some Reformed arguments, especially when they are based on shoddy history.  I don’t find it surprising when Evangelicals (I don’t want to insult them any longer with a lower case e) make absurd claims about Constantine or people tracing their heritage to Constantine, because that is part of their reading of church history, but I don’t quite understand what these (basically unfounded) shots at Constantine are supposed to do except establish the manifesto-writers liberal bona fides as believers in the wall of separation.  As opposed to whom?  Oh, right, the fundamentalists and Constantinian running dogs. 

It’s also true that this manifesto seems to lack what most manifestoes have, namely a plan of action or a set of proposed goals or common purposes.  Instead, you get a good deal of teeth-gnashing about past failures (how many times did they begin a sentence with the phrase “all too often”?) and the lame lukewarmness one will often get from mistaking difference-splitting for the broad and royal way. 

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. 

Minimally, I will predict that West Virginia will be either her best or her second best finish, behind only Arkansas. Kentucky should come in right behind the two. This alone should be enough to induce some caution. I think it is too hasty to declare her finished just days before two of her three best states.

The problem for Democrats is that she is finished despite the fact that her two best states will reveal glaring problems with their presumptive nominee.  The superdelegates aren’t going to throw him overboard because of Kentucky and West Virginia, but their predicament is that they probably should but cannot and will not do it.

A president is expected to be a patriotic symbol himself, not the arbiter of patriotic symbols. He is supposed to be the face-painted superfan at every home game; to wear red, white and blue boxers on special marital occasions[bold mine-DL]; to get misty-eyed during the most obscure patriotic hymns.

More significantly, this passage is filled with more than a little irony: 

It is now possible to imagine Obama at a cocktail party with Kerry, Al Gore and Michael Dukakis sharing a laugh about gun-toting, Bible-thumping, flag-pin-wearing, small-town Americans.  

But one of the points that David Kuo made in his book is that there were plenty of people in the Bush White House who shared similar laughs at the expense of these people, which is actually in some ways worse, since these are the people who voted Bush into office.  Did Gerson join in the laughter?  Maybe not, but he worked alongside people who viewed these people as rubes and pawns to be used.  We await the Gersonian moralising against Bushian elitism, knowing that it will never come.  

If we went for Baldwin, our vote would be perceived as, “Wow, those guys are to the right of John McCain!” This is not helpful. 

Helpful to whom?  I think it’s very helpful to keep framing all the things that are wrong with McCain as evidence of the leftward drift of the Republican Party; I also think it’s true.  I suppose it isn’t helpful if we want to pretend that we are not, in fact, to the right of McCain and that there is a new right/left divide defined in such a way that we are the moderates.  But we are to the right of McCain, and that’s a good thing.  Does that win votes?  Well, no.  But if you’re inclined to vote for Chuck Baldwin in the first place, winning votes is not exactly your priority.  A more interesting result might be a different reaction: “Wow, those guys far to the right of John McCain are much more sane and prudent than he is!”  That simultaneously works to discredit him and help us.  Meanwhile, voting for Obama could inspire the reaction, “Wow, those guys are to the left of Hillary Clinton!”

P.S. Richard, there is a cure.  It’s called pessimism.

One reason why Democrats are hauling in more CEO and corporate donations is that they are poised to dominate the government, or at least increase their majorities in both houses.  The donations are a kind of insurance.  If the Congressional GOP didn’t have the look of a three-day old horse carcass that had been picked clean by vultures, they would probably be getting many of the donations that are now going to the Dems, and they were getting many more such donations in the bad old days of the DeLay era.  Nonetheless, corporate donors have been more generous to the Democrats generally since the ’90s when the Clintons began cultivating friends in the the financial sector.  The other reason is that there is obviously no connection between being a top corporate executive and being interested in what the GOP is selling if the Democrats are perfectly willing to accommodate you.  In many ways, corporate executives, especially those who work for multinationals, are going to be more inclined to the views of progressive globalists, and the latter will often find the Democratic Party more amenable to them on a host of issues.  What seems to be missing from this analysis and from Ross’ response is any discussion of the GOP leadership’s complete disconnect from its own political base in its consistent, egregious tilt towards corporate interests.  One of the continuing problems that will bedevil Ross and Reihan’s project, which has some worthy elements, is that the GOP has been and will to some degree always be a party that more often than not serves corporate interests.  They aren’t going to act like a “working-class party” anytime soon.  That has its merits and flaws, but it means that those Sam’s Club Republicans will continue to have their interests unrepresented.   

It seems to me that Obama was annoyed by Keyes for a couple of reasons: Keyes is an histrionic looney, who would annoy anyone who had to debate him for any length of time, and it is insulting to have one’s faith and integrity attacked by a ludricrous Pharisaical showman.  I think Obama’s views on, and more importantly his votes and actions related to, abortion are entirely incompatible with faith in Christ, but we should be very clear that even this would make him at most a bad Christian, not an “unbeliever.”  Unless we would play the role of the Pharisee, we should be careful not to declare someone to be agnostic because he does not live out that faith as he should (or, more to the point, as we think he should).  As someone who came to the Faith by an intellectual and fairly academic route, I would say that arguments that assume that all conversions happen in the same way are going to get things badly wrong quite often.  I grew up without much in the way of religious instruction, and I was educated at very secular private schools, and I went through the same syncretistic and multiculti phase that Obama did, so I think I probably relate to his conversion to Christianity better than most and I take umbrage at the suggestion that it is somehow less than genuine or phoney or staged for effect.  If it is, there is no way that you or I can possibly know that; God alone knows.  Let’s have some humility.