presidential election – Page 33

Up in the air

This thing may never end. Hillary Clinton has been declared the winner in Ohio by MSNBC with Texas too close to call. By any gauge, she would have to be viewed as tonight’s winner.

But is it enough? One of the things that strikes me about this is that it is the kind of night that, had it happened a month ago, would have been used to reinforce Clinton’s inevitability factor, but now is viewed as a last gasp for her campaign.

Listening to Chris Matthews now — gasp — I am struck by his unexpected rationality, tied to a piece that he read by Ronald Brownstein in The National Journal, in noting that the so-called momentum of this race is really nothing more than a quirk of calendar. Matthews point is that Obama, for the most part, has won only those states that he was supposed to, while Clinton has won the states she was supposed to. Had the calendar shaken out differently with the same results in each state, we may have a different definition of momentum.

Brownstein’s analysis is both more expansive and more nuanced, focusing on trends and their impacts on the Democratic coalition. The growing involvement of blacks and younger voters has been of great benefit to Obama and to the party in general, with record turnouts across the country.

The big question is whether the race has split the party, whether two competing coalitions are now in place and whether Obama supporters will stay home should Clinton win the nomination or Clinton supporters — downscale white women and seniors — will migrate to McCain should Obama win.

I still think both Democrats have the advantage as we move forward, especially if the economy continues to be the major issue. And I think that Iraq still looms large.

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The myth of media bias

Matthew Yglesias takes a look at the latest storyline to catch on during this year’s Democratic primary race and finds it to be based more on myth than fact. It is true that Hillary Clinton tends to get more focused coverage, but that has less to do with a built-in awe of Barack Obama than with Clinton’s familiarity.

Yglesias offers an interesting thought experiment designed to show that the bias argument is flawed:

I’d say it’s definitely true that, on balance, Obama has gotten better press than Clinton. Still, I think Clinton fans are going more than a little overboard with this monocausal account of the campaign. For one thing, one important exception to this is that if Obama had lost eleven contests in a row, there’s no way he’d still be treated as a viable candidate. Similarly, if Obama had reached a situation where nobody can mathematically see a way for Clinton to catch his lead without altering DNC rules, I seriously doubt the race would continue to be covered as a serious competition.

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Barack Obama’s answer to the ‘Muslim slur’

One of the big disappointments I’ve had with Barack Obama to date is the way in which he’s addressed the “Muslim question.” Each time it comes up, he trots out his church attendance to prove his Christian bonafides — implicitly endorsing the use of Muslim as a slur. It’s as if he is saying, to echo the McCarthy era response to accusations of communist affiliation, “I am not now, nor have I ever been a Muslim.”

Naomi Klein in The Nation offers the candidate some advice on how to answer the veiled slur without implicitly buying into its use.

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Too much money business

Money is a distorting influence on the electoral process. Simply put, the need to raise ungodly amounts to cover the cost of running not only national by state level and local campaigns has resulted in a level of cynicism that should be unacceptable to the political classes.

Instead, we hear the candidates talk tough but then rush out to collect their checks, ignoring the rules that they say they support.

That’s what we’ve been watching over the last week or so, as the three remaining major candidates — Democrats Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and Republican John McCain — do a dance designed to raise questions about their opponents sincerity.

First, there was the criticism of Obama by McCain for Obama’s weasling out of a promise to abide by public financing rules for the general election, prompted by conditions Obama wanted placed on the agreement.

Not that McCain was playing it straight, either, as he attempted to back out of the public financing system after using it to secure a loan when his campaign was near bankruptcy. Add to this the series of stories detailing his connections to lobbyists and you have a picture of the clean-cut kid sneaking behind the school gym to get high.

Clinton, for her part, has been spending campaign cash like a drunken sailor,

Then there are the Democrats’ superdelegates — a group that has been receiving generous help from both Obama and Clinton over the last three years.

All of this creates an impression of conflict — the infamous quid pro quos — and hypocrisy, neithger of which leave our elected officials and democratic system looking particularly good.

As The New York Times writes today, “Americans deserve better.”

Taken together, these skirmishes over cash stand as an advertisement for change. Money has to be taken out fo the system without violating the First Amendment. The courts have ruled that money is the equivalent of speech, and while they are not the same it is money that allows speech to be heard in our culture. A hard cap on donations or spending would cross this line, I think, so some other system must be put in place.

Or the system that exists for public funding of the presidential race needs to be reinvigorated bu making sure there is enough cash available to run legitimate campaigns. In an era of tight budgets, this will not be popular. But the money saved on the kind of pay-to-play nonsense that plagues government could help offset the costs.

Plus, public funding should be extended beyond the presidential races to the states — to senators, Congressmen and state-level officials, even local officials.

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McCain’s bad week about to get worse

John McCain is not having a good week. And this story in tomorrow’s Washington Post will not make it any better.

Broadcaster Lowell “Bud” Paxson yesterday contradicted statements from Sen. John McCain‘s presidential campaign that the senator did not meet with Paxson or his lobbyist before sending two controversial letters to the Federal Communications Commission on Paxson’s behalf.

Paxson said he talked with McCain in his Washington office several weeks before the Arizona Republican wrote the letters in 1999 to the FCC urging a rapid decision on Paxson’s quest to acquire a Pittsburgh television station.

Paxson also recalled that his lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, likely attended the meeting in McCain’s office and that Iseman helped arrange the meeting. “Was Vicki there? Probably,” Paxson said in an interview with The Washington Post yesterday. “The woman was a professional. She was good. She could get us meetings.”

The recollection of the now-retired Paxson conflicted with the account provided by the McCain campaign about the two letters at the center of a controversy about the senator’s ties to Iseman, a partner at the lobbying firm of Alcalde & Fay.

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