It’s surely a measure of how bad things are out there that I’ve actually gotten a couple of emails from students asking if I’m ever going to post anything again. It has been over a month now since the last incisive Cobbloviation, after all. Part of the long dry spell on this site may be chalked up to a brief trip to Italy, the tab for which, I pray to God, the Missus never reveals to me. American tourists were in much shorter supply this time than in 2002, but with their currencies flush, the Euronats and the Aussies were thick as green flies on fresh cow-plop, and they all wanted to talk about our election, most of them curious, it seemed to me, to know if some last minute shenanigan or systemic manipulation would deny the Barackster the Democratic nod. There were clearly no tears flowing for the duly departing Doofus, but if they saw McCain in comparably critical terms , I didn’t pick up on it.
The most interesting sequence of events for me over the last month began with Hillary’s defiant June 4 non-concession speech, in which she seemed utterly convinced that by sheer force of will she could erase the primary results. Her ostensible effort to leverage ol’ Oby on the VP-ship while refusing to recognize him as the nominee, first struck me as further evidence that if she wasn’t going to be allowed in the cockpit, she intended by God to sabotage the whole flight. By throwing around her seventeen million votes and effectively asking him for something she already knew he wouldn’t give, she seemed to be setting up a situation where she could cast herself once again as the abused, humiliated female who could hardly be blamed for failing to rally her minions by the millions to this arrogant male chauvinist upstart who had hoodwinked just enough of the sovereign electorate to snatch away that which was rightfully hers. Could she really be expected to ask any self-respecting woman in America to vote for a man who had dissed their ol’ gal pal “Hil’” so egregiously?
How then did we get from the reality-defying speech from la-la land on the evening of June 4 to breaking news on the evening of June 5 that she would be conceding within the next few days and endorsing Barry O.? Was Bill eagerly drafting plans to gather several intern-bimboettes and return to the campaign trails in a rental van, pulling over every now and then to take on condoms and other supplies and maybe for some impromptu speechifying wherever folks had not yet developed an immunity to his charms? As the official story of her so-called change of heart goes, enough of her big-time supporters simply told Ms. C. that she had already blown by the “enough already” sign several weeks earlier. I have no doubt that this happened, but, in light of her not so-veiled threat the previous day to undermine ol’ Oby nine ways to Sunday, I’m guessing that she agreed to swallow the proverbially bitter bill only after it had been coated with a generous dollop of sweetener. With the Clintons, it’s always about either power or money, and since she was supposedly foregoing the former, that probably means she was being promised a great deal of the latter. So much for her campaign debt, including the $1,200 tab at that Dunkin D’s in Iowa.
With Hillary and Bill relegated—temporarily at least--to the purgatory of the sidelines, it’s interesting at this point to watch the emerging Obama-McCain dynamic. In the face of a substantial media backlash, the Obama camp quickly backed off overt suggestions that the very senior Senator from Arizona sometimes seems disoriented and confused on the stump. Relax guys, age discrimination is one of America’s most acceptable prejudices, and when the campaign blahs set in, the press will eagerly puncture its own protective membrane around Johnny Mac just as it did with Oby. On another front, in fact, disapproving accounts of the younger, friskier McCain’s rather unceremonious dumping of his permanently injured first wife in favor of the permanently hot and inexhaustibly rich Ms. Mac #2 are already starting to make the rounds.

Polls are still mighty shaky indicators of the November outcome at this point, but even discounting the Newsweek numbers showing a fifteen point spread, Real Clear Politics’s cumulative poll figures suggest that Oby may be opening up a least a small gap. The conventional wisdom seems to be that, given the helluva mess we’re in, that gap should approximate the Grand Canyon. I’m thinking that there just too many doubts about the Demo nominee for that to happen anytime soon, if ever. On the other hand, McCain’s best talking point is that things seem to be calming down a bit in Iraq. Problem is, not many folks seem to care. Two-thirds of those polled still think the war was not worth the cost and well over half favor American withdrawal even if it means that Iraq is left to drown in the blood of its own sectarian strife. Then there’s the economy, where neither candidate has said much that’s exciting, but what McCain has said sounds eerily like what the Bush administration said, and we all know where that got us.
The real poll number that spells trouble for McCain is 15 percent. That’s how many Americans seem to believe the country is headed in the right direction. We may not know how much Obama’s race is going to hurt him with white voters, but we can be fairly certain that the scarlet “W.” that might as well be tattooed on McCain’s forehead doesn’t figure to be much of a plus for him.

Posted by JC at 10:48 AM | Permalink

“I'm against sin. I'll kick it as long as I've got a foot, and I'll fight it as long as I've got a fist. I'll butt it as long as I've got a head. I'll bite it as long as I've got a tooth. And when I'm old and fistless and footless and toothless, I'll gum it till I go home to Glory and it goes home to perdition!” --Rev. Billy Sunday

The foregoing vow from a famed and clearly fiery evangelist not only evokes the vigor and resolve of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s opposition to Barack Obama, but in the wake of her West Virginia primary triumph, it suggests another voter bloc on which Ms. C. may lay legitimate claim: the toothless. West Virginians in their sixties and older, it seems, are the most dentally challenged of all Americans. (If you doubt, check it out.) Judging from yesterday’s exit polls, it would appear that Hillary won nearly seven in ten of the votes cast by a portion of the electorate where more than four in ten are no longer sporting their natural choppers. This bodes well for her because the next big primary is the May 20 contest in Kentucky, which stands second only to W. Va. in the all-important dentally deficient demographic.

The Clintonistas are busily trying to put some teeth (Ouch!) in Hillary’s big win by describing West Virginia, with its five electoral votes, as a vital “swing state,” and pointing out that the last two Demo losers failed to carry it. Let me respond to this with a question. What do Adlai Stevenson (1952,1956), Hubert Humphrey (1968), Jimmy Carter (1980), and Michael Dukakis (1988) have in common other than losing their respective presidential bids? If you guessed “winning West Virginia,” then not only are you correct, but I like the way you think.

When I noticed that 48 percent of those polled after the West Va. balloting said that they would either vote for McCain or stay home on election day if Hillary was not the nominee, it occurred to me that the Democrats might be well advised to cut a deal with the Billarys. Why not offer to make her president of West Virginia? With the party’s control of Congress likely to be strengthened in November, the paperwork should be a snap. Certainly with her own teeth not only intact but pretty darn intimidating if you ask me, Ms. C. should have no problem subduing any mountaineer dissidents in short order. There would be the very real possibility, of course, that she might quickly rally her supporters for an invasion of the United States in order to claim the presidential throne she really wants and views as rightfully hers. The prospect of fighting off hordes of meth-crazed Hillaryites might be daunting for some, but not for me. Please don’t get me wrong, as the only member of my immediate family to live this long still chewing with the set God gave him, I don’t like to belittle anyone who has no teeth. Still, I find it difficult to figure out what I have to fear from a bunch of folks who would have trouble eating a Moon Pie.

Posted by JC at 11:18 AM | Permalink

Barack Obama’s big win in North Carolina came as no great surprise to me, given the significant African American and up-scale white Democratic demographic representation in the Tarheel State. I was mildly surprised, however, by his near-win in Indiana because Real Clear Politics.com’s last cumulative pre-election poll average showed him trailing Hillary Clinton by four points, and he eventually lost by only two. This difference hardly seems earth-shaking until you consider that in five of six previous primary losses in states outside the South where polling data is available, Obama’s percentages of the actual vote have fallen short, frequently well short, of the percentages indicated in the final RCP poll averages. Obama ran eleven points behind his final poll average in New Hampshire, ten points behind in California, and eight points behind in Massachusetts. In North Carolina, on the other hand, he ran six points ahead of the polls, and in Georgia, South Carolina, and Alabama, his positive margins were eighteen, seventeen, and fifteen points, respectively.

Obviously, polls can’t ever be perfect. For example, despite duly diligent efforts of pollsters to contact voters from every segment of the electorate, it’s always a distinct possibility that the opinions of lower-income groups will be underrepresented. This could be critical in southern states, where African Americans represent a much larger percentage of the Democratic electorate than elsewhere, and it could help to explain the wider than expected Obama victory margin in several southern states, including North Carolina, where some 65,000 new African American voters have reportedly been registered since January alone.

Beyond that, polls are like computer programs. What they tell us can be no more reliable than what we tell them. Even opinion polls completed only hours before the voting polls open cannot account for what happens in the hearts and minds of the electorate in the all-important meantime. Surely, part of Obama’s shortfall in New Hampshire can be chalked up to a big but late shift of women to Senator Clinton in response both to the brutal media beat-down she endured after her upset loss in Iowa and to her well-publicized, ostensibly “unguarded” emotional moment a few days before the N.H. vote.

If last-second shifts help to explain why Obama has performed better in the polls than at the polls in several non-southern states, what explains the shifts themselves? Trying to make sense of Obama’s surprising loss in New Hampshire, some observers invoked the “Bradley Effect,” referring to the 1982 California gubernatorial race in which former LA mayor Tom Bradley, an African American, enjoyed a clear lead in the polls only to come up short on Election Day. The following year, polls had Harold Washington headed for a landslide victory in the Chicago mayoral election before he barely managed to squeak out a win. In response to these and several similar cases, the pointy-headed obfuscators of the blatantly obvious quickly trotted out “social desirability bias” to describe the phenomenon of whites misrepresenting their electoral intentions because they are too embarrassed to tell pollsters, especially black pollsters that they don’t want to vote for a black candidate. (It doesn’t sound scientific enough for some folks, I guess, but where I come from, we just call this kind of behavior “lyin.’”)

It’s hard to know how much of a role plain old prevarication by whites has played in generating the disparity between Obama’s polling percentages and his vote percentages outside the South, but I’m guessing it may be a significant one. If so, this raises some questions: Why would white Democrats outside the South be more likely to say they support a black candidate and then fail to actually follow through in the voting both? Are, as some suggest, northern whites simply more sensitive to the social stigma attached to any expression of opinion that might somehow be construed as racist? I love this interpretation because it makes northern whites who try to conceal their racial hang-ups seem more enlightened than southern whites who presumably have no such qualms. Unfortunately, this thesis doesn’t quite square with the fact that, to cite but one example, the percentage of white Democratic voters who actually admitted in exit polls that race had “mattered” in their voting choice was slightly higher in Indiana than in North Carolina, and the percentage (78) of those same whites who also voted for Clinton was a whopping sixteen points higher among Hoosiers than Tar Heels. However directly it may fly in the face of enduring regional stereotypes, from where I sit, Obama’s much stronger performance among whites in states like Georgia and Texas than in states like Ohio and Pennsylvania would seem to suggest that maybe whites in the South who say they support Obama are simply more likely than whites elsewhere to really mean it. This possibility likely says less about the greater racial tolerance of white southerners as a group, of course, than the relatively stronger economic and educational bonafides of southern white Democrats, among whom blue-collar types are as rare as a full set of teeth at a Porter Wagoner concert.

In any case, with the nomination of a black candidate now a virtual certainty, Democratic campaign strategists would at least seem to have a better idea of where they stand with white Democratic voters in the South than with Democratic whites elsewhere in the country. Regrettably for the Dems, white Democrats hardly dominate the electorate in these parts. So far as I can tell, even Bill Clinton, who won four southern states in both 1992 and 1996, only managed about 35 percent of the total southern white vote. I’m eager to see how close Obama, who wants to become our next “first black president,” can come to that figure.

In reality, it will probably be white voters outside the South who ultimately tell the tale for the Democrats this November. Constructing a reliable appraisal of the party’s prospects this fall depends on whether pollsters can find better ways to assure that the tale they hear from these voters between now and then is by any means a truthful one.

This typically wise and cogent commentary was also posted over at History News Network, http://hnn.us

Posted by JC at 12:35 PM | Permalink