Beginning with the Potomac primaries, a trend emerged: Hillary Clinton posted overwhelming victories across the Appalachian region.  The trend continued through the Ohio and Pennsylvania primaries.  

The media bloviators have lapped up the silliness from the Clinton campaign that Obama has a "white working class problem."  If that were true, we would see the evidence in the election results, not just in the exit polls.  I am not sanguine about racism in America; racism permeates almost every facet of life around Detroit, my home town.  There are some voters who will never vote for a black man.  But most of those people who can not get beyond a person's race are Republicans.  I don't believe Obama "transcends race," whatever that's supposed to mean.  Few people don't notice or think about his race.  But most swing voters who could succumb to veiled racial appeals are comfortable voting for this particular Black man.  

Furthermore, many of the voters currently supporting Hillary Clinton simply prefer her to Obama.  Until the campaign turned more contentious over the last few months, most Clinton voters, according to the polls, were fine with supporting Obama.  I don't think recent polls that show Clinton supporters unwilling to support Obama are a good indicator of how they will vote in November.  They won't vote for McCain, and--especially if Hillary Clinton eventually rediscovers some graciousness--they will support Obama.

I don't believe Obama has a significant "race problem."  However, I do believe that he has and will continue to have a problem with some white voters who are clustered mostly in Appalachia.  To see if there was a good visual representation, I enlisted the help of Kossack meng bomin, who's created a bunch of really excellent maps (such as this  outstanding series of maps showing the evolution of the Democratic primary vote from January through last week).

First, let's define how we'll be using "Appalachia."  In the 1960's, one out of three people in Appalachia   lived poverty, per capita income was 23% lower than the national average, and the region was rapidly losing population.  In 1963 the Appalachian Regional Commission was created by Congress and President Kennedy to address the problems in the area highlighted in the map.  Since the 1960's counties near Atlanta, Huntsville AL and Pittsburgh have become wealthier much more developed.  But much of the region remains well below national standards in most measures of economic and social well-being.

The ethnic and cultural character of this part of the country has been more static since the 19th century than anyplace in America.  Outside of some of the new growth areas north of Atlanta or Huntsville, or in some of the college towns, most of the people in Appalachia trace their heritage back to immigrants from the borderlands of Northern Britain who began settling the region over 200 years ago.  Outside of the Northern part of Appalachia—Pennsylvania in particular—relatively few Eastern or Southern Europeans from the great waves of immigration that started in the 1880's have moved in to the area.  It's the most homogeneous region in America.  The region is home to few Catholics, and is heavily Baptist and Methodist.  

In the 19th century, migrants from Appalachia moved west.  People from Appalachia settled and put their stamp on the Ozark region of Missouri and Arkansas, on Okalahoma and the southern Plains, on North Texas, and eventually they were a big part of the initial growth of Southern California.  

First, to see if Obama has a "problem" with white voters, it's worth looking at where he's performed well.  Not surprisingly, he's done well in Northern cities and southern rural areas with very large populations of African Americans.  But his appeal is not limited to African-Americans and higher-income, highly-educated whites.  

[click on maps for greater detail]

Counties where Obama won at least 55% of the vote in green:

Counties where Obama won at least 65% of the vote in green:

As we see, his appeal is not geographically limited.

But if he has a serious "problem" with white voters, we would see it in numerous regions across the country.  We do not see that.  So where do we see Clinton doing well, and where do we see her racking up big wins?

Counties where Clinton won at least 55% of the vote in purple:

Counties where Clinton won at least 65% of the vote in purple:

Clinton, like Obama, has posted solid wins (55% and up) in many different parts of the country.  But her biggest wins--the places where she beat Obama by margins of 2 to 1 or better--have come almost exclusively in Appalachia or in areas originally settled by Appalachian migrants that remain relatively homogeneous compared to the rest of the country.

How do these results track with the distribution of people based on religious affiliation?  Let me be clear: I am NOT suggesting that there are religious reasons to explain why Clinton or Obama might do better or worse with Baptists or Methodists.  Rather, religious affiliation, which is highly correlated with the denominational affiliation of one's parents, is an indicator of family background and regional heritage.  I am not making a strong causal argument, but noting the correlation between the heritage of voters in Appalachia who have been favoring Clinton by margins of better than 2 to 1 and those voting the same way in other parts of the country:

Distribution of Baptists by county:

Distribution of Methodists by county:

What does this mean going forward?  Well, first of all, there's no reason to expect that Obama will do well in West Virginia or Kentucky.  The counties surrounding both states have gone overwhelmingly for Clinton, so it would be extraordinary if Clinton didn't post big wins in both states.  

The other thing demonstrated by these maps is a strong regional distribution of white voters seemingly disinclined to vote for Obama.  I'll try to address some of the reasons for this tendency in future posts.  In the meantime, it would be great if pundits and politicos would recognize and acknowledge that race doesn't appear to have been much of a hindrance for Obama in the Democratic primaries, except, it appears, in Appalachia and in some regions where descendants of Appalachian migrants settled, such as the Ozarks, Oklahoma, and some isolated rural communities on the Plains.  Obama doesn't appear to have much of a problem with white voters.  But it seems quite likely Appalachia has a bit of an Obama problem.  

WaPo:

Clinton aides continued to insist that she will remain in the race even while confirming that she is $20 million in debt. "The voters are going to decide this," senior adviser Howard Wolfson said on "Fox News Sunday," acknowledging the $20 million figure. "There is no reason for her not to continue this process." Wolfson said he has seen "no evidence of her interest" in pursuing the second-place spot on the Democratic ticket, contrary to rumors that she is staying in the race to leverage a bid for the vice presidential nomination.

I've always thought the theories that Clinton was just hanging around to poison the Obama well to set herself up for a run against McCain in 2012 were daft.  This supports my contention; she's spending to win now, because she recognizes that she either wins now or she will never be President.  

This creates serious problems for Clinton.  At a time when her only appeal left is to superdelegates, she's just shown that she's managed to lose the pledged delegate contest AND mismanaged her campaign.  If she can't at least balance the books of her campaign while getting beaten by Obama, why would superdelegates view her as the more viable candidate for November?

Furthermore, to use gambling terminology, Clinton had doubled down...which is often a sign that the person has a gambling problem.  It usually makes it harder for the gambler to walk away, because then they're gambling to get back their losses.  For over a month Clinton's debt has been seen as a possible impediment to getting her out of the race.  There have been rumors that the exit strategy could include offers from Obama of helping her retire her debt.  As I explained Saturday:

No money donated to Obama, in the past or in the future, will end up with Hillary Clinton's campaign.

It is illegal for a campaign to accept more than $2,000 from another candidate's campaign fund for a primary.  Any discussions about Obama helping out Clinton might lead to Obama appealing to some of his donors to contribute to Clinton after she drops out to help her with her debt, but it will not involve taking money donated to him and giving it to Hillary Clinton.  

But think about it; Barack Obama has beaten Hillary Clinton in the only metric that matters—delegates—but in every other major fuzzy metric that some people clam is important: popular vote, number of states won, he generally polls better than her against McCain, and he's raised more money.  He's so much stronger than her that he can beat her, and still be in a position to help defray some of the costs of her campaign.  

And she's trying to convince the superdelegates that she's the stronger candidate?  

In February 2005, shortly after the assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, the pro-Syrian Lebanese government resigned.  The day it happened, I warned against any stupid pro-American triumphalism:

But whatever happens next in Lebanon, it would be a mistake to view it only through the lens of some kind of Middle Eastern "people power," a Cedar Revolution as soft and peaceful as the Velvet Revolutions of 1989 or the Orange Revolution of 2004.

Of course that's exactly what happened.  Within hours, what happened in Lebanon was being called the Cedar Revolution, and the Bush administration was taking credit for the change.  Over the next few days, bloviators like David Brooks were claiming that what happened in Lebanon was the result of the US invasion of Iraq.  The problem was that Brooks, like most conservative champions of neocon foreign policy, is a simpleton when it comes to understanding the politics of a complicated place like Lebanon.  One small piece of evidence is that he glowingly quoted Druze leader Walid Jumblat, who just a few months earlier had declared "we are all happy when U.S. soldiers are killed [in Iraq] week in and week out. The killing of U.S. soldiers in Iraq is legitimate and obligatory."

Oops.  

"Oops" can describe much of what's happened in Lebanon since early 2005.  To be ever-so-slightly generous to nitwits like Brooks, in 2005-2006 there was some cause for optimism about reform movements in the Arab countries and the Middle East.  As Economist Middle East editor Max Rodenbeck explains in a review of the new book by WaPo reporter Robin Wright, in those years there were signs of reform from Morocco and Egypt through Lebanon, Syria and Iran.  

The Arab spring, [Wright] says frankly, did not endure...Wright is surely correct in ascribing some part of the blame to America's inept and counterproductive Iraq policy. As numerous interlocutors in the region tell her, not only did the debacle promote extremism and further isolate pro-Western liberals, it alerted people to the terrible risks of toppling tyrants. The Iraq adventure, in Wright's view, may have been the biggest American policy failure of all time. It could yet prove to mark the end of an imperial America's influence in the region, much as France and Britain's catastrophic invasion of Egypt in 1956 demolished the colonial powers' standing and dangerously boosted the fortunes of Egypt's reckless leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. That is surely a sound judgment.

Our debacle in Iraq has also strengthened and emboldened Iran, and there's little we can do about it.  While many of the claims about Iran made by the Bush administration are B.S., it is true that Iran has become more bellicose, and whether or not they are are trying to weaponize their nuclear program, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad apparently wants people to suspect they are.  His standing in Iran has plummeted along with the economy, but he clings to power by stoking nationalism through the nuclear program.

Nobody knows the full extent of Iran's involvement in Iraq, but it clearly has strong ties to all of the Shia factions.  Last month, when Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki unsuccessfully tried to subdue the Shiite militias that control Basra, in particular that of Muqtada al-Sadr, it took the intervention of Iran to work out a compromise, suggesting that Iran dictates the balance of power within Iraq.  

Now we have Lebanon.  Instead of shutting up and quietly working with the new Lebanese government in 2005, Bush and his lackeys chose to claim credit for what was mostly an internal reaction to the assassination of Hariri, almost certainly perpetrated by shady forces from Syria.  (Whether the assassination was approved by, or even known by Syrian dictator Bashir Assad is less clear.)  Syria withdrew from Lebanon, but doing so removed a check on the actions of the Lebanese Shiite militia/social movement/political party Hezbollah.  Sure enough, with a year and a half Hezbollah was provoking Israel, with the result a several week war in southern Lebanon which seriously hurt both sides, but from which Hezbollah came out much better in terms of morale with its political base.  

UN resolutions have called on Hezbollah, which fields one of the most formidable fighting forces in the Middle East, to disarm and cede military control in the south to the multi-sectarian Lebanese Army.  The problem is that there isn't any power that can disarm Hezbollah, and it has no interest in forfeiting its military power.  Far from some Cedar Revolution, Lebanon has seemingly intractable problems that are rooted in how power has been apportioned between the sectarian groups since the 1940's.  It was highly unlikely that the withdrawal of Syria from Lebanon was going to usher in a new dawn of Lebanese political harmony, regardless of how badly its population craves peace and a stable social and economic environment.  

With 18 religious groups recognized by Lebanon's government, the situation is complex, but roughly speaking the main divide in the country is between the Sunni Muslims and Druze on one side and the Shiite Muslims on the other side, with the sizable Christian population split between the two camps.  The Sunni/Druze faction controls the government by a narrow margin, but not by enough to really do much.  All sides agree that army chief Michel Suleiman should be president, but the Shia faction is blocking his appointment.  

Whether urged on by the US and France, or acting on its own initiative, last week the ruling coalition decided to crack down on Hezbollah by going after it's phone grid.  Israel jammed cell phones in the zone where it fought Hezbollah in 2006, but Hezbollah coped by relying on a fiber-optic network it had constructed in the south that's independent of the national grid.  Since 2006 Hezbollah has secretively expanded the fiber-optic network to other areas of the country, to allow it to maintain contact between the south, Beirut, the Mount Lebanon region and the Bekaa valley.  In the event of a war with Israel, the government of Lebanon would not control the phone grid depended on by Hezbollah.  

Syria's role in Lebanon has been hard to discern in the last few years.  Iran is clearly closely tied to Hezbollah, but Jumblatt and others appear to have forged ties with Syria in recent years.  Syria is overwhelmingly Sunni, but the Assad clan that rules the country is Alawite, which is viewed by many Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, as an apostasy.  There are no religious affinities between Assad and Hezbollah, and some have speculated that Hezbollah's control of the airport would be required if it lost the patronage of Syria and had to fly in weapons and and people from Iran.  

Upon discovering that the phone system had been installed at Beirut's airport—the only international airport in the country—the government sacked the pro-Hezbollah head of security at the airport on grounds of spying, and demanded that Hezbollah dismantle the phone grid.  

Hezbollah's response:

Hezbollah and its allies decided on Wednesday and Thursday to make a show of force by quickly taking control of and closing Beirut's airport and seaport, and then shutting down all the Hariri-owned media (television, radio and newspaper). The message was clear: Hezbollah could take over all Beirut at any moment it desired. This was probably an inevitable moment, when Hezbollah felt it had to show the government the real balance of power between them.

Hezbollah also occupied neighborhoods across the city, demonstrating the impotence of the Army in controlling a sectarian dispute.  Hezbollah was able to rally it's forces in part by declaring the government a bunch of stooges of the US and Israel, which its audience was inclined to believe, since the US has been touting the government over each of the Shiite groups for over three years.  

Eventually the Army did intervene, by delaying implementation of the parliamentary decrees removing the head of the airport or dismantling the phone network.  Thus, Hezbollah retains the balance of power in Lebanon, just as Iran appears to have attained the balance of power over the Shiite forces in Iraq.  

Given Lebanon's vexed history since the 1940's, one can't honestly say that even if the US had handled the Lebanese situation more adroitly—by taking a smaller, quieter role instead of using internal Lebanese developments as evidence of the salubrious effects on Arab democracy supposedly brought about by our invasion of Iraq—that Lebanon would have avoided a power struggle between Hezbollah and the Sunni-Druze led government.  

But yet again, the Bush administration bumbled in to a complex situation in the Middle East, and made pronouncements that demonstrated its ignorance and dangerous naivety.  And once again, a situation arises where, because of our invasion and occupation of Iraq, we have no credibility to intervene diplomatically or help bring about a situation that would be both better for the local population and less likely to empower declared adversaries of the United States.  

Few people in politics had a worse year in 2006 than Liddy Dole.  The chair of the Republican's Senate campaign committee, by the end of the campaign she had pretty much been bypassed by the Bush team, who tried to save vulnerable Republicans by running the operation through the RNC.  It didn't work.  Other than current DLC Chair Harold Ford, who ran against the Democratic party but wouldn't run against the war, every Democrat in a close race beat their Republican opponent.  Dole's tenure at the NRSC was an unmitigated disaster.  

Well, 2008 may be an even worse year for her, as she could very well lose her Senate seat to Democrat Kay Hagan:

Rasmussen
May 8, 2008  500 Respondents +/-4.5%

A little while ago I was scrolling through some of my older posts looking for something, and I came across this, from a diary I wrote two and a half years ago:

On the Site Stats thread, TX Dem in DC, one of my fellow DKosers who registered immediately after the switch to Scoop--judging by his number, probably within a few hours of me--asked a good question:

UID's below 1000 is pretty rare these days.  Where has everyone gone?

It got me thinking.  One thing I've noticed is the dearth of "topical" names compared to 18 months ago; unlike in the early days of the Scoop version of Daily Kos--from the switch in October 2003 through Super Tuesday at the beginning of March, 2004--there were a ton of users with "Dean" or "Clark" in their names.  Now there's hardly any.  Did those people stop coming around to Daily Kos, or did they "become somebody new?"  And what about the people we now know by a particular moniker?  Were some of them here under a previous user ID?

At the time of that diary, we had just over 50,000 registered users.  We're now over 160,000.  A small number of those user ID's (UID's) are from sock-puppets and returned trolls.  Many are people who've never posted a comment.  And based on past comments, more than a few are people who've "retired" a previous UID and adopted a new one.  [It's not against the rules to have two UID's, although it's cause for instant banning if you keep using both.]

That's a lot of UID's.  Some of us came up with boring UID's:

I discovered this site in late 2002, after I had managed my second statewide campaign in Michigan and was finishing a stint working on policy and legislation in state government.  One night I decided to comment.  Not thinking for a second that my comment could have an effect on my life, I just tossed out my initials and my state.  Had I been thinking it was something that would matter long-term, I would have tried to pick something cool, like Meteor Blades.  But I picked something that one could probably use to confirm my identity.  

Within a few months, Markos offered me and Meteor Blades the opportunity to be what are now called Contributing Editors.

As I went on to explain, it made it a little easier for small-minded people to scurry around and out me via email.  Eh, whatever.  The consequences for me were minimal, although that doesn't make the scurrilousness of the offense any less.  But more than that, I wish I had picked a more interesting moniker.  Something clever like its simple IF you ignore the complexity, or the moniker picked by my friend GOTV, which is a name AND a call to arms.  

How about you?  In retrospect, are you happy with your DKos name?  Would you change it?  Have you changed it?  And if you had it to do over again, what might you choose as your DKos name?

A month ago I raised the issue of Hillary Clinton's campaign debt as a complicating factor is ending her futile quest for the Democratic nomination.  Time had published speculation from a Clinton aide that mounting campaign debt could create problems for Clinton, because she would have to get additional donations before she could start raising for her next Senate campaign.  

The issue of Clinton's campaign debt and what Obama might be able to do about it is causing confusion.  The inherent difficulty for most people in making sense of the nuances of campaign finance issues has been exacerbated by some reportage and commentary on the matter.  For instance, a few days ago Josh Marshall ruminated on how Obama donors would feel if their contributions went from Obama's campaign fund in to Clinton's campaign fund.  

It's not a subject worth ruminating on, because it would be illegal for Obama's campaign fund to donate more than $2,000 to Clinton's campaign.  

Unfortunately Steve Benen has quoted Marshall's piece without noting that it's not legally permissible for Obama to donate money to clear Clinton's debt.  Others, including the NYT, are confusing the matter by not making it clear that Obama can not give more than $2,300 $2,000* from his campaign fund to Clinton's campaign.

Let's make this absolutely clear:

Money given to Obama's campaign, either in the past or in the future, WILL NOT end up in Clinton's campaign fund.

What Obama can do is go to his donors and ask them to contribute to Clinton's campaign.  He could have his campaign send out email appeals to small donors to help Clinton pay off her debt.  

Helping Clinton pay off her debt would not be a simple act of altruism by Obama.  It would be in Obama's self-interest to help take the debt issue off the table if it facilitated her exit from the race and helped avoid the distractions of delegate challenges and talk about "taking it to the convention."

There's still the question, however, of how much Obama could really raise for Clinton, and whether it would be enough to get her out of the race.  I'm skeptical that the offer to help erase her campaign debt would amount to much.  Her debt is over $10 million, and it's possible she's putting more money is now to keep her campaign going.  These kinds of offers are usually made when the losing candidate had taken out a bank loan for campaign debt, or had done something like put their house up for collateral in order to secure a loan.  Those are the acts of a candidate who doesn't have the means to put in her own money, or simply refuses to pay out of her own pocket.

Hillary Clinton didn't borrow money for her campaign.  She essentially wrote a check from her personal account to her campaign account.  With their new wealth since Bill Clinton left the White House, $10 million isn't really all that big a chunk of change for the Clintons.  A candidate can't carry debt from one campaign to the next, unless the debt is to themselves.  Thus, Hillary Clinton could easily write off the debt to herself.  

Since the money would not be necessary to protect Clinton's viability for future campaigns, donations to retire Clinton's debt would really be contributions directly to the personal and private wealth of Hillary and Bill Clinton.  I don't see many Obama donors taking money from their personal pocket and putting it in to Hillary Clinton's personal pocket, especially not after the campaign Clinton has run and continues to run against Obama.  

So, people worried that money you donated in the past or might donate in the future to Barack Obama might go to Hillary Clinton, relax.  Whether any of your money goes to Hillary Clinton will be your decision.  Unless you want it to, none of your money will end up in Hill and Bill's piggy bank.  

*[The personal contribution limit increased from $2,000 to $2,300 for this campaign cycle, but the contribution limit for a campaign committee to campaign committee contribution remained capped at $2,000.]

Michigan offered up a plan for seating its delegates:

Under that proposal -- hammered out weeks ago by Sen. Carl Levin, Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, UAW President Ron Gettelfinger and National Committeewoman Debbie Dingell -- Sen. Hillary Clinton would get 69 of the state's delegates and Sen. Barack Obama, 59.

The compromise would cut only slightly into Obama's lead. The Illinois senator has 1,846.5 delegates to Clinton's 1,696, according to the Associated Press.

The proposal also would seat the state's 29 superdelegates.

The proposal essentially splits the difference between the 73 delegates Clinton won under state party rules in the disallowed primary -- Obama had taken his name off the ballot -- and an Obama proposal to award each candidate half the delegates.

State Party Chairman Mark Brewer said he was directed during a conference call with the state party's 80-member executive committee Wednesday night to bring the plan as a challenge to the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws panel when it meets May 31 in Washington.

Brewer said support for the compromise was sizable.

Among those supporting the plan:

DNC member Joel Ferguson, a co-chairman of Clinton's Michigan campaign who said he could support the 69-59 plan.

"While we compromised on how many delegates we get, we still recognize the plurality of the election," Ferguson said, noting that proposal lets Clinton keep a 10-delegate lead in light of her primary victory.

Ferguson said Thursday that he would withdraw a plan he and DNC member Jon Ausman of Florida -- both superdelegates -- submitted to the DNC's Rules and Bylaws Committee. Their plan would have allocated the delegates based on the primary election results, but given each just half a vote. The superdelegates would have had full voting rights.

There's no way the plan would have been brought before the state central committee without the support of Governor Jennifer Granholm, a Clinton supporter.  There's no way that Granholm and Ferguson would have supported the plan unless they had been told by the Clinton campaign that it was OK to move forward with the proposal.  So that means that Hillary Clinton accepts the plan, right?

Wrong:

On Wednesday, Clinton called again for Michigan's votes to be counted -- mentioning it at an appearance in West Virginia, which holds its primary Tuesday, and, according to her staff, greeting protesters outside the DNC who were demanding the state's delegates be seated.

On Tuesday night, speaking in Indianapolis, she said: "I am running to be the president of all of America -- north, south, east and west, and everywhere in between. That's why it is so important that we count the votes of Florida and Michigan."

This means that we now have Clinton supporters who will either have to argue against the Clinton campaign at the Rules and Bylaws Committee, or they will have to retract their support for the proposal.  It's an awful place for a candidate to put her supporters.

This may have have been caused by a screw-up within the Clinton campaign, where some staff/leadership spoke with the Michigan supporters and expressed the acceptance of the compromise plan, but others within the campaign either didn't know about the plan or are sticking a shiv in others within the campaign, and in the process hurting Granholm, Ferguson et al.  Or maybe Clinton simply changed her mind, in which case the F.U. to Granholm and the Clinton supporters in Michigan is even worse.  

It's been obvious for 2 months that Clinton's only chance to become the nominee was to hang around and hope Obama blew up.  That's not going to happen, so now the only question is how the loser loses.  Screwing over your steadfast supporters in a key state isn't a good sign that she will be acknowledging her loss gracefully or quickly, and is evidence that Clinton's continued candidacy can still delay the movement toward unity and hurt our chances in November.  

North Carolina and Indiana could have done what a bunch of other states did, and rushed to the front of the line and had their primaries on February 5th.  They could even have done as Michigan and Florida and "taken cuts" and broke through the DNC's approved sequence of early primaries.  Instead they decided to have late primaries.  They got a lot more attention from the candidates than they would have had they gone on Super Tuesday, and certainly more than had they broken the DNC rules and gone early (thus resulting in a candidate boycott).  The state parties benefited from the extra voters, the extra activity, the extra excitement.  And North Carolina and Indiana get the distinction of being the states that, if not concluded, then essentially conclusively settled the nomination battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
But that's not all they got.  To keep states spread out and not all clustered in February, the DNC offered bonus pledged delegates to those states that went late in cycle.  Thus, instead of only getting 66 pledged delegates to the Democratic convention in Denver, Indiana gets to send 72.  And North Carolina went from 89 delegates to 115.  Those extra delegates put Indiana ahead of Tennessee and Maryland and gave it as much voting strength as Minnesota and Missouri.  And North Carolina bypassed Massachusetts and New Jersey.  

When the primary system is reworked, maybe some states will remember that going late was great for North Carolina and Indiana.  

Re: To Do List Before Dropping Out

Please, before dropping out, help the party start the healing process.

Even though it no longer matters, please, for the sake of party unity:

FIRE MARK PENN!

Thank you in advance for devoting your attention to this important matter.

A NYT op-ed by Rhodes Cook:

While Hillary Clinton probably can’t catch Barack Obama in the race for most pledged delegates at the Democratic presidential nominating convention, she does have a shot at overtaking him in the popular vote. Whoever triumphs in that symbolic total will have a persuasive argument to use with the wavering superdelegates who are likely to decide the race this summer.

Granted, Mrs. Clinton boasts that she has the lead already, but her count includes the votes in the unsanctioned primaries in Florida and Michigan. A fairer calculation would eliminate the ballots cast in those two states, as well as the votes from caucuses where no statewide tally of the actual vote was compiled.  (Those states are Iowa, Maine, Nevada and Washington; Mr. Obama won three of them.) Territories that do not possess any Electoral College votes should be ruled out, too.

What a compelling argument!  There's no way Hillary Clinton will come out ahead of Barack Obama in pledged delegates.  Obama may soon pass Clinton in commitments from super delegates.  It's quite possible that by the end of the primaries that Obama's combined total of pledged delegates and commitments from super delegates will exceed 2,025, the number of delegates required to secure the nomination in Denver.  Obama will have won more states.  He polls ahead of Clinton nationally, and he consistently polls better than Clinton among independent swing voters.  

To be fair, Cook doesn't count the totals from Florida and Michigan, which were not sanctioned by the DNC and which Clinton said shouldn't be counted.  She's harped on MI and FL because she needs to keep uncertainty to keep everyone from telling her she's lost, and that she won't be the nominee.  

But, if Clinton does really well the rest of the way out, and if you don't count four states that that don't count caucus votes, three of which Obama won outright and the fourth one from which he won more pledged delegates, then maybe Clinton will squeak past Obama in what this author calls the popular vote.  

In other words, if you give Clinton a several state handicap, she might look better than Obama, but even then, only on one measurement, and not one that is anywhere in the rules for determining our nominee.

I can't wait for the Olympics.  I'm looking forward to hearing and reading arguments about how the winner of the 100-meter dash shouldn't be given the gold medal, because the second-place finisher's time over 92 meters was faster than the time of the winner's over the entire 100 meters.  

Who could possibly argue that that's not a fair calculation?  

From Jake Tapper:

The campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., removed a man from his Michigan Finance Committee today.

It started after conservative writer Debbie Schussel called Michigan businessman Ali Jawad not only a supporter of Hezbollah -- a group the US State Department labels a "terrorist organization" -- but also claimed he was a "key agent of the terrorist group in the Detroit area."

After Schussel started asking questions the McCain campaign removed him from the finance committee for a May fundraiser.

"Apparently he is a well known member of the Arab-American community in Dearborn," a McCain staffer tells ABC News. "He is also a known Republican donor and former Bush finance committee member. When these rumors surfaced he notified the campaign and we removed him from the finance committee. The guy never raised a dime for us and he isn’t even a contributor."

Tapper directed people to Schussel's site—if you want to look for yourself you can get there via the link to Tapper—and then wondered if this wasn't some preemptive move by McCain to deny Obama a shot at McCain for being weak on terrorism.

It's both more complicated and simpler.  The Arab community, its place in Michigan, and its ties to the Middle East are complicated.  However, what's simple is that Debbie Schussel hates Arabs.  The McCain campaign is afraid to offend the far right.  So they ditched Ali Jawad rather than deal with Debbie Schussel.

A disclosure.  I haven't seen him in about 5 years or so, but I once knew Ali Jawad.  That may sound extraordinary, but it's nothing special for someone who's run campaigns in Michigan, especially for one who's worked with the Detroit Area's huge Arab community.  I've brought candidates to meet with him and his political circle, and I've worked with him to elect Democrats, just as my Republican counterparts have worked with him to elect Republicans.

To fully understand what's happening here, one must understand the Detroit area and its Arab community.  There are several million Arabs across the country, most of whom are Christian, with many tracing their families back to Christian Lebanese and Syrians who immigrated to the US in the early 20th Century.  What's different about the Arab population in the Detroit area is the size, diversity and power of the Arab community.  

Lebanese Shiites have lived in the Detroit area since the early 20th century.  In the shadows of the Ford Rouge Complex—one of the biggest factories in the world, which once employed 80,000 men—is the "South End" of Dearborn.  This neighborhood was a mix of Shiite Lebanese, Hungarians, Italians, Poles, Maltese, Greeks and Armenians.  In the 1970's, as the other ethnic groups moved away from the neighborhood, the Lebanese Civil War exploded.  Soon the neighborhoods of southern and eastern Dearborn—which borders Detroit—became home to many thousands of Arabs.  These immigrants were mostly Shiite Lebanese, but eventually Dearborn also became home to large numbers of immigrants from Yemen.  Around the same time many Chaldeans—Roman Catholics from Iraq whose traditional language is Aramaic, the language that dominated the region at the time of Jesus—moved in large numbers to other neighborhoods in the Detroit area.  

Today, the Arab population of the Detroit area is somewhere between a quarter and a half million.  The largest groups are the Lebanese Shiites and the Chaldeans, although there are also large numbers of Yemeni, Palestinians, Jordanians, Syrians and, since the end of the first Gulf War, Iraqi Shiite Arabs.  Many Detroit area Arabs are Christian, but immigrants in the last 20 years are more likely to be Muslim.

Like almost every immigrant group, Arabs have moved beyond their original neighborhoods and can be found throughout the area.  And everyone in Detroit has a lot of contact with Arab-Americans.  In secular Baathist Iraq, Chaldeans were a semi-protected group that were permitted to sell liquor.  When they began moving to Detroit, they took up the same business.  Today, Chaldeans own almost all the convenience and liquor stores in the area; everyone in the Detroit area interacts with Chaldeans because almost all the corner stores are family run.  And when you stop for gas, you'll be dealing with a Lebanese Shiite, because they own and/or operate almost all the gas stations in the area.  

Arab-Americans lean Democratic but are a key bloc of ticket-splitters.  Because of their rapidly increasing wealth, they have also become an important source of campaign contributions, especially in the $250 to $1,000 range.    This is where Ali Jawad comes in.  He is the head guy in the gas stations owners association.  He also runs the Lebanese Heritage Club, which hosts just about every candidate forum for Arab-Americans, and which regularly attracts every major politician in the area.  He's a major collector of checks, and he's one of the leaders of his community.  

As Tapper points out, Jawad has said things about Hezbollah that make it sound less sinister than one would think a group would be to make the State Department's list of terrorist organizations.  Well, he's not the only person in the area to not condemn Hezbollah; the range of attitudes of Lebanese in Dearborn is probably centered somewhere between ambivalent to fairly supportive.  Many of the Dearborn Lebanese come from a handful of villages in Southern Lebanon, within a few miles of the Israeli border.  Thus, they come from the heartland of Hezbollah.  Their home villages were used by the PLO to stage raids in Israel during the early 1970's—there is often animosity between Lebanese Shiites and Palestinians, for many Lebanese blame Palestinians for destabilizing Lebanon—the area was occupied by Israel for many years, and it was only after years of fierce attacks by Hezbollah that Israel abandoned Southern Lebanon.  In the eyes of many Lebanese, Hezbollah liberated their home villages from Israeli occuption.  

Hezbollah is now the de facto government of Southern Lebanon, and provides social services as well fights Israel.  Many people in Dearborn have family ties to major players in Lebanese Shiite politics.  And Lebanese in Dearborn view Hezbollah with much the same mix of distrust mixed with nationalist pride and identity that Catholic residents or former residents of IRA-controlled neighborhoods in Belfast or Derry view the IRA.  Most Lebanese in Dearborn came here to escape war, but that doesn't mean they don't identify with one faction more than the others.  In Dearborn, many identify  with Hezbollah.  

But whatever their views about their home country, most Arabs in Southeast Michigan view themselves as Arab-Americans, and that's how they're viewed by most of their non-Arab neighbors.  In the Middle East, most would be viewed hostilely by the Sunni terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, because most Arabs around Detroit are Shiite or Christian.  They moved to the US to escape problems back home, and have settled in.  They often hate the foreign policy of their adopted country, but they love being Americans.  And in Michigan, they are political players.

Back in the 1980's, Democratic governor Jim Blanchard was accused of returning contributions from Arab-Americans.  When he ran for Governor in 1990, Republican John Engler—with the help of his Republican party chair Spencer Abraham—did the opposite, and enthusiastically reached out to Arab-Americans.  For each of his three elections he was rewarded for his outreach with votes and contributions from Arab-Americans.  Abraham himself even slid in to the Senate in the 1994 Republican landslide (before losing to Debbie Stabenow in 2000).  But many Arab-American voters still strongly supported Democrats, especially members of Congress David Bonior (then the second-ranking Democrat in Congress), John Dingell (who represented all of Dearborn for several decades) and John Conyers (who now splits Dearborn with Dingell).  Jawad's personal political contributions mirror these community-wide patterns.

I don't know enough about Ali Jawad's background or business practices to vouch for him, but I doubt the McCain campaign does either.  But I do know that just about everyone in Michigan politics, Republican and Democrat, has sought his support, and John McCain's campaign just dumped him because viciously anti-Arab reactionary Debbie Schlussel called him a terrorist (which for her is practically a synonym for "Arab").  

Once again we have a case where a politician has no problem with dumping on Arab-Americans because of ethnic stereotyping.  It's like accusing Italians in the 1940's of all being tied to the Mafia, or thinking that every Salvadoran that comes in to the US today is connected to a violent drug gang.  

Tapper wondered if the Obama campaign might eventually throw the Jawad association back in McCain's face.  I would hope not, because that would just be validating the claims of one of the most hateful people on right.  She's claimed Media Matters is Nazi-funded.  She claimed the shooter at Virginia Tech was a "Paki."  And she's used the same scare tactics against Obama himself, pushing the bullshit that he was once a Muslim, and that "once a Muslim, always a Muslim,"  and that his comments are heavily lifted from the film Malcolm X.  In short, this woman hates Arabs and hates Muslims.  Hell, she just hates.  And anyone or anything she hates she depicts as part of a scary conspiracy of all Arabs and all Muslims (with the occasional Nazi thrown in to give her predictable hatred a bit of retro zing).  

There are legitimate criticisms to make against McCain and the Republican party in general about being soft on terrorism.  However, in the absence of anything other than the hate-filled rantings of that lunatic Debbie Schlussel, attacking McCain for once having Ali Jawad on his finance committee would not be a legitimate criticism.  The legitimate criticism of McCain is for being soft on hatred and bigotry, and caving to Debbie Schlussel.  It would be wrong for Obama's camapign to dignify her hate.  Furthermore, it would be dumb politics, because it would needlessly alienate tens of thousands of good Americans who also happen to be of Lebanese descent and swing voters in what could be one of the most competitive states in the November election.  

Chuck Norris political idiot, in the role of Chuck Norris, Republican policy wonk:

If these solutions don't stop the tides of illegal flow in and out of our borders, a friend of mine has a Texas-tough alternative and answer to replace the government's virtual fence failure. In fact, he says, we don't need a security fence at all. All we need to do is to post signs and position manned trucks at key points, just like our government does at Area 51, the top secret military airfield in remote central Nevada, around which there are no fences or walls. There is never a breach or unwanted border crossing there, at least that we hear about! And why? Because the boundary sign reads and is never questioned, "Warning: Use of deadly force authorized."

One would think that before Norris started proposing "final solutions" to "problems" of people who "aren't like us," he would have realized that the Nazis, through the experiences of their mobile killing units, the einsatzgruppen, discovered that shooting wasn't a very efficient way of killing large numbers of people.  How long until Norris or one of his buddies takes the next step, and advocates gas chambers?  

[h/t to Ken Bank]

It's not in Brooklyn:

Republican John McCain said Wednesday that the bridge collapse in Minnesota that killed 13 people last year would not have happened if Congress had not wasted so much money on pork-barrel spending.

Federal investigators cite undersize steel plates as the "critical factor" in the collapse of the bridge. Heavy loads of construction materials on the bridge also contributed to the disaster that injured 145 people on Aug. 1, according to preliminary findings by the National Transportation Safety Board.

"The bridge in Minneapolis didn't collapse because there wasn't enough money," McCain told reporters while campaigning in Pennsylvania. "The bridge in Minneapolis collapsed because so much money was spent on wasteful, unnecessary pork-barrel projects."

I never took physics, but I'm pretty sure it collapsed because it wasn't strong enough to hold the weight it was bearing.  It probably would have held up if some money had been spent to strengthen it, but the Republicans neglected infrastructure investment the entire 12 years they controlled Capitol Hill, because they were more concerned with tax cuts to the rich and war in Iraq.  

But the man does offer a compelling argument against electing a Republican Congress.

Also, does McCain think he's already been elected President?  Doesn't he know that he shouldn't be blaming Congress, especially his own Republican leadership, while he's still a member of Congress?  

And I love this:

"I think there is a long, long list of earmarks which went to unnecessary and unwanted projects that I think should have gone to the bridge in Minnesota," McCain said.

"I don't know whether it would have gone or not, but if you're spending $223 million on a bridge in Alaska to an island with 50 people on it ..."

McCain said such projects "have everything to do with the power and influence of an individual congressman or senator and has nothing to do with the actual transportation needs of the United States."

On the same day, McCain was confronted with an earmark he did consider worthy. During a forum at Lehigh Valley Hospital, he met a woman with ovarian cancer who was treated in a clinical trial funded with $80 million in congressional earmarks.
The hospital was showing off an electronic medical records system that is virtually paper-free.

McCain insisted he was not trying to have it both ways and said that deserving projects can get money through regular channels.

"It's the process I object to," he said. "I'm sure that I can give you a list of projects the Mafia funds, and they would probably be good projects. But I can't give you a justification for the Mafia. I can't give you a justification for the corruption that's been bred which has sent members of Congress to the federal prison," he said.

Did John McCain just compare Ted Stevens to a tool of the Mafia?  

Bob Herbert:

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright went to Washington on Monday not to praise Barack Obama, but to bury him.

Smiling, cracking corny jokes, mugging it up for the big-time news media — this reverend is never going away. He’s found himself a national platform, and he’s loving it.

It’s a twofer. Feeling dissed by Senator Obama, Mr. Wright gets revenge on his former follower while bathed in a spotlight brighter than any he could ever have imagined. He’s living a narcissist’s dream. At long last, his 15 minutes have arrived...

The thing to keep in mind about Rev. Wright is that he is a smart fellow. He’s been a very savvy operator, politically and otherwise, for decades. He has built a thriving, politically connected congregation on the South Side of Chicago that has done some very good work over the years. Powerful people have turned to him for guidance and advice.

So it’s not like he’s naïve politically. He knows exactly what he’s doing. Forget the gibberish about responding to attacks on the black church. That is not what the reverend’s appearance before the press club was about. He was responding to what he perceives as an attack on him.

This whole story is about Senator Obama’s run for the White House and absolutely nothing else. Barack Obama went to Rev. Wright’s church as a young man and was blessed with the Christian bona fides that would be absolutely essential for a high-profile political career.

Faster than anyone could have imagined, the young Mr. Obama became Senator Obama and then the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination. Then came the videotaped sermons and the roof caved in on Rev. Wright’s reputation. Senator Obama had no choice but to distance himself, and he did it as gently as he felt he could.

My guess is that Mr. Wright felt he’d been thrown under a bus by an ungrateful congregant who had benefited mightily from his association with the church and who should have rallied to his former pastor’s defense. What we’re witnessing now is Rev. Wright’s “I’ll show you!” tour.

Obama appears unwilling to let Wright succeed:

"I am outraged by the comments that were made and saddened by the spectacle that we saw yesterday," Obama told reporters at a news conference...

"The person I saw yesterday was not the person that I met 20 years ago," Obama said of the man who married him...

Obama said he heard that Wright had given "a performance" and when he watched tapes, he realized that it more than just a case of the former pastor defending himself.

"What became clear to me was that he was presenting a world view that contradicts what I am and what I stand for," Obama said.

In a highly publicized speech last month, Obama sharply condemned Wright's remarks. But he did not leave the church or repudiate the minister himself, who he said was like a family member.

On Tuesday, Obama sought to distance himself further from Wright.

"I gave him the benefit of the doubt in my speech in Philadelphia explaining that he's done enormous good. ... But when he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the U.S. government somehow being involved in AIDS. ... There are no excuses. They offended me. They rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced."

"At a certain point if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally and then he questions whether or not you believe it — in front of the National Press Club — then that's enough," Obama continued.

In his Philadelphia speech last month Obama couldn't openly repudiate Wright without risking a negative reaction from voters, especially African Americans, would see him as an ingrate, willing to cast aside people who've become inconvenient.  Now, however, as Wright goes around the country performing as a caricature of what many white voters will perceive as "The Scary Black Man," Obama has an obligation to repudiate Wright.  Failing to repudiate Wright risks allowing the GOP (and until then presumably the Clinton campaign) to use Wright as the Black proxy with which to scare off white voters.  White people who aren't solid GOP voters aren't personally scared by Obama, but they could be scared away from Obama if they're afraid that as President  he'll bring a bunch of "Scary Black Men" along with him in to the White House.  

As long as Wright continues to blab, Obama not only has the obligation to repudiate him, he has the opportunity.  This afternoon, he took advantage of the opportunity.  

Howard Dean says it again:

"We want the voters to have their say. That's over on June 3," Dean said on ABC News' Good Morning America. Although party rules enable the superdelegates to wait until the presidential nominating convention on Aug. 25 to make a choice, Dean says the party cannot wait that long if it hopes to beat Republican John McCain in November.

"We really can't have a divided convention. If we do it's going to be very hard to heal the party afterwards," Dean said today. "So we'll know who the nominee is, and that'll give us an extra 2 1/2 months to get our party together, heal the wounds of having a very closely divided race and take on Sen. McCain."

Dean isn't saying which of the two Democrats will have to step aside in June. "Either of these candidates, if it's time for them to go, they'll know it and they will go,. They don't need any pushing from me. You know when to get in and you know when to get out. That's just part of the deal."

Dean reiterated this prediction on NBC News' Today : "Five hundred of the 800 unpledged delegates have already said who they are for. The remaining 300 will do that by the end of June and we'll know who our nominee is and that's what we need to do.''

Interestingly, Terry McAuliffe said something similar to David Corn:

So, [Corn asked McAuliffe], when does this end?

"June 15," he said without a nanosecond of hesitation.

Why then? I asked. The primaries finish on June 3, he noted, and after that there will be pressure on the uncommitted superdelegates (who now number about 300) to commit to one candidate or another. It should not take too long for these undecided insiders to make up their minds and declare their intentions--even if there are some who would rather not choose between the two.

So all done by June 15? You won't contend the nomination contest beyond then? I asked.

"Oh, I'm confident we'll be the nominee," he said, smiling.

But, I added, on the night of the Pennsylvania election, you said, "We're going all the way to Denver." That suggested, I noted, that Clinton would not yield any time before then...

"What do you expect me to say?" McAuliffe retorted. "I'm chairman of the campaign." Well, I suggested, you could have said, "We're going on to the next primaries and we're going to keep on winning." He didn't have to use the D-word. He shrugged.

So, I asked, I have a promise? June 15? "June 15," he said. You keep it alive beyond that, I noted, and it could be a nuclear war within the party. (In fact, even if McAuliffe and Clinton succeed by winning enough superdelegates in the 12 days after the primaries to trump Barack Obama's lead in pledged delegates, there still could be an intra-party apocalypse.) He didn't take the bait. "June 15," he repeated.

Clinton must win almost 70% of the remaining pledged delegates to overcome Obama's lead among pledged delegates.  That's not likely.  Over the weekend, she picked up fewer add-on delegates than expected.  As the pool of superdelegates gets smaller, it's harder for Obama to overcome her superdelegate lead (although his odds of doing so are decent), but it's also harder for Clinton to overcome Obama's overall delegate lead by growing her lead among superdelegates.  

Today's superdelegate news was split.  Despite Clinton's win in New Mexico, Senator Jeff Bingaman will endorse Obama.  But Clinton appears ready to pick up a somewhat more valuable endorsement, from North Carolina governor Mike Easely.  

Typically an endorsement from a governor is especially valuable because governors have patronage networks; they can put workers on the street to round up votes.  But this will not be like Ohio with Ted Strikland or Ed Rendell in Pennsylvania, because Easley is in his last months as governor due to term limits.  There aren't that many people who need to curry favor with him, because his term is almost done.  Furthermore, there are contested Democratic  primaries for both governor and Senate, so many of the Dem operatives and power brokers will be pulled in numerous directions, unlike in PA or OH, where down-ballot races weren't big attractions.  Nevertheless, Easley is well-liked, so it's a good pick-up for Clinton.  

But Clinton needs a lot more than a scattered "good pick-up" here and there.  What might McAuliffe be thinking?  After all the talk of going to Denver, is the Clinton campaign changing its talking points?  

From journalist Elizabeth Drew:

At first, a large number of superdelegates planned to announce their support for Obama following Super Tuesday, but he didn’t do well enough to warrant that; then it was to be after Ohio and Texas; then after Pennsylvania; and some Democrats suggest that if Obama wins both Indiana and North Carolina a number of superdelegates will announce for him then...

"We may have to go to June, and whoever ends up with the most delegates wins," a key Democrat says. "Meanwhile, the attention will be on the battle she can’t win, so why is she doing this – from here on out she’s only bleeding the party. The right way to put it is, ‘This is a war of attrition and it’s obvious that the numbers aren’t going to add up, so what’s the point?’" He added, "The hope is that at some point the superdelegates will get frustrated and join the Obama bandwagon."

Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid and Howard Dean are talking about sending a letter to superdelegates urging them to go public with their endorsements.  Rahm Emanuel is talking about the end game.  And despite winning Pennsylvania, Clinton probably needs close to 70% of the remaining superdelegates to get the nomination, while Obama will probably need little more than 30% to put him over the top.  Obama is polling well ahead of Clinton in North Carolina, and his odds of winning Indiana appear pretty good.  

Just about everything points to Obama locking up enough pledged and superdelegates in the next few weeks to secure the nomination.  But Kentucky and West Virginia could cause him some problems.  

Way back in February, the day of the Potomac Primary, I wrote that what happened in the mountains of Virginia and Maryland could presage what would happen in the Appalachian parts of other states.  Clinton pulled up to 90% in some of those counties, and she's won the Appalachian regions of every state contested.  

In the 1960's, one out of three people in Appalachia   lived poverty, per capita income was 23% lower than the national average, and the region was rapidly losing population.  In 1963 the Appalachian Regional Commission was created by Congress and President Kennedy to address the problems in the area highlighted in the map.  Since the 1960's counties near Atlanta, Huntsville AL and Pittsburgh have become wealthier much more developed.  But much of the region remains well below national standards in most measures of economic and social well-being.  

The region also has given Barack Obama by far his lowest share of the vote; this map by Kossack Meng Bomin shows that outside of Arkansas that Clinton's biggest wins (depicted in red, vs the Green Obama counties) have almost all been in Appalachia:

Why?  

George Packer offers some evidence that in Appalachia it's racism:

On Wednesday, I was in Inez, Kentucky, the Appalachian town where L.B.J. declared war on poverty forty-four years ago this month. John McCain was on a tour of "forgotten places"...After [McCain's] speech, I left the county courthouse and crossed the main street to talk to a small group of demonstrators holding signs next to McCain’s campaign bus. J. K. Patrick, a retired state employee from a neighboring county, wore a button on his shirt that said "Hillary: Smart Choice."

"East of Lexington she’ll carry seventy per cent of the primary vote," he said. Kentucky votes on May 20. "She could win the general election in Kentucky." I asked about Obama. "Obama couldn’t win."

Why not?

"Race," Patrick said matter-of-factly. "I’ve talked to people—a woman who was chair of county elections last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for a black man." Patrick said he wouldn’t vote for Obama either.

Why not?

"Race. I really don’t want an African-American as President. Race."
What about race?

"I thought about it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion. After 1964, you saw what the South did." He meant that it went Republican. "Now what caused that? Race. There’s a lot of white people that just wouldn’t vote for a colored person. Especially older people. They know what happened in the sixties. Under thirty—they don’t remember. I do. I was here."

Everyone knows that race is a factor in Obama’s low vote among older whites, though reporters say that no one will admit it personally. In Eastern Kentucky, people (and not just J. K. Patrick) admit it personally, without hesitation or apology. It’s impossible to say how much this has affected the primary or will affect the fall election. For voters like those I met in Inez, the objection to Obama has nothing to do with Reverend Jeremiah Wright or, God knows, Bill Ayers. There’s nothing Obama can do about it. He can’t even mention it.

Many pundits have declared that Obama has a "race problem," or a "working class problem," or more specifically a "white working class" problem.  Meng Bomin's map doesn't suggest a racial problem; Obama has done extremely well in many parts of the country that are almost entirely white, including several places with primaries instead of caucuses. According to Obama campaign manager David Plouffe:

I think if you look at -- we have won white voters, particularly white voters under 60, in a lot of states. We've won white men voters in most of the states we've competed in, and, you know, again, if you look at our favorable/unfavorable ratings and the characteristics and the traits with some of these voters that have voted for Senator Clinton in recent primaries, you know they are strong and they are going to be supportive of us in the fall.

Most of the white voters voting for Hillary Clinton will enthusiastically vote for him in the fall.  A good chunk of the Clinton vote is women, and there's little to suggest that they would shift from her to McCain instead of voting for the Democratic candidate, as women have been doing for decades.  No, Obama doesn't have a racial problem.    

It appears that Appalachia has an Obama problem.

If doing well in Appalachia—which has only about 18-20 million of the almost 300 million people who live in America—were necessary for an Obama win, he would be in deep trouble.  But there aren't enough people in Appalachia to present a big problem, especially since the region makes up a relatively small part of the population of most of the states it touches.  (The Appalachian counties of Pennsylvania are a bit different than the rest of the region, as they are much more Catholic than the rest of Appalachia and more ethnically diverse, with a decent number of Italians, Slavs and Germans mixed in with the most Scots-Irish and descendants of the 18th century immigrants from the English backcountry that dominate the rest of Appalachia.  Those counties, in fact, are the only part of Appalachia where Obama did OK, and actually improved on his performance over similar counties in Ohio).  

The two big exceptions, however, the two states in which Appalachia dominates, are Kentucky and West Virginia.

Based on the results of the primaries up to now, and for reasons suggested by Packer's interviews, we can see that Obama will not do well in West Virginia or Kentucky.  And that's a problem for perceptions, because even if Obama wins North Carolina and Indiana, Clinton and her surrogates are likely to trumpet the West Virginia and Kentucky results as proof that Obama can't win white voters, and offer the results as a rationale for her to stay in the race.  

If the discussion were limited to Appalachia, Clinton might have a point about the importance of her relative strength with white voters.  But increasingly, in presidential elections, Democrats can't win Kentucky, and West Virginia is also trending strongly Republican.  In 1992 Bill Clinton won Kentucky by 3 points, but against Bob Dole he barely hung on for a win of less than one point.  Despite winning the popular vote, Al Gore—from neighboring Tennessee—lost Kentucky by 15 points, and Kerry lost it by 20.  Frankly, Kentucky is not part of a map that shows a narrow Democratic win.  If any Democrat were to win Kentucky, it would be part of a landslide win.  

Even West Virginia, once one of the most Democratic states in the country—it voted for Dukakis and was one of the six states won by Jimmy Carter in 1980—is now moving in to Republican territory for Presidential years.  It's not as Republican as Kentucky, but like Kentucky it's unlikely to go Democratic regardless of the Democratic nominee, even if it were Clinton.  

The press, however, will lap up the talking points of the pundits, Clinton spinners (and Republicans) that losing Kentucky and West Virginia means that Obama won't do well with White voters, when it really means voters in Appalachia aren't ready to vote for a Black candidate, even though in most of the rest of the country they are.  

I disagree, obviously, with Packer's conclusion that Obama's race is a serious political problem; I think it's only a serious problem if he needed majorities in Appalachia or he was trying to appeal to streadfast Republicans who vote Republican for, among other reasons, racism.  Nevertheless, his advice is still sound:

McCain began his speech in Inez by saying, "I’m not the son of a coal miner. I wasn’t raised by a family that made its living from the land or toiled in a mill or worked in the local schools or health clinic. I was raised in the United States Navy, and, after my own naval career, I became a politician. My work isn’t as hard as yours." His modest disclaimer seemed unnecessary—the local pol who introduced McCain had just finished calling him a son of Kentucky at heart, and the crowd was entirely on his side. But for Obama, who’s bound to strike people in places even less isolated than Inez as alien, this kind of self-presentation might be essential. Rather than analyzing them out loud, or pretending to be one of them, he should speak about the differences (and race is far from the only one) directly, candidly, in the blunt, personal language that made his Philadelphia speech so memorable. He should say that in spite of these differences, in spite of what he doesn’t know about or share in their life, he knows what Presidential leadership can do to improve their lives—as did Roosevelt, who was an aristocrat, and Kennedy, who was rich and Catholic.

Bill refuses to get off the stage:

Dubbed the "Billification" of Sen. Clinton's campaign by some insiders, Mr. Clinton has become something of a strategist-in-chief in recent weeks. He has been pushing for harder and sharper attacks on Sen. Obama. While she has jabbed her opponent over his "elitist" tone and controversial statements by his former pastor, Mr. Clinton delivers his own slams on the stump, calling Obama ads misleading.

The former president says he's in uncharted territory. "Being the spouse is more difficult than when I was the candidate," he says in a brief interview. "When you're running, you're out there driving every day. But when you're the spouse, you feel more protective. It's much harder."

Mr. Clinton has placed several of his own aides at headquarters, including his former lawyer and a bevy of strategists. Known as a bad loser, Mr. Clinton privately buttresses his wife's drive to push on, telling her, according to aides: "We're not quitters."

On his own daily message calls, advisers say, he implores: "We've got to take him on every time." At the Clintons' Washington, D.C., home recently, these people say, he reviewed possible TV spots and told ad makers to be more hard-hitting, faster and harsher.

Mr. Clinton also told the campaign to double the number of his daily appearances. "Look at this schedule -- you've got me down for four events," he said the week before Pennsylvania's primary, according to one operative. "Give me six, eight a day. Get me to the suburbs where I can make a difference."

Hillary Clinton won't be the nominee, but a small part of me wishes she would have won and then become President to see her and Bill fight for the microphone to answer those questions shouted out to "President Clinton."  

A little while ago the Obama campaign emailed reporters and bloggers announcing a press call regarding the campaign's 50 state effort to register new voters.  I'm intrigued about the effort, so I did something I almost never do, I hopped on the press call.  

Obama deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand spoke, followed by NC Congressman G.K. Butterfield.  Hildebrand then opened the call for questions, which led to:

• A question about Reverend Wright (which had nothing to do with voter registration).
• A question about Jim Clyburn's remarks that Bill Clinton was tarnishing the image of the Clintons (which had nothing to do with voter registration).
• A question about TV ads going up in all the remaining states (that the reporter tried to make about voter registration, but really wasn't about voter registration).
• A question about Obama's performance with white voters (which wasn't about voter registration).

Several times Hildebrand reminded the reporters on the call that the subject was voter registration, and clearly implied  that questions about other matters should be directed to the press operation, but none of the reporters asked a single question about voter registration.

Growing, shrinking or not trying to change the size and composition of the electorate is one of the fundamental decisions of a campaign.  Most campaigns just deal with the electorate as it is, which is why so much attention is paid to the sliver of voters who are persuadable (which is seldom more than 12-14% of the national electorate).  Sometimes, by going mercilessly negative, one seeks to shrink the electorate.  Or one can try to grow the electorate, as Obama is doing.  

Apparently none of that was more interesting to the four reporters who asked questions that had little or nothing to do with voter registration, which reminded me of this essay DavidNYC wrote last month, in which he asserted that most political reporters don't love politics the way sports writers and science writers typically love their subject, but instead hate what we love about politics:

But oh - the political reporters. They are a breed apart. They like politics-as-theater: Hillary's pantsuit, Obama's turban, the Clenis, the flight-suit, America's Mayor, dead-or-alive, he-said, she-said and all the world's a stage.

Most of us care about voter registration, so look for more on this subject in the next day or two...here, at Daily Kos.  Maybe you'll see it in the traditional media.  Or maybe you'll just see more discussion about flag pins.