There’s a thing people keep saying about Hillary Clinton that I don’t get.

(Let me preface this by saying the following: I think Hillary would be an acceptable-to-good President. I think the misogynistic attacks upon her are deplorable. And I have never understood Hillary-hatred – like, at all. It’s just weird.)

Here’s the thing I don’t get. Proponents of Hillary’s candidacy argue that she’s taken all the lumps the right wing attack machine can dish out and therefore she is “vetted” and knows how to fight back on those terms.

Now, I will freely admit that Hillary has managed to survive the constant attacks on her, and that isn’t nothing to be sure, but surviving isn’t the same as thriving. The constant attacks on Hillary have given her an incredibly weak public image. The most recent polling of hypothetical election matchups has Barack Obama pulling much stronger victories over every Republican candidate except John McCain (where it’s a razor-matchup for both him and Hillary), and the McCain numbers are within the margin of error anyway.

Now, I freely admit that it is entirely possible that, should Obama be nominated as the Democratic candidate, that the sleaze machine will ratchet up to 11 and knock his favorability numbers down. And I don’t think should Obama be nominated that his victory will be as totally assured as his current thirty-point margin of victory over Mitt Romney.

But here’s the thing: the worst-case scenario, in this regard, is that Obama’s negatives get as bad as Hillary’s. It’s really not possible for Obama’s numbers to get worse than hers in this regard. Hillary is a polarizing figure, and pretty much everybody has already made their mind up about her. This is fine, except that way too many people have made up their mind that they don’t like her.

(As an aside, I’d also point out that the reason major Democrats are lining up behind Obama is because they all know that a Hillary candidacy will actively work against many smaller Democratic campaigns and an Obama candidacy probably won’t. All of Hillary’s “experience” arguments are worth precisely dick if the House and Senate go Republican again.)

EDIT TO ADD: Somebody mentioned foreign policy in the comments and I wanted to mention something else: Hillary’s potential policy fuckups are larger than Obama’s potential policy fuckups, I think. A lot of people play the “experience” card as regards Hillary, and although I’m not sure how greatly we can treat her eight years as First Lady as “experience,” I also think it ain’t nothing.

That having been said, whatever experience Hillary possesses is almost entirely domestic and legislative, and the capacity of any President to act on the domestic front is curtailed somewhat by what Congress wants to do. A repeat of the Bush presidency with ruling party members acting in lockstep with the President is almost certainly not going to happen. (As Will Rogers once said, “No, I don’t belong to any organized political party; I’m a Democrat.”) So the potential for Obama screwing up domestic policy worse than Hillary can (assuming she can) is, I would suggest, low.

However, on the foreign policy front, the President has far greater latitude to act, and Hillary has next to no foreign policy experience. Neither does Obama, so experience in this regard is mostly a wash – however, after experience comes intent, and Hillary’s foreign policy track record is poor and her stated intentions are even less encouraging.

The GOP Presidential candidates as Buffy the Vampire Slayer villains.

Also, the Presidential field as Star Wars characters.

Everybody who’s complained that Barack Obama is all fluff and no substance really needs to read this piece. I was going to link to it earlier but couldn’t find it, then somebody thoughtfully mentioned it in a post somewhere else.

Short short version: the man is a skilled politician who knows very well how to get change accomplished for the better.

Read his WSJ column on Barack Obama.

His trash talking was an unattractive carryover from his days playing pickup basketball at Harvard…

DID YOU KNOW THAT BARACK OBAMA IS A BLACK MAN?

He is often lazy, given to misstatements and exaggerations and, when he doesn’t know the answer, too ready to try to bluff his way through.

HE IS A LAZY BLACK MAN TOO!

he was the only candidate, Democratic or Republican, to use a teleprompter to deliver his Iowa and New Hampshire election-night speeches.

INTELLECTUALLY INFERIOR BLACK MAN!

As I have said before about Dane Cook, I would give all my earthly possessions to kick Karl Rove repeatedly in the nuts until he was incapable of breeding.

Obama 40
Clinton 29
Edwards 25
Richardson 6

McCain 29
Romney 28
Huckabee 15
Thompson 12
Paul 10
Guiliani 6

Your turn!

The new ARG poll of New Hampshire is out, and Clinton is spiralling. She’s dropped from 35 percent to 26, a nine-point drop (or better than a quarter of her support) in two days. Obama, predictably, has jumped from 31 to 38 percent in the same timeframe, but what’s just as notable is that John Edwards has gained five points (from 15 to 20) at the same time. The same trends, albeit in smaller amounts, show up in the Rasmussen poll from yesterday.

There exists a chance – a small chance, but a chance – that Clinton could come in third in New Hampshire. (I don’t think she has a chance of winning it outright at this point.) If she does, Edwards becomes the alternative to Obama and it’s essentially a two-man race.

(As for the Republicans, it’s less interesting: McCain is the man to beat, Romney hasn’t lost any ground and Huckabee got a small bump from Iowa but not nearly what I think people expected.)

Out of all the things people have forwarded me this week, I am gonna talk about this. Mostly because I’ve seen the sentiment that films like Juno and Waitress and Knocked Up are “pro-life movies” crop up elsewhere and it’s just getting annoying.

Juno and Waitress and Knocked Up are all, emphatically, pro-choice movies. This is not hard to understand. In all of these films, the protagonist becomes pregnant, then – wait for it – chooses to have the child. See? Pro-choice. There is a choice made in each film, and the choice to not have an abortion is made freely in each incidence. In all of the movies, other characters are used to emphasize the fact that these characters are, if they wish, allowed to get an abortion.

That is all that being pro-choice entails.

(Never mind that from a narrative standpoint, an abortion is lousy for a whole movie. Consider: the HBO telefilm If These Walls Could Talk deals with three women who have abortions, in three separate segments, each about forty minutes long, and at least one of them feels stretched out. That’s because an abortion is a single event: it happens and done. You can deal with the fallout or the decisionmaking to an extent, but that’s mostly going to be “talk talk” rather than “do do”, and a good narrative usually goes for the latter rather than the former. That’s why pregnancy is a good storytelling engine: it has a defined beginning, middle and “end” which everybody is completely familiar with, which provides its own set of challenges. It’s a process rather than an event, which is why any writer worth their salt knows it’s easier and offers more possibilities for storytelling than an abortion does.)

In any case, complaining that the characters choose to have the children makes the films “pro-life” is just stupid, because by doing so the complainant, who is presumably pro-choice, is buying into the framing of the pro-life argument that being pro-choice is de facto being pro-abortion. This just isn’t true, as any pro-choice individual knows: the whole point of the movement is to make abortion safe, legal, and (for most people) rare. Abortion isn’t a pleasant experience and wishing it on people is just ludicrous; the point of being pro-choice is to ensure that women have the legal right to determine the use of their own bodies. Yes, the movies present childbirth as miraculous. So what? Childbirth is pretty goddamned miraculous, after all. It just shouldn’t be legally required.

That’s why Juno and Waitress and Knocked Up are all pro-choice movies. They assume their characters have a choice. It’s just that simple. Anything more is arguing for ideological tautologies we really don’t need.

Edwards 35
Obama 32
Clinton 25
Biden/Dodd/Richardson/Kucinich 8

Romney 26
Huckabee 22
McCain 21
Guiliani 13
Paul 12
Thompson 7

Your turn!

EDIT TO ADD: So the results are, roughly:

Obama 37.5
Edwards 30
Clinton 29.5
Richardson 2
Biden 1

Huckabee 34
Romney 25
Thompson 14
McCain 13
Paul 10
Guiliani 4

So, what does this mean?

1.) Well, obviously it’s big ups for Obama, for a number of reasons. Firstly, an enormous youth turnout – really, it’s massive. The legendary “candidate that brings in the youth vote that never appears” is nigh-mythical in politics, but Obama did it – in spades. Secondly, a massive initial victory in whiter-than-fuck Iowa effectively dismisses the “a black guy can’t get white votes” argument that quietly been making the rounds (especially, it seems, in black political circles – go figure). Finally, it’s just a good start right out of the gate, and that’s never a bad thing.

2.) Edwards’ campaign isn’t done, but his odds are very weak now. His campaign was predicated on winning Iowa and he didn’t do it. His concession speech, though, was a thing of genius, effectively arguing that with a top-two finish of himself and Obama, the primary season is about who can bring change, and Hillary effectively has been cast as the status-quo candidate. If the Clinton campaign collapses (and it could happen), the dynamic is in place for a two-man race. Still, that’s a lot of “ifs.”

3.) Clinton is in trouble. Her campaign was predicated on her being the inevitable nominee and she just came in third place in the first real test: not even second, but third. She needs an exceptional performance in New Hampshire to keep it together. If she doesn’t win New Hampshire she is in deep shit. If she only barely wins New Hampshire she is still in pretty deep shit. With just about all the non-big-three nominees dropping out to endorse Obama, she has a tough road ahead of her.

4.) Romney is in less trouble than people think. Yes, Huckabee winning Iowa is not great for Romney, but remember that the essential character of Romney’s campaign is that he’s every Republican’s inoffensive second choice, and getting a solid quarter of the vote right off the bat is good for him. The Guiliani and Thompson voters aren’t going to flock wholesale to Huckabee, after all.

5.) Speaking of Huckabee, yes, it’s a great early performance, but Iowa is littered with the ghosts of campaigns which had one great early performance then collapsed outright. Huckabee has very little institutional support and not a lot of money, and although he’s a very folksy speaker, he’s shit on details, which might even matter. The question for Huckabee is can he get more than one-third of the Republican electoral vote when the money and the foreign policy cons are against him, and I don’t know if he can do that.

6.) McCain probably wanted a few more points (fourteen points for Fred Thompson? Seriously?), but Iowa was always a distant afterthought for a campaign planning to really start by kicking ass in New Hampshire. That having been said, McCain needs to kick ass in New Hampshire even worse than Hillary does.

Ezra Klein and everybody else commenting on the newly-hatched whispering campaign to elect Mike Bloomberg as an independent candidate for President are missing the point. All the big-name political blogs commenting on this story are mocking the cabal of old, mostly male, irrelevant white people pushing for an independent “end the gridlock” candidate who will not, in fact, end the gridlock in any way, and that’s definitely a fair comment, but that assumes that the motivations behind this quixotic idea are genuine.

They aren’t. Think about it for a second: if you’re really, really worried about gridlock in Washington? There are already candidates campaigning for increased bipartisanship. In fact, there’s one major candidate per party: Barack Obama for the Democrats and John McCain for the Republicans. The old irrelevant white people, were they truly determined to end partisan gridlock, have their choice of candidate already. However, what David Broder won’t say in public is that Obama is too progressive a candidate for their tastes (even though he’s been courting their nonexistent voting bloc by making threatening noises about Social Security and admonishing John Edwards for being too “angry” a candidate), and that they think McCain will have trouble winning the primary, let alone the election. (Of course it’s not about policy. Mike Bloomberg’s differences in policy from John McCain are miniscule.)

However, an independent Presidential campaign has the potential to peel off more votes from the Democratic candidate than the Republican one. This isn’t Ross Perot in 1992 or 1996, where the independent campaign grabbed votes about roughly equally from the Democrats and Republicans; this is an electoral climate where independent voters are breaking Democratic in large numbers and just aren’t going to vote for any Republican period, no matter how cute and fuzzy he might end up being. But those same independent voters might vote for a perceived nonpartisan independent candidate, campaigning on wishes and dreams, not least because many independent voters are idiots. And that doesn’t swing the election for the Republican party – you know, the party most of these people always support either implicitly or explicitly – but it transforms a potential rout into a competitive race, and that’s all they want.

(Tack on “so they can steal it convincingly” arguments if you feel so inclined.)

Sometimes I wonder what I feel like writing about and I draw a bit of a blank. This is why I am thankful for Republicans. Give them a couple days, and inevitably they will produce a howler. For example, this one, from a mid-to-high-level organizer in the Rudy Guiliani campaign:

“I’ve been very concerned about this Muslim thing for quite awhile. The average American does not know beans about what the Muslims are about. I am talking about the Muslims in general. I don’t subscribe to the principle that there are good Muslims and bad Muslims. They’re all Muslims.”

Wow. No, just wow.

(Also, I am horribly amused by the use of the phrase “know beans.” I honestly thought I would never see that phrase again without rereading a Henry Huggins book.)

With the Iowa caucuses for Presidential candidacy less than a week away, I’ve gotten one or two emails asking me which candidate I prefer. I can see where my opinion – being a foreign national who does not vote in American elections and all – is dramatically important, of course.

Now, it’s important to preface that most of the Democratic candidates would likely make anywhere from decent to excellent presidents, except for Dennis Kucinich. (Yes, Kucinich agrees with me on certain positions, but you know who agrees with me on every position? Me! And yet, I would likely make a terrible President. Competency in the duties of the job itself is just as important as having the right agenda, and Kucinich just doesn’t have that competency.)

And it’s also important to preface that the Republican candidates are barely worth mentioning. This is one of the weakest slates in Republican presidential history, if not the weakest period: a blowhard former mayor with a tendency to explode his own campaigns and an agenda that essentially amounts to “let’s blow up everything,” a former actor who doesn’t even seem that interested in running for President, a out-and-out theocrat who’s at least honest about his prejudices, and Mitt Romney, who is, I think, an android. John McCain, despite being eleventy thousand years old and touting his executive experience as a former Pharaoh on the campaign trail, manages to be the least offensive by being willing to say things like “torture is wrong” and “guess what, you can’t deport twelve million people, it just doesn’t happen” – which of course hurts his chances with the Republican base.

But back to the question at hand.

continue reading "The All-Important Non-Voting Canadian Primary"

I periodically have to go delete spam comments that show up on old posts (it’s the blog equivalent of dusting, really), and most of these comments are of course porn. However, I just deleted an obvious spam comment which was about Joe Biden receiving the endorsement of a Delaware union.

Firstly, I’m kind of amused that the Biden campaign is so desperate as to spam my blog.

Secondly, how would it even qualify as noteworthy for Joe Biden, the senior senator from Delaware, to receive the endorsement of a Delaware union? Seriously, that’s a dog-bites-man story if ever there was one.

The Lakota have cancelled their treaties and seceded from the United States.

The first question that comes to mind, of course, is “can they legally do this under the treaties they have established.” To answer that with any level of competence, I’d actually need to see the treaties in question and particularly the part about withdrawal from same (if there are specific procedures that must be followed or requirements fulfilled, et cetera). The Lakota are completely right about their argument that Article VI of the Constitution demands that treaties entered into by the United States government are binding law upon the United States government, for what that’s worth, but that only goes so far as the treaty. That having been said, I’d find it likely that the Lakota A) have their own lawyers who probably know a lot more about Indian law than I do, and B) are legally confident of their position for a number of reasons.

The second question that comes to mind is “okay, now what?” Can the United States allow – law or not – what essentially amounts to its own version of Taiwan within its borders? And how much land is exactly at stake? I’ve heard people suggest that Lakota territory, under the terms of those treaties from which the Lakota just seceded, stretches as far as the Canadian border. (Not that this helps them much right now, because Stephen Harper won’t do anything to endanger his precious “special relationship” with the biggest dipshit in American presidential history, but I’m sure even with that caveat the Lakota would prefer to not be an entirely surrounded nation like Lesotho or the Vatican.)

Also: be prepared for a shitstorm of indignation considering that Venezuela is one of the nations the Lakota initially approached for diplomatic purposes.

As I said in the post title – this is one of the most significant developments in American political history to come down the pike in a very long time, and potentially one of the most dramatic changes as well – or one of the quickest enforcements of the status quo.

Whenever I get lazy and think Stephen Harper is the worst leader imaginable – I am reminded that things could be far far worse.

To sum up, one of the following possibilities must explain this situation:

1.) President Bush was given all the relevant information about Iran’s nuclear capabilities (or, more accurately, the lack thereof) and ignored it.

2.) President Bush was given all the relevant information, and simply decided to lie about it.

3.) President Bush was given all the relevant information, then forgot about it because he saw, I don’t know, a cute puppy or something.

3.) President Bush was never given said relevant information, because what the hell would he do with it?

5.) SPACE ALIENS.