Between a Donkey and a Hard Place

Had the Republicans nominated John Kasich instead of Donald Trump, he would almost surely be crushing Hillary Clinton now. Had the Democrats nominated Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton, he would be crushing Donald Trump. So much for the will of the people. The American nominating process is disturbingly random.

A lot depends, for example, on which states hold the earliest primaries. What plays in Iowa or New Hampshire might not play at all well in New York or Texas, but if you do not pull well in Iowa or New Hampshire, you will never find out. That's why Rudi Giuliani did not become president.

Rather than whole states, it might be better to hold small early primaries in county-sized demographics around the country, selected as representative the way pollsters might select their samples. Something urban. Something rural, something Southern, something from the Northeast, and so on. And a different selection each cycle. Would this make starting a campaign cost more? Not if we used only a few such jurisdictions. If they end up being far apart, so are Iowa and New Hampshire.

Odds now are that Hillary Clinton will hold on and get the presidency. The RCP average shows her up a thin 1.8 percent. As she has just been cleared again by the FBI, this is unlikely to go down over the next few days.

This is probably the best result for the Republican Party. If Trump wins, the Republicans will be more or less saddled with him, an unsatisfactory candidate, in 2020. A lot of better candidates will be blocked. His administration is not likely to be a grand success, as he has few friends in congress. The Democrats are unlikely to put out again a candidate as unappealing as Clinton. If, on the other hand, Trump loses, it clears the way for a better candidate in four years, to run against a scandal-plagued Hillary Clinton or against Tim Kaine, never elected and saddled with the Clinton scandals.

Watergate? That Was Junior Varsity

The current situation for the United States is dire. Anyone who cares about America’s future must be alarmed. Surely those who wish the US well cannot now support Hillary Clinton, given what we now know. Were she to be elected, still the most likely outcome, the Congress would need almost immediately to move to impeach her, throwing the nation into the kind of constitutional crisis it faced over Watergate. Even worse if they did not impeach and convict her. Even if they did, by voting for her immediately in the face of such corruption, the general population would be announcing to each other that they do not care. As Confucius properly pointed out, if the top of a nation is visibly corrupt, the rest of the nation will quickly and inevitably follow suit. People will decide only suckers follow laws or work for the common good.

This is a fast and bumpy ride to Third World conditions.

Trump would be scary, but not that scary. We are protected from the worst by the fact that he has no personal following in the political elite. He is not part of any existing Washington cartel. The press is not covering up for him—just the reverse. The professional class, including the bureaucrats, are against him. Even a Republican congress is going to include many enemies.

At worst therefore, and even if he were as personally corrupt as Clinton—which he does not seem to be—the greatest danger would simply be that he was ineffectual. Fears of a Trump dictatorship are not credible—even if it were his desire.

Here is what I think is going on with the converging Clinton scandals.

Perhaps the fundamental question is, why did Clinton do her business as Secretary of State on a private server? There is no chance she was stupid enough, and everybody around her was stupid enough, to do it innocently, or not to see the blatant security risk and risk of scandal. She must have had a reason so pressing that the risk was worthwhile.

In other words, she must have been intending, from the start, misbehaviour so serious that such a terrible risk was, to her, worth it. And worth the further risk of stonewalling once the private server was discovered, and the further risk of destroying evidence under subpoena.

So it goes without saying that the truth must be a real bombshell.

We have already had ample evidence, from the Podesta emails, of what that might be: the selling of influence. Bribery, graft. That is bad enough. But as Secretary of State, she was selling influence not over pavement contracts, but over foreign affairs. This is, in other words, treason.

What might the yet-unseen worst be? Voluntarily sharing information with folks like Putin or Iran, in return for money?

After all, American foreign policy since Obama, and Clinton, took office could not have gone much worse, in terms of American interests. Putin and Iran have somehow been ridiculously successful, despite playing weak hands amid the collapse in oil prices. Not to mention China’s successful move into the South China Sea, and the Philippines switching sides in that dispute. It is hard to believe someone wasn’t screwing things up deliberately.

Of course, Putin is backing Trump, isn’t he? After all, we have Hillary Clinton’s and Harry Reid’s word on it. Why would he back Trump if he owns Clinton?

I assume Clinton and Reid are simply lying. That, after all, is their track record. Putin is not behind the Wikileaks dumps. That is the obvious misdirection to use, if Hillary is his real puppet. And how can she not be, if she did not care about the obvious risk of exposing her own diplomatic correspondence to Russian hacks? The real culprit in the Podesta-Wikileaks email leaks might as easily be an individual or a non-state group. How hard is it for anyone without state financial backing to hack into an email account protected by the password “p@ssw0rd”?

As to the discovery of a reportedly huge cache of relevant emails on the Huma Abedin—Anthony Weiner laptop: if someone is involved with people of very dubious ethics, like the Clintons clearly are, she would, if she were smart, want to keep a cache of evidence of their worst wrongdoing, for use whenever necessary to protect her own position. This would be doubly true for her husband, conscious of his own wrongdoing and so vulnerability. Surely she was cunning anough to keep copies of anything incriminating on her own laptop away from the office. By any other logic, having sensitive documents kept at home on a laptop shared with her husband would be terribly reckless. And we know she did this.

This would also explain why Jim Comey, until now leaning over backwards to protect Clinton, has announced the reopened investigation days before the election. Not something he would likely have done if he did not feel forced to do it; whatever the danger he faced by not going public now was greater than the danger of completely alienating Hillary Clinton just before she was likely to become president, and his boss, and able to fire him.

This no doubt was what kept him from convening a grand jury in July. If Clinton won, his job was toast. A fair assessment, it seems, based on the ferocity of the attack against him by Clinton and other leading Democrat spokesmen now. If Clinton now becomes president, she would indeed have to fire him, or declare herself a liar.

This almost has to mean, given his previous actions, that Comey believes he faces a greater risk of losing his job if he cooperated in the coverup. Either he believes that whatever he has found out would ensure that she loses the election, or it would so incriminate her that she would lack the political capital to fire him. That surely suggests something impeachable.

Nevada

I have just about lost interest now in the US presidential race. Nevada has made both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump look close to inevitable. It is too depressing. To think: the Republicans at least produced the best field in a generation, and it boils down to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? After Obama, I'm not sure the US can survive this with its preeminence intact.

For the Dems, South Carolina will tell the tale. But Nevada was a better shot for Bernie than South Carolina; the SC vote is heavily black and the black vote prefers Clinton. It is not fair; Sanders spent his youth fighting for civil rights, and Clinton came late to the game. The problem is apparently that blacks do not identify with Sanders culturally. He is too white. But Clinton has the advantage of a large black vote throughout the SEC primary to come as well. By there time that it over, Sanders may have lost all momentum.

As for the Republicans, the big problem is that Trump's vote has not just grown, it is now bigger than the next two candidates, Rubio and Cruz, combined. If this holds, it suggests he cannot be overtaken even in a two-man race. And Rubio and Cruz are so close in their vote that it is hard to see either dropping out. If you add Carson's and Kasich's vote to either Rubio or Cruz, it would hardly make a difference.

I can only hope that Nevada is some odd anomaly, like a rogue poll.

Poor Oppressed Hillary

Haplesss victim of circumstances beyond her control.

In a recent debate, Bernie Sanders said Hillary Clinton represented the establishment. Clinton immediately took strong exception to this. "Sen. Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment." Adding irony, her husband, the former president, Bill Clinton, later insisted at a campaign stop that his wife was not a part of the establishment.

She is a former First Lady of th US, leaving aside an education at Wellesley and Yal and a career as US Senator and Secretary of State. If she is not a member of the establishment, who is? A woman cannot by definition be in the establishment? Queen Elizabeth is not? Queen Victoria was not? Lady Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, cannot be and is just putting on airs?

Yet there is every chance she believes it. This is the same millionaire who exposed herself to public ridicule by once saying she and her husband were dead broke when they left the White House.

The modern left, at least tits leadership, is largely composed of wealthy and powerful people who believe someone else is in charge. By income, Republicans and Democrats are almost evenly matched; in bluesttes, generally the richer ones, the wealthy tend to be to the left, in red states they tend to be on the right--along with everybody else. By postgradte edoucation, Democrats predominate, In other words,the Democrats are the party of the professional elite. Generally fat capitalists are blamed for being in control of everything.There are actually few left, or many, if you count all retired people., A capitalists is prorerly someone who lives entirely by the fruit of fhis capital investoments This is a social class which has essentially disappeared since Marx created it over 150 years ago. Large coroprations are instead usually publicly held, which is to say, controlled by professional fund managers and professional managers, both of whom lean Democratic. Yet Bernie sanders sgainst the billionaire class who controls our politics. He does not note that there are in total less than a thousand of them, that most of them are politically to the left, or that, if they really controlled politics, he could not have won the New Hampshire primary.

It is a conspiracy theory, it deals in phantoms, but it is easy to believe this. It is, after all, uncanny how there does seem to be a malicious intelligence controlling the world's affairs. It i not just that the world is full of lies, but that the lies seem remarkably calculated and generally the very opposite of the truth, Hence the constant stream of conspiracy theories, involving not just rich capitalists, but the Koch brothers, the Jews, the Illuminati, the international Catholic Conspiracy, the gnomes of Bilderberg, the Trilateral Commission, the Masons, and so forth.

The key to the strength of the modern left is that. the more one is oneself a member of the establishment, more the case with Democrats than Republicans at the leadership level, the easier it is to believe in such conspiracy theories, especially the wilder ones. After all, one is acutely aware, despite one's own high position, of affairs distinctly following what seems to be a malicious pattern beyond your control. How else explain this? Someone must be doing this, and someone who is somehow keeping themselves hidden, for you are nominally in charge and should at least know who they are, should catch them doing it. Case in point: Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defense, who is now convinced that the governments of the world are concealing dealings with aliens. And planning an intergalactic war,

The real answer is simple. The devil is real. He is a coherent intelligence. He really is, as the New Testament says, the prince of this world. He has real power. Fail to understand this, and the least of your worries is that you get the basic nature of the social world completely wrong. This misunderstsng has also led to some of the worst crimes of history: Hitler's scapegoating of the Jews, the scapegoating of the well-off in Communist countries, and so forth.

The prince of this world.

Told Ya So!

Michael Dukakis consults with his 2016 presidential campaign exploratory committee.

A year and a half ago, TIME magazine featured Chris Christie and Hillary Clinton as the presumptive nominees of their two parties for the 2016 presidential stakes. They were way ahead of all other possible candidates in the polls. I said then, in this blog, that neither would be their party’s nominee.

Looks more and more as though I was right. I said a suspicion of sleaze would bring down Christie. Then “bridgegate” knocked him back into the pack. Even though it seems he was not involved, and the matter was trivial, it cemented an image to which I suspected he was already vulnerable. Just for coming from New Jersey and from the politics of that area.

I said Hillary was too boring and too familiar to satisfy Democrats. I said a dark horse would take it.

Welcome, Bernie Sanders.

Now Clinton’s poll numbers are sinking. Already, she trails Sanders in New Hampshire. Party stalwarts are scrambling for an alternative establishment pick—someone more electable than a declared socialist. Rumours focus on Joe Biden entering the race, or Al Gore, or John Kerry, or Jerry Brown.

They may get in—I doubt they will—but they’re not going to win the nomination.

They have the same main disadvantage that Hillary does. They’re too familiar. Democrats crave the novel.

If Sanders loses now, it will be to another dark horse.

The Manchurian Candidate?

We could tell you what film this still is from, but then we'd have to kill you.

There is an aphorism, “never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently explained by ordinary incompetence.” That may be so; there is much incompetence in the world. But I fear, as I grow older, it is too optimistic. There is also a good deal of malice.

Why did Hillary Clinton use a private server during her time as Secretary of State?

Was it pure incompetence? That is her own defense. She says she wanted it so that she could do all her messaging on one device, one smartphone.

However, it is perfectly possible to have two email accounts on one phone. Did she not know this? Did she ask no one? Given that the Clintons, were tech unsavvy, they managed to get someone to set up a private server for them. Could not get someone to set up a cell phone for them?

And didn’t she know about the need for security? Wouldn’t any one of us know? She was no neophyte to the issue—having spent eight years in the White House. Could nobody in the State Department have ever advised her on security? Moreover, if she was so naïve about security, how is it she took the trouble to have her private server scrubbed before it was turned over to Congress?

Nah. We must rule out incompetence. Although this level of incompetence in itself would disqualify her from the presidency.

No, it must have been cunning. Clinton must have had a motive, from the beginning of her tenure as S of S, for keeping her official business off the record. Not simply the matter of sending classified materials in the open. She had no motive for that. That much must have been collateral damage. Whatever her motive was, it must have been so disreputable that she was ready to accept such collateral damage, and even perhaps letting the public know about it, in order to keep the real secret.

Beyond that, we can only speculate.

What was I doing behind the couch? Oh, just looking for spare change...

The most obvious and perhaps least disreputable thing she might have had in mind was the peddling of influence; using her official capacity to enrich herself. Every politician, after all, seems skilled in it. Fundraising is a constant necessity. Most seem to become lobbyists as soon as they leave office. Theoretically, of course, this is not supposed to happen. Theoretically, there is a bridge for sale in Brooklyn.

But, unfortunately, even that does not seem an adequate explanation. By using a private server, Clinton was concealing what she was doing from the American public. But she was probably revealing it to Russia and China. Both, we have long known, have teams of hackers busily at work. They have cracked US government servers. They no doubt would have found a private server a beginner’s exercise. It is hard to believe the State Department, and the Secretary of State, had never been briefed on this issue.

So Hillary was not doing this for secrecy, exactly.

In fact, if Clinton was trading influence in the usual way, with businesses and lobby groups, she was opening herself up to blackmail by foreign powers.

If so, it would be a very bad idea to elect her president. Was she politically suicidal?

Which leaves, I think, only one possibility. Forgive me if I am missing something here, but doesn’t this mean that Russia and China must have been complicit in whatever she planned to do? If so, they could not blow her cover without blowing their own, and losing a valuable asset. They would not blackmail her, because they had no need to.

It all sounds a little paranoid, but what’s the alternative explanation? What am I missing? As I said, mere stupidity seems ruled out.

Oh, Dmitry, you can press my 'reset' button any time!

And now that I think about it, what other thesis better explains the Obama administration’s foreign policy record? Not just Benghazi, which still seems to make no sense on the information we have: there was that line in the sand that Assad crossed in Syria, and then Putin dramatically riding in and saving his ally from US intervention. Could that have been set up, in whole or in part? There was the bizarre inability to come to a SOFA with Iraq, and all the US troops leaving, obviously counter to both US and Iraqi interests. There was Putin’s apparently breathtakingly risky gamble of annexing the Crimea. Did inside information give him the confidence to try it? There was the deal with Cuba, asking virtually nothing of the Castros at a point when Cuba was on the ropes and probably could have been forced to make concessions. There was the failure to back a significant popular uprising in Iran. There is the current nuclear deal with the Ayatollahs. There’s that time Obama’s mic picked him up saying to Russian President Medvedev, off the record, that he would have more freedom to give Russia what it wanted after his re-election. Can it all have been mere American incompetence?

Of course, to explain all these apparent bungles, our conspiracy theory must extend beyond Clinton herself, to include Obama, and probably John Kerry. On the other hand, if she were a particularly effective operator, she might have crippled the American position badly enough that they had few cards left to play.

Perhaps one day we will know. It would certainly not be the first time in history that a foreign minister or other important courtier turned out to be in the pay of a foreign power. All that ever prevents it is personal ethics, fear of exposure, and pure patriotism. For there is obviously a lot of money to be made.

But in the end, we are left with this: either Hillary Clinton is too stupid to be trusted with the presidency, or she is not.

Pray that she is stupid.

Yesterday Is Still Over

It looks as though Marco Rubio's campaign has spotted the same huge vulnerability in Hillary Clinton's campaign launch speech that I pointed out here:

Eleanor Roosevelt Launches Her Presidential Campaign Yesterday

You can't make this stuff up. Hillary Clinton reboots her campaign by claiming that her Republican opponents are living in the past. She quotes “Yesterday” as their imaginary theme song.

Nice cultural reference, Ma'am. That'll resonate--with anyone over 65. It's a good song, but it's officially 50 years old today. Even when it came out, it was the one Beatles song your parents liked. Her command of its lyrics is sure to demonstrate to everyone that she is not living in the past herself, no doubt.

Especially since the entire theme of her announcement was to evoke the memory of Franklin Delano Roosevelt—on Roosevelt Island, in Four Freedoms Park.

It might not be a bad idea to play up her long experience. After Obama and Bush II, many might be craving a steady hand on the wheel. Moreover, after eight Democratic years in the White House, and her role as part of that administration, “Hope and Change” is not a convincing slogan.

But that does not excuse the irony of attacking her opponents as old-fashioned. Using a song that would officially quality as an antique.

It makes her sound not just hopelessly out of touch, but lacking in self-awareness. Give it a little push, look in her sometimes-not-quite-properly-aligned eyes, note her weird smirk, and you might suspect she is delusional.

How could her aides have let this pass? Perhaps she does not listen to her aides.

Blame Hillary

She used to be rather good-looking, but she totally lost me with the pantsuits.

I'm impressed, and surprised, that, rather than a feud between Obama and the Clintons over who was responsible for the Benghazi bungle, Hillary Clinton has publicly accepted full responsibility.

But perhaps I shouldn't have been.

Some commentators have said this hurts her prospects for 2016. Assuming she has any interest in her prospects in 2016, though, on reflection, I think this might have been the best thing for her to do.

Had she fought back hard now on Obama's attempt to scapegoat her, she might well have caused Obama  to lose the election. If Democrats came to blame her for that, her hopes for 2016 would be dead.

If, on the other hand, she kept mum until after the election, Obama would then have all the more reason to scapegoat her, since she could no longer effectively kick back by doing him any harm--he's not running again. She could have been left twisting in the wind, as the Nixon White House used to say, and her 2016 prospects would have been almost as badly damaged.

Having no other good choice, then, acting now like the good soldier and taking the hit for the team gives her some claim to favors later.

In a way, it even gets back at Obama. She's setting an example that makes him look weaselly by comparison.

In any case, it is entirely likely that she is now telling the truth--that it really was her decision, and Obama and Biden were not really in the loop. If so, she has every reason to expect that this would come out anyway.  Best to step up to it and get it behind her, if possible.

The Coming October Surprise

There is definitely chatter going on about Obama dropping Biden as VP candidate in favour of Hillary Clinton.

Here's what I think is behind it.

Israel believes Iran is very close to having a nuclear weapon. Their calculation is to strike now, if they think Obama is going to be reelected, or wait, if they think a new administration might be more favourable to Israel.

The polls now favour Obama.

Therefore, the Israelis are likely to strike at least before January. Indeed, the calculus may suggest striking as soon as they are reasonably certain of an Obama win. That would probably be September or October. Just in time for an “October surprise.”

If they strike, there is likely to be a muscular response from Iran. This will dominate the news for a time; Israeli sources are talking about a month-long war.

Whether or not Obama was a good bet to win before this point, this will probably make him a shoo-in. Nobody can blame him for the carnage, and the natural tendency will be to rally round the Commander in Chief. This also takes the public focus off economics, Obama's weak spot, and puts it on foreign affairs, where he seems to have done a decent job. Or rather, Hillary Clinton seems to have done a decent job.

This development, if it comes, will leave the Republican ticket flat-footed, as its expertise is entirely on domestic economic matters. The Ryan pick cemented that, and struck me as risky in part for this reason.

At this point, Obama doing anything is perhaps a case of spiking the ball, but it does make sense to highlight the foreign policy side by taking on Clinton as VP candidate, giving the Democratic ticket the image of the team who are most likely to be able to handle the foreign crisis. That is not quite so clear with Obama-Biden—Romney and Ryan just might pip them in perceived competence even so. It is Clinton who has been the face of US foreign policy. Presumably, Obama has or soon will have advance warning from the Israelis at least that they are seriously considering an attack.

If he does decide to swap Biden for Clinton, I think it will be an indication that the balloon is going up.

Some say Clinton is unlikely to want the job. However, if she wanted the Secretaryship of State, she might also go for the Vice Presidency in these circumstances. If she wants to succeed Obama as president, then, win or lose, this puts her in a somewhat better position, by eliminating Biden as a rival in 2016. If she does not want to succeed Obama as president, then this is a good way to cap off her political career. Rockefeller made the same decision.

Feminist Hypocrisy

The feminists are howling that Sarah Palin doesn't count as a woman, because she holds the wrong political views.

This is revealing—as I have always argued, feminism is not pro-women, but anti-women. Sally Quinn and Susan Reimer, for example, argue that picking Sarah Palin is actually an “insult to women,” because she is, unlike, say, Hillary Clinton, not actually qualified for the job. Reimer writes, “He [McCain] seems to think that my girlfriends and I are so disappointed that an utterly qualified woman is not going to be president that we will jump at the chance to vote for an utterly unqualified woman for vice president.”

Right. Let's compare Sarah Palin's experience with that of Hillary Clinton, remembering here too that Palin is auditioning for understudy, Clinton for lead role:

Sarah Palin – born 1964

1992 - first elected to public office—Wasilla City Council.
Since then, she has run for office seven times, counting her VP run, winning five of these elections, with a sixth still to be determined.
Eight years' executive experience.

Hillary Clinton – born 1947

2000 - first elected to public office—US Senate.
Since then, she has run for office twice, counting her presidential run, and won once.
No executive experience.

In fact, Palin has eight years more political experience than Clinton; and eight years more executive experience. People keep confusing Hillary Clinton with her husband--obviously helping her political career. Palin did it all on her own.

But let's not stop there. We have already seen that Palin has more experience than Barack Obama too. How about the last major Democratic presidential contender, good old John Edwards?

John Edwards – born 1953

Six years in public office (US Senate).
Since then, he has run for office three times, counting his presidential run—and lost every time.
He has no executive experience.

Sarah Palin has more qualifications to be Vice President than any of the major Democratic contenders--for President.

Next, the feminists accuse her of hypocrisy because her daughter is pregnant. Let's have a look at what hypocrisy actually would be in this situation: hypocrisy would be pressuring her daughter to have an abortion. Had the Palins done that, in all probability, nobody in the national press would have been the wiser. There would have been no story. Instead, they stuck to their principles—by keeping the child, as they did with their Down's syndrome daughter—despite the very public, and national, embarassment. This is the opposite of hypocrisy. This is living one's principles.

The hypocrites are those who support abortion for themselves, and yet condemn Palin and her young daughter for a decision they would never have had the ethical courage or the selflessness to make.

Now let's recall that Barack Obama was raised by a single mom, who gave birth to him at age 18 (some documents suggest 17). Should he too have been aborted? Is he responsible for what his mother or father did? How about John Edwards? No—let's not even go near John Edwards. And we'd better not mention Jesse Jackson either. Or Ted Kennedy.

Allan Combs suggests that Sarah Palin was irresponsible in continuing her duties as Alaska governor when pregnant with her most recent child, implying that she might have been responsible for the girl's Down's syndrome. With regard to her daughter's pregnancy, Sally Quinn asks “whether Sarah Palin has been enough of a hands-on mother.”

Idiotically enough. Down's syndrome is a genetic condition. It cannot be picked up during pregnancy. And anyone who has either raised or actually ever been a teenager knows that parents are just not responsible for what their teenage children do. The minister's daughter is always the worst behaved; the professor's son is always the worst student. It's called teenage rebellion.

But if Sarah Palin should have been in the kitchen with her shoes off instead of holding a job outside the home, why doesn't the same apply to Michelle Obama or Hillary Clinton? Neither put aside their legal careers for motherhood, though they hardly needed the money. For that matter, why doesn't it apply to Joe Biden, who did not after all resign his Senate seat for the five years that he was a single parent to two seriously injured sons?

I wonder—wouldn't it be wonderful if the Palin candidacy ended up killing off feminism altogether, by showing how dishonest it really is?

Lutherans for Obama

There is chatter among the chattering classes about the odd datum that Hillary Clinton does particularly well against Barack Obama among Catholics. Why so? What’s the link? As there is no obvious one.

A couple of theories I have read: 1) Hispanics are a significant element of the Catholic vote, and Hispanics are inclined to see blacks as rival gangs in the hood. 2) Catholics, because of the cult of Mary and the tradition of nunhood, are more accustomed than Protestants to the idea of women in responsible roles outside the home.

Both are reasonable hypotheses; and how about possible Catholic sympathy for Clinton sticking with an adulterous partner?

But I wonder that no one else has noticed something else: that Obama’s rhetorical style has something in it of the traditional “inspirational” Protestant preacher. A grand and admirable tradition, but one more likely to resonate with Protestants. Not that Catholic are necessarily turned off by it; but cradle Protestants are more likely to be turned on.

And what about the chance that Catholics, whose ancestors generally arrived on North American shores as immigrants only this century—from places like Italy, Ireland, Poland, Mexico—are a bit short on white guilt over the issue of slavery?

If white guilt is a significant factor in Obama’s appeal, it is likely for historical reasons to be higher among Protestants than Catholics.

Indeed, these children of more recent immigrants, themselves often facing discrimination, may resent the special attention given to blacks, often, with affirmative action, at their expense. It is on their backs, after all, that the old Protestant families have assuaged their own guilt over slavery.

Iron My Shirt

The discrepancy between the polls and the actual results in the New Hampshire primary is historic. Everyone is trying to explain how it happened.

One fascinating bit of evidence is that exit polling suggests the big difference between Iowa and New Hampshire was in the way women voted: they went in much higher proportion for Hillary Clinton in the second contest.

This suggests that the pivot point that turned the Clinton campaign around may not have been Hillary’s teary-eyed moment, but an incident at another rally when two hooligans disrupted a talk with a sign and a chant of “iron my shirt.” Hillary observed in response, as the protesters were bundled off, that she was running to break through the old glass ceiling and to end sexism. The crowd loved it. Standing ovation.

Women may have felt driven, after that, to vote for her. And women are the majority of the electorate. In a democracy, a sane person does not pick a fight with the majority.

But the moment seemed too good for Hillary, frankly, to be true. The heckling too obviously helped instead of harmed her. And it turns out, indeed, that the thing was almost certainly staged. The perps have now been identified as two young men who work for a Boston radio show. So they may have done it as a publicity stunt; then again, one of them apparently had a “Hillary for President” sticker on his carrying bag. The media are overwhelmingly Democrat by voter registration… And isn’t this just a small step beyond planting audience questions, something Clinton’s campaign has already been caught doing more than once?

Others note that Hillary seemed remarkably well prepared with her comeback, which went on for some time. And not only that—the chants of the demonstrators seemed to be picked up clearly by a microphone. That seems unlikely in normal circumstances. And when the disturbance began, Clinton asked that the lights be turned on so it could all be better seen.

Have a look at it all for yourself here.

It smells funny to me.

"Iron my shirt?" When was the last time you heard anyone express a sentiment like that, even in private?

So She Wasn't Made of Brown Sugar after All

Okay, I got it wrong. So sue me; big deal; so did everyone else. Clinton’s back; the Comeback Queen. I think just possibly this primary result, on the Democratic side, was based on the general calculation that Obama had it won. Assuming so, perhaps, a lot fewer young folks bothered to turn out here than in Iowa—his strongest constituency. A lot of independents who might have voted Democrat and Obama may have switched to the supposedly closer Republican contest to help McCain, perceived as being in more trouble. And a lot of people too may have been moved by Clinton’s recent shows of emotions—not to embrace her candidacy, possibly, so much as to feel that, heck, the Clintons at least deserved better than to end by being embarrassed—since Obama has it won anyway, let’s lend her our vote to show her some sympathy, to preserve her dignity.

A man who sheds tears or shows emotion—as Muskie did in 1968—is probably doomed. But it does not follow that the same is true for women. I think many, men and women, are conditioned to respond generously to a women seemingly overcome by emotion. We want to reach out. It may not be fair, but it is the way the world is.

If I’m right, Hillary Clinton’s comeback may be short-lived. That calculation will never happen again. It depended on the confidence that she would lose.

It is pure instinct, but I think people really are eager for change. Not a big change in policies, nor in the political direction of the country. I think most people know things are going pretty well, on the whole, for the USA. It’s more a question of change of personnel. After all, there have been Clintons or Bushes in the White House for the last 28 years. Anybody younger than 45 this year has never seen a presidential ballot without one of those two names on it. I can understand a feeling that there need to be some fresh faces—rather than at least four more years of the same. So too with the strongly partisan temper of those times—attempted impeachments, “vast right-wing conspiracies,” culture wars, and so forth. It begins to feel sterile and repetitious, especially into a new millennium.

No, to me it feels the time is right for an Obama and his message. I believe it will prevail. Huckabee’s message too works well on the same principle—a new face, a new approach, and a platform that breaks molds. McCain’s “maverick” persona also perhaps fits the temporal temper, despite his age.

Anyway, the net result of this match is the same as the net result for Iowa: nobody is knocked out. Nothing is decided. McCain will now have the money and momentum to go on—had he lost, it would have been done for him. There is no reason for Romney to drop out before Michigan—he has ties there, and is not in trouble for money. Nevada also might be good for him, with its Mormon population. Win both, and he’s back in the fight. Huckabee and Thompson are sure to want to stay in through South Carolina, which looks promising for them. Thompson can also hope to pick up significant support should Romney drop out. Giuliani has not yet begun to fight, and the split in the early primaries works in his favour.

Among the Democrats, similarly, Edwards will want to hang on to South Carolina, his home state. Clinton and Obama are, of course, both fully in contention—for now.
But if and when Richardson or Edwards does drop out, it will probably shift the calculus decisively in favour of Obama. Even if it is not there already.