Tag: Barack Obama

The Kennedys and the Clintons

It’s hard to imagine that anyone would base his or her vote on what a Kennedy says. (Especially this one!) Still, it’s pretty interesting that both Caroline Kennedy and Sen. Ted Kennedy would endorse Barack Obama on the same weekend.

Caroline Kennedy’s choice, which she reveals in an op-ed piece for the New York Times, is all the more impressive because she submitted it before last night’s South Carolina blowout. For all she knew, her op-ed was going to appear on a very good day for Hillary Clinton — that is, the day after a narrow loss in South Carolina and bulging leads in most other states. Whatever the opposite is of inevitable, that’s how Obama was starting to look, and Kennedy endorsed him anyway. As it turns out, she looks prescient.

As for Ted Kennedy, I have to assume his endorsement has been in the works for some time, and that he’s been waiting for the moment when it would have maximum effect. With Super Tuesday coming up on Feb. 5, and with Massachusetts being a part of it, now’s the time. I’m surprised by Kennedy’s choice. The Clintons have always been wildly popular here, and Kennedy seemed to have enjoyed a good relationship with them. Did something happen? Or does he simply find Obama too impressive not to support?

With Sen. John Kerry and Gov. Deval Patrick also supporting Obama, that’s the trifecta for the state’s top three elected officials. House Speaker Sal DiMasi’s endorsement of Clinton isn’t looking all that significant right now.

Predictions, always futile, have been especially so this year. But I can confidently predict this: The next few days are going to be the roughest of Clinton’s campaign, regardless of whether she has a happy Super Tuesday or not.

Photo (cc) by toastiest. Some rights reserved.

More Clinton-bashing on MSNBC

As Hillary Clinton was about to begin her speech, Joe Scarborough and Margaret Carlson started tut-tutting that Clinton would not congratulate Barack Obama for his victory, that the Clintons somehow don’t play by the same rules as everyone else. I mean, they were really getting into it, all venomous smiles.

Naturally, one of the first things Clinton did was congratulate Obama.

Obama’s best speech yet?

As we all know, he always gives a great speech. But it strikes me that, tonight, he’s being unusually effective in putting some flesh on the bones of his “change” message. No, he’s not being much more specific than usual. But he’s at least making a thematic case that old-fashioned partisanship is holding back progress on issues from health care to the high cost of a college education.

Yet another big surprise

On CNN, Carl Bernstein just supplied the story line for at least the next few days: “Bill Clinton is a huge loser in this.” Wow. Barack Obama, 54 percent; Hillary Clinton, 27 percent. The Clinton camp was reportedly prepared to declare moral victory if they could find a way to lose by less than 10 percent percentage points [Thanks, Mike_B1]. Instead, Obama beat her by two to one.

Could you imagine what people would be saying if the polls in South Carolina had been this wrong in Clinton’s favor? And will someone (i.e., Obama) finally get some momentum out of a primary victory during this weird election year?

An ugly Democratic split

My former Boston Phoenix colleague Al Giordano, on leave from the Narco News Bulletin, has been blogging the presidential campaign this winter. He’s got a particularly detailed and perceptive post on the Nevada Democratic caucuses, in which he offers some thoughts — backed up by first-hand reporting — on the increasingly ugly split between pro-Obama African-Americans and pro-Clinton Latinos. Giordano writes:

Now, I’m a connoisseur of ugliness in all its forms, I find it mostly entertaining, but the part of yesterday’s caucus that was so ugly as to be distressing was to see the Hispanic and black communities so polarized: The Clinton caucusers were predominantly Hispanic-American and the Obama caucusers were predominantly African-American — most on both sides were women — and they shouted and taunted each other with boos, cat-calls, hisses, thumbs down, and at one point one man on the Obama side began chanting, “I did not have sex with that woman!”

He concludes: “Frankly, unless events conspire during this 2008 Democratic primary process to reverse those truly ugly developments, any Democrat that thinks that November is already won is a fool that is not to be taken seriously from here on out.” (Thanks to Media Nation reader C.M.)

Last word on the Bradley effect?

If you haven’t read John Judis’ analysis at The New Republic yet, you should. Judis has looked at the numbers from New Hampshire and found that 57 percent of those voting in the Democratic primary were women — substantially more than the 53 percent that had been predicted. Change that assumption, and you’d have had poll numbers within the margin of error. Quod erat demonstrandum.

Where are those college students?

I just got an e-mail from a long-time correspondent who reminded me of something that the cable pundits should have known Tuesday night. Remember when they were saying that Obama still had a chance because the college towns hadn’t reported? Well, guys, the semester hasn’t started yet.

I overlooked that because classes started at Northeastern last week. But we’re on an unusual schedule. Very few other schools start until next week, or in some cases even later. Shouldn’t the folks who make the big bucks have figured that out?

More on the (Tom) Bradley effect

Over at Hub Blog, Jay Fitzgerald has a good post linking to two commentaries by pollsters. In the New York Times, Andrew Kohut argues that a subtle version of the Bradley effect may have made Barack Obama’s support in New Hampshire look stronger than it was — lower-income white voters who might tend to reject a black candidate are also less likely to answer polling questions in the first place.

But John Zogby, in the Huffington Post, says (at least I think this is what he’s saying) that the pollsters didn’t get it wrong so much as they ran out of time. Uh, OK.

More on the Bradley effect

Only this time I’m talking about Bill, not Tom. Robert David Sullivan, one of my editors at CommonWealth Magazine, has analyzed the results of the Hillary Clinton-Barack Obama contest in New Hampshire and finds an eerie resemblance to the 2000 Democratic primary between Al Gore and Bill Bradley.

Apparently the archetype is more important than the person. I can’t see much resemblance between Hillary Clinton and Al Gore, but each appealed to New Hampshire’s more traditional Democrats. And the smug, self-regarding Bradley couldn’t be more different from the electrifying Obama (OK, Obama is a bit self-regarding, too), but both had their base among the affluent, the well-educated and the young.

Robert does things with maps and stats that I can barely comprehend, but he makes a plausible case that the way to win a Democratic primary in New Hampshire is to go after the party regulars. Among other things, unlike young people and independents, they can always be counted on to vote.