Got an interesting job offer? Self-employed, thinking of a career change, and you never know what'll happen when you just put it out there. (I have a law degree, but I don't practice.)
(Updated) Restless Math Syndrome: The Edwards 7 Premise (w/Poll)
May 20, Barack Obama will declare pledged delegate victory. Oregon'll be a fun results tracker diary.
3 weeks ago, Jed grasped the importance of perception of whether it's voters or supers putting Obama over the top.
One week left. Here are my topline conclusions about what it will take (nitty gritty details spelled out below):
47 pledged delegates from KY/OR Tuesday. 99% lock.
4 add-ons this weekend. CO(1), CA(2) a formality. KS(1) expected.
49 supers or Edwards pledged not from MI/FL. Avg 7 per day for the next 7 days.
7 Edwards-committed pledged switchers.Note: Count toward the 49 if from Iowa, NH or SC, otherwise they're extra.
Thu May 15 - 7 supers or E-pledged
Fri May 16 - 7 supers or E-pledged
Sat May 17 - 9 supers or E-pledged (incl. CO add-on Frederico Pena, KS add-on)
Sun May 18 - 9 supers or E-pledged (incl. 2 California add-ons)
Mon May 19 - 7 supers or E-pledged
Tue May 20 - 7 supers or E-pledged; Obama wins 47 pledged delegates
Wed May 21 - 7 supers or E-pledged
I confess, I didn't even watch one second of cable news on Tuesday. I played poker. I got a friend on the phone nearly 3 hours after the polls closed, and he gave me a hilarious, gorgeously profane encapsulation of the massive insipidry of Greater Pundolia.
Right as we were winding up our conversation, he mentions, reading off TV:
"Breaking: Democrat wins special election in Mississippi."
I started laughing. All that effort in punditry. So pointless. All the exit poll wankery, so much drilling down, so little feel for the spirit at loose in the land.
Today is May 13, 2008, and West Virginia, a state that matters like all the rest, is going to the polls.
We already know this will be a bad day for Barack Obama in the pledged delegate count. But I encourage those of you tempted to harbor bad feelings for a state because it doesn't support the candidate I favor and most of you favor not to do so. See the big picture, and get a smile on your face.
The talkers on TV don't matter. What matters is that the incredibly effective team running Barack Obama's presidential campaign has executed a masterful plan from the beginning all the way to the nomination. They don't get too high, they don't get too low, they don't leak. They just like, respect and believe in their guy.
The bottom line is this. Barack Obama is going to give an acceptance speech on Thursday, August 28, 2008 in Denver, Colorado that is going to make you god damn proud to be an American. Non-citizens will see that while America can fail its ideals sometimes, the best of what America can produce is still pretty magnificent too.
We have crossed another landmark moment in the superdelegate race. With the endorsement of Rep. Peter DeFazio (OR) and the flip of Rep. Donald Payne (NJ), even under Clinton counting of the Florida/Michigan delegations, Barack Obama leads in every individual category of elected superdelegate: Governor, Senator, Representative.
True, the race is in the post-checkmate phase, but it sure is fun officially touching the bases and I have had this diary in the queue for some time, so here it is.
Barack Obama leads in Governors 14-11 [14-12].
Barack Obama leads in Senators 18-13 [18-15]. Maria Cantwell will flip after May 20, so it's really 19-12 [19-14].
Barack Obama leads in Representatives 83-78 [86-85].
This will be a relatively short diary, attempting to expand on a comment I made in dawnt's excellent diary.
There are calls for unity from Obama supporters and Clinton supporters alike. As an Obama supporter I have a swirl of emotions about the tone and tactics of the recent campaign. I fully get the practical need to come together.
I also understand the resistance fellow Obama supporters feel toward immediately displacing honestly come-by antipathy about Clinton campaign tactics. I am sure I'm not alone in feeling that many things crossed non-negotiable moral lines that mark out why we joined the Democratic Party in the first place. Living out our best selves by embracing the better angels of our nature is easier said than done.
It's Tuesday, Sixo de Mayo, 2008. Someone forgot to tell North Carolina it wasn't a big, mattering state in time to cancel this foolishness. So they're having it. Polls close at 7:30 EDT.
IMMEDIATELY CALLED FOR OBAMA AT 7:30PM EDT.
After tonight, there are 37 mini-races left, and Obama has been viable in every single one of these races so far, which means 1 delegate. 135 pledged delegates to clinch the majority. That means the magic number tonight is 98. 98 means checkmate.
The popular vote is a fallacy, as I've written before. A brief recap: 1) Candidates would camp out in large urban areas like LA and Brooklyn and never spend so many millions trying to split 200,000 votes in the whole state of NH; 2) No state would rationally hold a caucus, thereby disenfranchising its say in the nomination selection; and 3) unlike the general election concept of one person, one vote, allowing independents or Republicans to vote in some states but not others badly skews the simplistic moral argument underpinning popular vote.
Tuesday night, I am watching two numbers. First, if Obama takes down a combined 98 pledged delegates then pledged delegate checkmate can officially be declared, with the remaining 37 proportional races guaranteed to give Obama at least a minimum 1 vote and thus put him over the top on the minimum viability alone.
Second, I want to see Obama erase Clinton's PA popular vote gain, which would finally drive a stake into that argument.
This diary is a straightforward analysis of what it will take to regain 214,224 votes.
There is a pattern of thought and commentary that goes like this:
"I like Barack Obama, and think he's a great guy and would make a great president. Unfortunately, there are too many racists in this country to elect Barack Obama."
(or, TV translation): "Barack Obama can't win working class whites."
There is a name for this: Vouching for the Other Guy's Bad Faith. Vouching for the other guy's racism.
This is a short diary to emphasize a point I hope gets made by Chuck Todd and by Obama surrogates on the night of May 6 about pledged delegates.
Though Barack Obama will not be at 1627 to get the majority of pledged delegates and thereby kick in the Pelosi Club (including Sen. Maria Cantwell's flip from Clinton to Obama), he will have clinched it anyway.
You are going to be on cable news shows in the next two weeks, and you are going to be confronted with the notion of the popular vote being a legitimate measuring stick.
I must say that thus far I have been generally very unimpressed with you as a group. You flub around, you let yourself get bullied by giant assholes like Joe Scarborough and you never make super-easy points.
So listen up, I am going to make this easy for you. Do not screw this up. Use the three obvious points, and use concrete examples, which I have helpfully provided for you. If you do not say these three things, you are a total failure as a surrogate.
It's always a tiny thing that moves me to tears. The speeches are masterful and I always come away from them thinking what an authentic, decent man this is, and how amazing his mom must have been. But the speeches don't generally get me choked up.
Instead, little things that catch me off guard, and most of the time it's something else someone is saying about him. It's observing his impact on others. One from a couple months ago that really opened me up me was Geoff Stone's short piece the morning after Iowa, when the world seemed fundamentally different. Stone helped bring Obama to the U. Chicago Law School and observed him early on. His thoughts about what Obama should have done with his career are faultlessly common-sensical. His confession is our cultural confession - we have very low expectations of our public servants. (After, all, we don't need to be raising the false hopes of this country about what can be delivered, right?)
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a diary that attempted to predict turnout, but it wasn't a full analysis. I believed it a sounder model than those predicters who were merely throwing spaghetti at the wall, because I tied the turnout to congressional districts and past performance in the 2008 primary cycle, distinguishing between closed and open/semi-open primaries and comparing like to like.
Still, I began seeing different numbers and methods around the web. Over at Open Left, fladem tied predictions of turnout straightforwardly to 2004 GE Kerry performance. PA turnout was pegged at 75% of 2004 Kerry GE turnout, based on an average of 64% of Kerry turnout in primaries and 80% of Kerry turnout in primaries post-Super Tuesday. I wanted to take a closer look because some 2004 GE states were battlegrounds and others were not.
You can contact me at pocket99s at gmail. See below for the 4 things I need from your email if you see yourself fitting the generalities and couple particulars I've described. Than we'll chat.
Basically I have an idea for a creative grassroots project. I believe the project is very cool and if done right might (or might not) generate a big enough impact on the election season to justify the energy spent on the project.
For a variety of reasons I am not going to describe it much, except in big generalities.
The goal of this diary is to find a few like-minded spirits with time and energy to be part of a small team.
Now comes the tricky part - how to entice people without saying what it is.
In poker there is a useful concept called the freeroll.
It means pretty much what it sounds like it means. There is a free "roll" or chance that a player can win more than he/she is currently guaranteed to win.
Here's an example. In hold'em, you are dealt two red aces, I am dealt two black aces. There's raising and reraising and we get all our money in preflop. At first it looks like we'll probably tie. But then the flop comes three hearts. You now have a freeroll with two cards to come. You cannot lose to me under any circumstances, but if one more heart comes (which it will about 36% of the time), you will make a flush with your ace of hearts and scoop the whole pot. That's a freeroll - the free chance you get at taking the whole pot, while having zero risk of losing to my hand. On the other hand, I have a negative freeroll.
Understanding times when you have a freeroll, and when it's possible someone else might have a freeroll against you is a part of selecting situational investment opportunities in a game like poker.
So, too, in politics. Right now, Barack Obama supporters are facing a negative freeroll on the question - "Would you support the other candidate as the nominee in the general election?"
A critical caveat: I reject the notion of the popular vote as a values-based basis for superdelegates selecting one candidate over another.
In the general election, every state but Maine and Nebraska run their electoral vote the same. But in the nomination process, the states are given the ground rules by the DNC, and then they decide whether to hold a caucus or a primary. Either method is a time-honored way of selecting delegates to the national convention. This isn't something radical and new.
However, if state parties believed that their voices would only be proportionally represented based on a popular vote number, which state would select caucuses as its method of voting? You can't be intellectually honest and argue that any state party would rationally choose the caucus method if it knew its input on the national level would be fractionally diluted.
I'm not implying that Pat Buchanan's comments should be reconsidered, or that he isn't a racist. I'm suggesting we reconsider our plan of action. This is a moment of education, not of gotcha and punishment.
Nailing Buchanan to the wall would provide some temporary satisfaction, but what would it accomplish in the larger discussion on race? Signaling that saying slavery was the best thing that ever happened to blacks is unacceptable public discourse? I dare suggest that the vast majority of the country knows this lesson already.
So we have to ask ourselves, what is the endgame? And I confess that I'm not writing this diary to prop myself up saying I have the answer. I might be wrong in my conclusion. But I offer this observation up anyway.
IMO, it all turns on an important distinction - Pat Buchanan sincerely believes what he wrote.
With his brilliant speech on race relations yesterday at the National Constitution Center, Barack Obama showed why his campaign for president has the aura of a mission.
As an example of contemporary oratory, it was stunning. As political rhetoric, it was designed to do far more than damage control and, in the end, distilled the essence of his candidacy.
Recently I've been noted for delegate math and caucus day/primary day diaries.
But on this day, the day of what I hope will be a heroic speech, I find myself more emotional than usual.
My favorite diarist is kid oakland. (Sorry, everybody else. It's not you, it's him.) Maybe it was this diary that got me going, or the awareness that when Obama speaks this morning, it might be a speech we remember a good long time.
