Category: Election 2008

You're going to have to cut me a little slack today. I just graded 55 research papers (varying in quality from "life-affirming" to "relevatory" to….remember the Holocaust? Like that.) and, after a 4 hour break, must start on 55 blue books.

Or I might drink a nice warm glass of paint. It's too early to rule anything out.

So everyone in America knows what a superdelegate is, or at least has heard the term and wondered. A question I am commonly asked is, quite simply, what the fuck? It's not an intuitively practical idea. It boils down to this: superdelegates exist to prevent exactly what is happening right now. When I put it that way it seems even more logical.
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By reserving 20% of the available delegates for party insiders, elected officials, and other people whose decisions are not made by the primaries, the Democratic Party was establishing a safety valve. If the primary/caucus process failed to produce a clear winner, the superdelegates would step in and (this is the important part) make a unanimous decision to determine the nominee. It only works if they act in unison. That was the whole point; if the party is split 50-50, the 20% superdelegates would act as one to tip the balance. What these certified geniuses have failed to realize is that if they divide into factions roughly proportional to the electorate, then there might as well be no superdelegates at all.
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What they need is a dark, windowless room and someone to lock them in it. Howard Dean is not an idiot, and although he lacks the legal authority to force the superdelegates to do anything he's not short on persuasive power. He keeps hinting at the end in Friedman Units (soon…always soon….May 1, and then the end of May, then June 15, then mid-summer…) but if he's strategic he understands that the matter is somewhat more urgent. The only way to come to a positive resolution is if the superdelegates do what they're supposed to be doing. They need to come to a consensus. No public debate, no justifications, no politicking – just come out of the dark room and say "We choose ____.
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This press conference is over."

The Democrats have been the L.A. Clippers of politics for three decades for a reason, though. The inability to avoid doing the transparently self-destructive as a party seems to be one of the prerequisites for membership since the 60s.

Teaching students at IU about partisan gerrymandering is very easy. It requires only a map of the district in which they live.

What are some of the red flags that indicate a gerrymander? Split counties. Boundaries that just barely include (Bloomington) or exclude (Columbus) major towns or cities. Irregular shape. Failure to use logical and major features like Interstate highways, rivers, or county lines to create borders. Poor compactness. It's very safe to say that this district was drawn in a manner that took into account factors other than population and geography.

Redistricting is controlled by state legislatures – in Indiana's case the process involves both chambers. In 2001, when districts were last re-drawn, the legislature was split. Democrats narrowly controlled the House and Republicans had a lopsided advantage in the Senate (32-18). The result was therefore a mixed bag. Republican influence was significant but mitigated by the Democrats' precarious hold on the House.
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Compromises were made; the process was not nearly as one-sided as in other states with unified partisan control.

That said, what was the political motive underlying the image you see above? First, the GOP needed to minimize the impact of Bloomington, which is significantly more liberal than the rest of southern Indiana. Second, help Congressional Republicans make competitive a seat held by Democrats Lee Hamilton (1965-1999) and Baron Hill (1999-2005) since the invention of fire.

Bloomington is a hot potato in the redistricting process. Having it in one's district would benefit liberal candidates and hurt conservatives. The irregular shape of the 9th District, which appears to have some sort of cancerous outgrowth that reaches out to engulf Bloomington, is a function of efforts to "balance" the liberal town with a wide swath of ultra-conservative but sparsely populated southern Indiana. This provides an advantage to Republicans in adjacent districts, sparing them the challenge of dealing with Bloomington.
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It also creates, or so statewide Republicans hoped, a 9th District that the GOP might reasonably hope to contest if not win.
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In other words, if they couldn't make it majority-Republican they wanted to make the Democrats sweat over it. Did it work?

Cue the news that Mike Sodrel is challenging incumbent Baron Hill in 2008. If this sounds familiar, that's because this is the fourth consecutive election in which these two have squared off. That's right. In 2002, Hill won with barely over 50% of the vote. Sodrel won by less than 1100 votes in 2004, one of the narrowest Congressional races in years.
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Hill won his seat back in 2006 by a slightly larger margin. Both parties expect it to be tooth-and-nail competitive again in 2008. As the graphic in the linked WSJ article shows, increasing amounts of money, national media attention, and interest from the national parties have accompanied the close results.

Most folks know almost nothing about redistricting, yet it powerfully impacts the competitiveness and outcomes of legislative races. Redistricting and reapportionment have become pitched battles on multiple fronts – political, legislative, and legal (redistricting plans almost inevitably end up the subject of numerous lawsuits and legal challenges based on the provisions of the Voting Rights Act) – conducted by self-interested legislators with personal and partisan motivations. The amount of manipulation done to district boundaries and the varying motives for doing so leave us to wonder: Are you choosing your legislators or are your legislators choosing you?

James David Barber is rather famous – or about as famous as professors of political science can get in the Real World – on account of his landmark study and classification of presidential personalities. Since you're not my damn students I won't sit here and lecture you at length about his work. Let me give you the brief version before explaining why you might care.

You and I have no contact with presidents or presidential candidates. We can't get to know them or understand their personalities. All we get are carefully staged, often scripted words and images through the media. So it's not possible to engage in armchair psychology and claim that we can assign some personality disorder or qualities to George W. Bush. But what we can do is observe them and get a basic sense of what kind of person we're dealing with based on two simple questions: is he a positive or negative person? Is he active or passive?

On this basis he created a four-part typology (active-negative, active-positive, passive-negative, passive-positive). Long story short, active-negatives are the folks to watch out for.** Examples include George W. Bush, Nixon, and LBJ. Because of low self-esteem, they crave power, surround themselves with toadies, and are psychologically incapable of admitting that they are wrong. They're paranoid, seeing threats everywhere, and often consider themselves to be above the law. Barber wrote his book right before Watergate broke, and his description of Nixon as a classic active-negative was soon borne out by the events of the day. Hence Barber's fame.

Active-negatives are not always "bad presidents." One could argue that Nixon, W, and LBJ accomplished some valuable things in office. But they have obsessions – Vietnam, Iraq, or a list of "enemies" – that bring out their bat-shit insane side and their eventual downfall. Self-esteem is the fundamental concept in Barber's opinion – active-positives have it, and thus they quickly rebound from embarassing failures (Clinton, FDR, Lincoln). Active-negatives don't, and they are too insecure to admit defeat or accept criticism. They develop an Ahab-like obsession with proving themselves right. Hence the years of hemmoraging lives and money into Vietnam long after Johnson stated that the war had become a lost cause, for example.

Why do you care? Maybe you don't. But as someone who is very familiar with the analysis, let me offer you two cents on what we're dealing with right now.

Barack Obama is a classic active-positive. Relentlessly optimistic, ambitious but not craven, able to move past his fuck-ups, and utterly undaunted by the fact that going from State Rep to President in 6 years is ludicrous. One thing that many people misunderstand about Barber – active-positive does not equal "good." Clinton wasn't that good of a president. But he fit active-positive to a tee. Obama does too.

John McCain is the classic passive-negative.
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Military men turned politicians usually are. He's not energetic and doesn't look like he's really enjoying what he does. He does it because of a sense of duty (snicker…"duty.") He's not chock-full of ambitious ideas (most of his platform appears to be recycled, standard GOP fare). He lets the action come to him, choosing to react rather than act. Note that passive-negatives are not "bad." Washington and Eisenhower did alright.
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Hillary Clinton is pure active-negative. Her win-at-all-costs mentality, and a complete inability to accept defeat, officially scare the shit out of me. She baldly craves power and appears to be willing to behead her own mother to get it.

When it became mathematically impossible for her to defeat Obama in the delegate count, her immediate reaction was to unveil a new strategy of trying to corrupt pledged delegates. How, she does not say; threats, bribery, coercion, pleading….there doesn't appear to be a depth to which she will not go to win. And she isn't stupid, so certainly it must be clear that doing something so inimical to the democratic process will devolve the nomination into a months-long circus of disorder and bad publicity. 1968 all over again, while McCain sits back and smiles. Hillary Clinton understands but does not care; the attitude is simply "If I can't have it, no one will."

Maybe I'm wrong; people frequently disagree about something as subjective as Barber's psychology-from-afar analysis. If I'm right, the best-case scenario is a Lyndon Johnson-type presidency; that is, one marred by a single fatal flaw. The worst-case scenario is a woman who, denied the power her ego needs, salts the Earth behind her.

John McCain has been the butt of some humor lately on account of his comparatively spartan fund-raising in February. In that month the Clinton campaign raised about $35 million, Obama raised an undisclosed amount "significantly more" than that, and McCain pulled up the ass-end of the parade with $12 million. Bad news for McCain, you say, showing a stunning mastery of the obvious. It certainly isn't good news (although it's less daunting than it appears.*) I'm more amazed at how completely we have managed to ignore the fact that raising $12 million in 29 days is now considered laughable.

I am very repetitive in my criticism of the exponentially rising cost of our elections. It's just absurd, and I don't think most Americans realize just how absurd it is.

It has been a while since we spoke about the presidential election, mostly because we need the break. The key to maintaining sanity until November is to pace oneself. Nonetheless I have a pair of related questions that need answering.

Please note that they are not rhetorical.

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1. With every indicator suggesting that the Democratic candidate should have a decided advantage in the general election, why does current polling show McCain ahead or in a dead heat?

2. What exactly is McCain's appeal?

On the first point, if you read this website regularly you are well aware of how I feel about public opinion polling in general and mass media-conducted polling in particular. At its top-dollar best it is wildly inaccurate, unstable, and susceptible to enormous variance from factors as prosaic as question order and syntax. At its worst it is flat-out misleading.
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This general skepticism aside, I do believe that polls measure something and therefore have value. And despite the fact that Democratic primary turnout has dwarfed GOP turnout in nearly every state, often by lopsided margins, the statistically insignificant portion of the electorate that is polled seems evenly divided. I am not overly fond of the media trope about how well McCain appeals to "moderates" and "undecided" voters, as any such appeal would logically be offset by what he loses in far-right evangelical Christian support. Have McCain and his pandering sluts in the media successfully programmed Americans into thinking that he is some sort of ideological maverick / pragmatist / magical shaman? How so many Americans could claim to want the war to end while professing support for this guy is beyond me.

Second, what is McCain's appeal? I struggle to think of a major presidential candidate who is or was a worse public speaker. He looks like he's delivering his speeches off of index cards – and at gunpoint. He talks into his chest, he appears to be dangerously close to falling asleep during his speeches, he has that Al Gore 2000-style pedantic tone of voice, and the only things he says with any conviction are that A) torture is bad and B) we need to start a few more wars in the middle east. He's not attractive, he's not young, he's not energetic, and his "message" is a pastiche of ideas taken from the past 30 years of GOP candidates. Most importantly, he's not appealing to the hardcore conservative base.

To whom is this bag of fluid appealing? And how?

Mysteries, at least to me.

(For no apparent reason beyond love, I am going to write "The Scenarios" in the style of Kafka's "The Sons." This is the kind of thing one needs to expect/endure from a man with a Kafka tattoo.)

I have three scenarios.

My first scenario is my favorite, and yet I have so little faith in it. While my heart supports it I fear that it is simply too impractical to survive in this world. This scenario insists that John McCain, who obviously has the GOP nomination in the bag now, is simply not something that the all-important Bible Thumping Inbred Nutcase wing of his party can accept. Said faction will instead create and promote their own independent/third party candidate, perhaps Huckabee. Or Fred Phelps. Or Jimmy Swaggart. Who knows. But thanks to the "brilliance" of Karl Rove, the GOP is now so heavily dependent on that portion of the electorate that their loss is not survivable. In this scenario, either Democratic nominee will coast to victory over a divided Republican Party. I wish this scenario all the best.

My second scenario is an ill-tempered and ungrateful one. It believes that there is nothing wrong with the GOP coalition, and its extremists will learn to love McCain as an arranged bride must learn to love the husband to whom she was sold for livestock.

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While this scenario does not include a third-party challenger from the far right, it does not believe that McCain can extend his support much beyond the hardcore GOP base. Too many Republicans and independents are disillusioned by 8 years of Bush to vote for another right-wing war hawk. The Democratic nominee wins, albeit not comfortably, over a united but weakened GOP.

My third scenario terrifies me. I loathe it but I realize that it is often the most immoral and horrific things that succeed in this world. It will be almost statistically impossible for either Obama or Hillary to put the other away now, as only ~1700 delegates remain and each candidate needs about 1000 more to win the nomination. As their fight drags on into the late summer, McCain – now essentially unopposed – will use the time to convince all of the "disaffected" suburban Republicans what a "maverick" and "independent" he is.

Look!, he says, Ann Coulter and James Dobson hate me! The tens of thousands of Republicans will slowly realize that they really only care about getting tax cuts every 18 months, and they will tell themselves that It's OK to Vote For McCain – He's Different!^tm Of course they are right. He is different than Bush, which is to say he is more tolerable on a handful of issues and much, much worse on others.

Like foreign policy. They will sweep their It's OK Because He's Different, Therefore We Still Voted For Change candidate into the White House, and after 4 years of St. McCain (and VP Lieberman) we'll be drafting people to man the wars in Iran, Syria, North Korea, Lebanon, and so on. I would be ashamed of this scenario if my experience with the selfishness, lability, and powers of self-delusion among the electorate did not so clearly suggest that it is correct.

These are my three scenarios.