Tuesday, February 12 – the primaries in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, which shouldn’t have been that important, were.
On the Republican side, the man the conservatives resent, or loathe, actually, John McCain, won all three – but the margins by which he won were not that impressive. See the Washington post account here – “Although McCain won in most geographic areas and among most demographic groups in Virginia, Huckabee’s strong showing among evangelicals and conservatives demonstrated McCain’s weakness with those voters and the challenge he faces to win them over before the fall election.” That party is tearing itself apart. The competent and slick technocrat, Romney, is out, leaving the difficult war hero with a history of supporting what the important leaders in the party (or those who say they are important) say are the wrong things, and the ordained but clueless Baptist minister, Huckabee, short on insight, full of oddball ideas, but earnest and amazingly personable. The results confirmed the coming train wreck. McCain will win the nomination, and much of the party will say they don’t really have a candidate. They may stay home and not vote, or drift to the Barack Obama camp – at least he doesn’t insult them, like McCain, and he seems pragmatic and smart as a whip, unlike Huckabee. This does not bode well. The only comfort is that if McCain loses, as seems likely, they can scapegoat him and work on finding someone right for the next election cycle – the theory being that conservatism didn’t fail, it never can, but this year they couldn’t find anyone who was a real conservative.
That’s an interesting theory, and now applied to George Bush – he ruined everything with massive spending and being all soft on illegal immigration, not proposing concentration camps and executions or something, and he managed every good idea badly – the war and all that. He just wasn’t a true conservative. When McCain loses that will do – use the same argument. But that is cold comfort.
On the other side, Obama cleaned Hillary’s clock, winning all three primaries by twenty or thirty percent margins – the Washington post account is here. He’s won the popular vote so far, as of this event, and now has a hundred more delegates, even counting the superdelegates. If you had watched the coverage on CNN or Fox or MSNBC you would have seen this expert or that doing the math – she has to win each of all the remaining contests from this point on with at least sixty percent of the vote, and convince the party to accept the results of the unsanctioned Michigan and Florida primaries that everyone previously agreed would count, and explain it wasn’t her fault everyone else removed their names from the Michigan ballot and her people forgot and she was the only candidate listed. And she has to keep her husband quiet. Even then he probably wins – or he sort of wins, as neither will have a sufficient number of delegates to win outright. She’ll just have far fewer delegates. Then it comes down to charm and arm-twisting, and promises and threats. She could pull it off – maybe. If so, the primaries would have meant very little.
Still, most Democrats find themselves in a situation unlike that of the Republicans – either will do, as they disagree on little. The differences are all in the wonk details – things would change. Her task, as one of those experts on television said, must be, for the next three weeks before the Texas and Ohio primaries, to make competence and well-tested political infighting skills seem inspirational. Good luck with that.
The best immediate analysis of what happened was from John Dickerson. Obama didn’t clean her clock, he ate her lunch – he swept the night by winning over Clinton’s core supporters:
Bill and Hillary Clinton often say that you can learn more about people from their failures than you can from their successes. If that’s true, then boy are we getting to know Hillary. Tonight she lost primaries in Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia, extending her losing streak to eight states. Overall, Barack Obama has won 23 of their 35 matchups. He now leads in the total delegate count for the first time since Iowa.
Clinton lost in Virginia and Maryland by more than twenty points and, Dickerson notes, maintained his coalition of young voters, the well-educated, and African-Americans. That was expected. But he also won among all income groups, including the lower-income voters he’s had trouble attracting even in states he won. The only voting bloc Clinton won was white women.
It wasn’t pretty:
When the bad news was announced, Clinton was in Texas trying to change the story. Never mind these losses, her aides say: Focus on the March 4th Texas and Ohio primaries and the April 22nd Pennsylvania one. The Clinton team’s argument has narrowed to this: Obama cannot win in big primary states where large African-American populations don’t dominate the electorate.
The puzzling thing, given this claim, is that Clinton isn’t fighting hard for the Wisconsin primary next week, a state that should fit the Clinton model. It doesn’t have a big African-American population, is home to lots of working-class voters, and was won twice by Bill Clinton. Independents and Republicans can vote in the Wisconsin primary, which favors Obama, but it’s hard for Clinton to argue that winning with the aid of independents and Republicans is a bad thing. They’ll be key to a general election matchup against John McCain.
But her campaign had its rationale, explaining why Obama won all those states to date, even if it’s shabby:
He won because the electorate had too many African-Americans or because the contest was a caucus where party activists dominate. These were attempts not only to explain away Clinton’s losses but also to suggest that Obama could never win in a general election in which broader coalitions are required. As he makes inroads into Clinton’s base, those asterisks fall away. If Obama wins the key general election swing state of Wisconsin, he’ll be in an even stronger position to argue that he can win among working-class whites. These victories give Obama ammunition for future states because they show he can build a coalition across race, gender, and income for the general election.
The race card has been taken away. Now what? And the Republicans are having a pissing contest over conservative purity – so why not the inspiring Obama?
But why didn’t the women stick with Clinton? Ask a woman. Ask Melinda Henneberger. She says this:
Hillary Clinton lost women in both Virginia and Maryland tonight, and not by a little; nearly 60 percent chose Barack Obama. (Or Oback Barama, as former Maryland Rep. Kweisi Mfume just called him on MSNBC, which I’m sure made all those who’ve ever mispronounced his name feel better.) So, does that mean we’re not her human firewall? Yes, it does, and here’s why: Black women were supposed to be her biggest fans - remember the whole “women with needs” narrative? - only, they aren’t. The new, amended story line is that, well, at least white women are squarely with Clinton - but even there, her 55 to 45 advantage tonight was an Al Gore-sized gender gap, not a yippee, a woman to vote for at last margin.
It comes down to this:
I don’t think the point is that women are not responding to her the way African-American voters are responding to Obama - though that is true - but that no demographic is responding to her as it is to him. The guy won every income group, the Catholic swing-voters everybody said he’d have trouble with, independents by a mile, and Latinos. Which is a blow to identity politics but not, as I see it, to women; on the contrary, isn’t it a testament to how far we’ve come that just because she is a woman doesn’t mean she’s automatically our woman? Yesterday, when a friend of mine said she didn’t understand how any woman could decide not to support Hillary, all I could think was that that made no more sense to me than if she’d said she didn’t understand not voting for the white person.
The race card has been taken way, and the gender card. There are more important thing to consider.
Emily Bazelon agrees:
Since the Iowa caucuses, I’ve been feeling the Hillary tug. Most of the women I’ve talked to in the last couple of months have felt it, too: Even if they weren’t sure they’d vote for Hillary, they were rooting for her on some level. They wanted her to make a strong showing. They didn’t want the girl who worked hard to lose willy-nilly to the guy who waltzed in. Those feelings must have helped bring more women than men to the polls in state after state, almost always in favor of Hillary.
But you know what? The tug doesn’t feel the same to me now. I wonder if that’s true for other Democratic women who could have gone either way, too.
But the Clinton woman has done her job:
Hillary has been an excellent first for us. No one else could have done what she’s done, with all her aplomb and professionalism and seriousness. But she doesn’t have to be the nominee, or the president, to have come through. She hung in there past every other contender, save one. She made it to the finals, the last round, overtime - whatever sports metaphor you want to use. I don’t mean to suggest that she’s done. But if she loses for good in the next weeks or months, she loses with dignity and heft and heart. And she’d leave us feeling, in a way I know I’ve never felt before, that a woman can be elected president. We already owe her. We’d owe her for that, too. Even if we don’t owe her, or give her, our votes.
Things really are changing.
But Texas and Ohio, Clinton’s must-win states, are to come. It’s the Giuliani firewall strategy – lose what doesn’t matter early and win big late. And his campaign manager praises her for thinking that way:
Mike DuHaime, a Republican consultant who managed Rudolph W. Giuliani’s campaign, said Mrs. Clinton was making the right decisions in trying to make the most of her strengths.
“Clearly, she has had success in larger states and there are a whole bunch of delegates at stake on March 4,” Mr. DuHaime said. “They are not trying to figure out who can win the most states; they are trying to figure out who can win the most delegates.”
That didn’t work so well for Giuliani, and the following day brought this:
A half-dozen senior officials of the Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee conferred this week on how to wind down their affairs, and at least one piece of their correspondence painted what appeared to be a bleak picture of the dormant campaign’s financial situation.
“We are deeper in the hole than I thought we would be,” John Gross, the campaign’s treasurer, wrote in an e-mail message to several senior campaign aides that was obtained by The New York Times.
He went on to say this – “We cannot prefer any one creditor. We probably could make a 10% payment to all qualified creditors at this point, but probably not much more.”
That cannot comfort the Clinton people.
Still, we must choose a president. And the day of the Chesapeake area primaries, out here in the Los Angeles Times, Max Boot made the argument for John McCain - Iran, Syria, and North Korea are thumbing their noses at us and only John McCain can put them in their place:
Clearly, these rogue regimes do not fear the consequences of waging a proxy war on America and our allies. They think they can get away with killing and maiming American soldiers - and so far they have been right.
… It is hard to see how Bush could reverse this decline in America’s “fear factor” during the remaining year of his presidency. That will be the job of the next president. And who would be the most up to the task?
To answer that question, ask yourself which presidential candidate an Ahmadinejad, Assad or Kim would fear the most. I submit it is not Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or Mike Huckabee. In my (admittedly biased) opinion, the leading candidate to scare the snot out of our enemies is a certain former aviator who has been noted for his pugnacity and his unwavering support of the American war effort in Iraq.
Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly comments:
There you have it. If you think the most important aspect of a president is the ability to “scare the snot out of our enemies,” then McCain’s your guy.
Now, you might think that after seven years of trying exactly this, with only the current collapse in our fortunes to show for it, the neocon establishment might at least pause for a moment to wonder if there’s more to foreign policy than scaring the snot out of our enemies. But no. The real problem, apparently, is simply that the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld administration wasn’t good enough at it. Not bellicose enough. Not unilateral enough. Not warlike enough. What America needs is someone even more bloodthirsty than the crew that got us into this mess. Time to double down, folks.
McCain is down with that – see this video:
McCain: “Anyone who worries about how long we’re in Iraq does not understand the military and does not understand war.”
Yep, everyone else is an amateur. He’s the military guy. That may sell. As he got shot down and was a prisinor of war and was tortured, and the other three were not shot down and not imprisoned and not tortured, he knows and they don’t. That too is an interesting argument. To some it will seem nonsense, to others, a comment on character, which to them counts more than competence, careful thinking, and the hard balancing of diplomatic alternatives. We’ll see if it plays in Peoria. Who knows? It may. The old mindset, or the master paradigms – be tough and don’t think too much about consequences – will be with us for many years to come.
We are who we are, now, and there’s no going back to the old ways:
If six suspected terrorists are sentenced to death at Guantanamo Bay for the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. Army regulations that were quietly amended two years ago open the possibility of execution by lethal injection at the military base in Cuba, experts said Tuesday.
Any executions would probably add to international outrage over Guantanamo, since capital punishment is banned in 130 countries, including the 27-nation European Union.
Justices with lifetime appointments to the Supreme Court will make sure we’re not like rest of the world. Consider this interview with the BBC – Justice Antonin Scalia dismisses what he calls the smugness and self-satisfaction of torture opponents:
In the interview with the Law in Action programme on BBC Radio 4, he said it was “extraordinary” to assume that the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” - the US Constitution’s Eighth Amendment - also applied to “so-called” torture.
“To begin with the constitution… is referring to punishment for crime. And, for example, incarcerating someone indefinitely would certainly be cruel and unusual punishment for a crime.”
Justice Scalia argued that courts could take stronger measures when a witness refused to answer questions.
“I suppose it’s the same thing about so-called torture. Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?” he asked.
“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game. “How close does the threat have to be? And how severe can the infliction of pain be?”
He goes on to talk about the ticking-time-bomb scenario; just like in the Fox show “24″ torture could save many lives. The trouble is that is not how things worked with one of the six detainees charged yesterday in the 9/11 attacks:
Qahtani’s case drew condemnation in June 2005 when Time magazine published leaked portions of his interrogation log showing that U.S. forces had him bark like a dog and left him to urinate on himself in isolation.
In the log, U.S. interrogators describe how they ratcheted up techniques on Qahtani during 50 days starting in November 2002 to extract a confession - by using sleep deprivation, leaving him strapped to an intravenous drip without bathroom breaks and having him strip naked.
Monday, he was one of six men named by the Pentagon to face a complex six-defendant war crimes trial for the suicide attacks that slammed aircraft into the Pentagon, World Trade Center and a Pennsylvania field - killing 2,973 people.
The six men could be executed if they are convicted, and if a Bush administration official approves their trial as a death-penalty case.
The Pentagon has since said that Qahtani’s interrogation tactics were personally approved by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.
Qahtani’s civilian attorney said the captive has since recanted any confessions he made during those interrogations.
Note that what the rest of the civilized world would call torture started in November 2002, more than a year after 9/11. Even if you grant some legal or moral authority to the ticking time bomb argument, it doesn’t appear to apply in this case.
What was Scalia talking about? He says torture has saved lives, at least on Fox Television. That is his, and the president’s position.
See Dan Froomkin in the Post on the Return of the 9/11 President:
Then, however, Bush made an unsupported claim, and issued a challenge that the media and his critics should pick up with vigor: “The American people have got to know that what we did in the past gained information that prevented an attack. And for those who criticize what we did in the past, I ask them, which attack would they rather have not permitted - stopped? Which attack on America did they - would they have said, well, you know, maybe it wasn’t all that important that we stop those attacks.”
But if the American people have “got to know” that torture gained information that prevented an attack, Bush needs to start making a better case. As I’ve written repeatedly, he has yet to offer any evidence that intelligence produced by torture thwarted a single plot or saved a single life.
The media should demand that he back it up or take it back.
David Kurtz:
Whatever you might think of the ticking time bomb rationale (the combination of its dubious moral and legal justifications combined with its real-world rarity lends it little weight for me personally), but you’d think that at some point its adherents would have to put up or shut up.
Or check out one Hollywood writer here:
That these people are so concerned about the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles - by the way it’s always Los Angeles, since it’s a fictitious, Hollywood-style scenario - is touching for this Angeleno, but somehow, I don’t believe that he’s all that concerned about me. What Scalia really wants is to make sure the horrible judgment and lack of conscience from his duck-hunting buddies doesn’t have any consequences.
By the way, Scalia - and his ideological soul mates on the Court - won’t be going away after January 2009. This mindset - that human rights are OK for some but not for all, that as long as a crime is ALLEGED and not part of a conviction then you can torture whoever you want, that we should all be so afraid for our lives at every waking moment that it demands setting aside any sort of ethics or values, and that everything a suspected terrorist tells you under duress is absolutely and 100% true - isn’t going anywhere.
No, it’s not going away. McCain authored the bill that explicitly outlawed torture, but was fine with the president attaching a signing statement saying he, as president, reserved the right to allow it when he thought it might be useful. Huckabee has no position, not wanting to offend the conservatives who see using torture as a test of conservative purity nor the Bible folks who think Jesus might not approve of inflicting excruciating pain and panic on the chance that amid all the things blurted out something screamed out might be useful. Huckabee doesn’t go there. Clinton and Obama want it stopped (although Clinton always hedges everything) – but the courts are packed with those who think it’s fine and dandy.
So the mid-February primaries sorted out a few things. But what will change?
Still, it was quite a night.
