Proper care and feeding

Oh, I do enjoy Gail Collins on a sunny Saturday morning. Her latest gift to political discourse is this memorable analogy:

picking a running mate is — no disrespect intended — like picking a pet. How much time are you planning to spend with the little fellow? How much exercise will he be getting on an average day? On one extreme, you have the William Wheeler model (“There’s the living room. Go find a corner and sleep in it.”) On the other end, there’s the Cheney version in which the pet takes over the checkbook, diversifies the family investment portfolio and starts strafing at the neighbor’s cat.

Of course, flip is not always fair:

And then there was Charles Dawes, Calvin Coolidge’s veep, who wrote the melody to the song “It’s All in the Game” and got a Nobel Peace Prize for his work on stabilizing the German economy after World War I.

Yes, I know. That last one didn’t work out too well. The song is nice, though.

Stabilizing the German economy after the post-WW1 hyperinflation was a tremendous achievement, whoever deserves the credit. It was the Depression that kicked the continent back into crisis.

Known quantity, unknown result

A savvy reader on Andrew Sullivan's blog points out that outside the beltway, it's Obama, not McCain, who's the 'known quantity':

America is literally obsessed with him. He's a celebrity candidate who became a celebrity by running for president; he's been discussed, debated, and argued over on television, in newspapers, in political magazines, in gossip magazines, on the internet, among every age group, every demographic, every race, and in every subset of American life....

On top of all this, Obama has the lopsided money advantage, the lopsided enthusiasm advantage, the lopsided technology advantage, the lopsided earned media advantage, the lopsided paid media advantage, the lopsided volunteer and voter registration advantage, the lopsided issue advantage, the lopsided party advantage, and the lopsided ground army advantage.

All true. And that star quality, along with a once-in-a-generation national political realignment toward the Democrats, may be just enough to elect a black man President of the United States -- just enough to overcome conscious and unconscious prejudice plus the genuine cultural dissonance between many Americans and an African American who came to political awareness among black campus activists and South side Chicago church organizers. Even after a post-nomination-battle bounce, Obama polls only slightly ahead of McCain, barely outside the margin of error.

What a risk the Democratic Party is taking. It's a brave risk, and I think it's an intelligent one -- a doubling down on "the fierce urgency of now"-- but it's a huge risk. In a year when Gore, Kerry, Edwards, Clinton -- even, say, Gephardt -- could have won the presidency easily, we've electrified the world as well as ourselves (per the reader's observations above) by trying to get done something no one would have dreamed possible two or three years ago. The lack of experience, the unique perspective, the unique quality of mind and the almost surreal electoral savvy of this political sport of nature-- even leaving aside race, Obama's a terrific gamble.

Texeira on Obama: Yes he can

Ruy Texeira, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority (2002) and of America’s Forgotten Majority: Why the White Working Class Still Matters (2000) provides essential perspective to those spooked by Hillary Clinton's "Bill, he cannot win" whispers about Barack Obama. From John Harwood in the NYT political blog The Caucus:

Mrs. Clinton’s claim that she is best positioned to win the “hard-working Americans, white Americans” has become the linchpin of her argument that she is more electable than Mr. Obama.

But Mr. Teixeira, who is not backing either candidate, does not buy that argument. He dismisses intraparty contests as “pretty poor evidence” of whether Mr. Obama, as the Democratic nominee, could attract the blue-collar support he would need against Senator John McCain the presumed Republican nominee.

And how much blue-collar support would Mr. Obama need? Not a majority, said Mr. Teixeira. Though blue-collar Democrats once represented a centerpiece of the New Deal coalition, they have shrunk as a proportion of the information age-economy and as a proportion of the Democratic base.

Al Gore lost working-class white voters by 17 percentage points in 2000, even while winning the national popular vote. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts lost them by 23 points in 2004, while running within three points of President Bush over all. Mr. Teixeira suggests that Mr. Obama can win the presidency if he comes within 10 to 12 percentage points of Mr. McCain with these voters, as Democratic candidates for the House did in the 2006 midterm election.

In recent national polls, that is exactly what Mr. Obama is doing. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll showed Mr. Obama trailing by 12 percentage points with working-class whites; a poll by Quinnipiac University showed him trailing by seven points. In each survey, Mr. Obama led over all by seven points.

Clinton's wins in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky and West Virginia have prompted a long second look at Obama's prospects in the general. News reports have proliferated focusing on voters, from the coal mines of Kentucky to the leisure villages of Florida, who say outright or signal indirectly that they will not vote for a black man. There's no question that we're in uncharted territory. But it helps to have a 'hard target number' for the most recalcitrant group from someone as versed in electoral demographics as Ruy Texeira.

Hillary's double message about Bill

While listening to the first 58 minutes of Hillary's now-infamous interview with the Argus (SD) Leader, it dawned on me that her "ready on day 1" pitch includes an implicit rebuke of Bill Clinton's administration. One subtext seems to be, 'don't pick a candidate as unready to take office as Bill was.'

I can't find a transcript, but to paraphrase, Hillary said that one thing she learned from the ride with Bill is that a new President has a narrow window, about a year, to get a major part of his/her agenda enacted. In a sense, Bill did this. In that first spring, his Administration bobbed and weaved its way to a deficit reduction package that passed the Senate on VP Al Gore's tiebreaking vote. That proved to be the keynote for Clinton's signature achievement: restoring economic confidence and growth by getting the Federal budget on a firm footing.

But that major achievement was a Plan B bi-product of internal struggles to find a focal point. Bill's first year was otherwise a disaster ride, his authority eroded by a string of small-bore screwups: an uproar and ignoble compromise over gays in the military; the Travelgate brouhaha, the serial scotched attorney general nominations. And all the while, Hillary herself was ginning up the trainwreck that was supposed to be the Clintons' signature accomplishment: universal healthcare.

Was the country wrong to take a flier on Bill? Hillary's viability depends on answering 'no' (and I agree). But if there's anything Bill wasn't, it was "ready on day one."

The dicey logic of defeat and victory

When my older son was about 10, we devised a simple dice baseball game (snake eyes a home run, 3 a single, 4 a strikeout, etc.) and kept tinkering with it until game results closely mirrored those of regular major league games - scores in a range of 1-0 to say 12-11.

One thing I learned from playing dozens or hundreds of such games is that the most thrilling dramas can come about as a result of pure chance. In one game, you might hold a 2-1 lead from the first inning on; in another, you might 'blow' a four run lead in the ninth. It struck me then that sports narratives always moralize a contest. A four-run lead disappears? Who choked? A one-run lead holds up through six rallies? What a gutsy battler the pitcher is! And to varying degrees, there's some validity in those judgments. But the equally variable and probably equally strong role of chance is simply discounted in our human drive to make sense of the event.

What's true of chance is also true of enduring, structural causes. One of the ironies of Obama's "bitter" commentary, as Paul Krugman pointed out, is that one simple fact almost completely explains Republican dominance over the past generation: Democrats' loss of the South in the wake of Johnson's successful championing of civil rights. The rest is noise. But just as we discount chance when explaining events, we also discount causes stronger than the individuals in their grip. Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry -- all are writ down emblems of Democratic weakness rather than victims of a stacked electoral deck. Every mistake looms large when you lose. Follies are forgotten when you win.

So with Obama in Pennsylvania. Al Giordiano, delegate doctor extraordinaire, wrote six weeks ago that Obama could not win the state -- that his task was to keep it close enough not to shake the delegate math or the phenomenology of [delegate] mind. The structural impediments, from Rendell-Nutter to demographics to the exclusion of independents -- were, Giordano insisted, insurmountable:

The press will try to make a race of it. There will surely be polls showing the race tightening, perhaps even suggesting that Obama could win it. But that’s just part of the predictable song-and-dance to sell newspapers and up ratings (and hit counts, for the political blogs and news sites that sell ads). The way the odd-numbered delegate districts break down, the demographics, the fact that it’s a closed primary (no Independent voters allowed), and its long border with the senator’s New York state make it a lead-pipe cinch for Clinton; to the extent that Obama supporters enter the “no, but yes, we can win it” narrative they’ll be walking into a trap.

But of course, the postgame show will now make a retroactive race of it - focusing on Bitter-ness, 37, the ABCeizure. And perhaps without a string of errors Obama could have done marginally better. But a string of errors (or losses) is also part of every long season. And the internal dynamic hasn't changed. Obama has not changed, nor has his campaign - they are a disciplined team that knows how to keep eyes on the prize. Obama once again remains, as Sullivan notes, calm in the face of all this Clinton drama.It's the rest of us who are panicking.