The Dish

If you’re reading this, you’re probably part of the relatively small number of people who take an inordinate interest in politics and the campaign. There are a lot of you, but still a tiny minority of the primary voting public. Most normal human beings with jobs to do, kids to raise, bills to pay, don’t have that luxury of examining candidates for months on end, long before voting time. So they often focus as the election day approaches, and picking among several within existing party categories, many make up their minds at the last moment. Jay Cost thinks this explains a lot about the skewiff polls this primary season:

If we put ourselves in the shoes of the average voters, and try to recreate their thought processes – it makes a lot of sense. Their partisanship cannot serve as a quick, easy guide. Thus, they have to take a good, long look at the candidates as people. Given their typical inattention to politics, the time when this happens is the last week or so.

This might explain the wide variability of the primary polling. Because they have not been anchored by partisanship – voter opinions have been unstable for most of the cycle, up until the very end when we are wont to see a massive break in one direction or another. The "error" in the polls might simply be a reflection of public indecision. For that matter, Clinton’s massive lead through most of last year might have its origins here as well – without their partisanship, poll respondents had little to go on except their vague sense of the media’s consensus view of the race. Predictably, they claimed to support Clinton. Finally, this might account for momentum. Voters take a close look at winners at precisely the moment they are basking in the glow of positive media coverage. Unsurprisingly, researchers have found that more informed voters are less susceptible to momentum effects.

Cost believes that the swings decline in the general election, as partisanship stabilizes preferences. My own view of this primary campaign is that Clinton has long enjoyed a big advantage because of her name recognition, her partisan brand, and almost two decades of media attention. And that was her strategy – coast to a coronation because she’s … Hillary. Obama – for all the hype – is still relatively new on the national scene. But when people actually focused and realized things were not fore-ordained, he caught up quickly. That’s why a twenty-point lead in the big states evaporated as Super Tuesday approached – because Dem voters realized they actually had a choice. In most of those states where retail campaigning really mattered – New Hampshire excepted – Obama won. The more you see of him, the more support he tends to get. Now he has momentum as well.

I may be deluding myself and I don’t believe for a minute that the Clintons will give up until they have no alternative, but my sense is that Obama has already won this thing. And as the broader electorate focuses more and more, that will become clearer and clearer. His main problem is voter cold feet. His relative unfamiliarity is still unsettling to many. He’s up against a very familiar, comforting brand, especially if you’re a Democrat. At the last moment, some lose their nerve. Hence the odd phenomenon of his winning most final weeks but losing support the day or so before the actual vote. His major obstacle now is understandable but unmerited trepidation.

Which means to say I can still see a way in which Obama could win or lose. But there is no way that Clinton can do anything with this election but survive it.

If this doesn’t put you in a good mood for today, I don’t know what will:

… whoring? GPS too!

Not easy to do:

Pay for everything in cash. Don’t use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can’t avoid. Don’t use automatic toll lanes.

(Hat tip: kottke)

Must-read:

Clinton is ultimately responsible for putting her political fate in this fool’s [Mark PennClinton] hands. But this is a guy who has basically one big political win under his belt and whose record in seriously contested races, particularly Democratic primary races is one of almost constant defeats. Much of Clinton’s current predicament stems from Penn’s disastrous, glass-jaw ‘inevitability’ strategy and the mind-boggling decision not even to contest a slew of states where Obama racked up huge victories and many delegates.

Campaigns are about winning votes not making excuses. There are plenty of delegates still out there for Clinton to win — over a thousand left in the remaining primaries. But her efforts are being stymied by a campaign apparatus rooted in the belief that any new reality can be overturned by pretending it away.

This is quite a moment. Last October, the titan of the civil rights movement signed onto the Clinton machine. A month ago, he even had this to say about Barack Obama:

"He is no Martin Luther King Jr. I knew Martin Luther King. I knew Bobby Kennedy. I knew President Kennedy. You need more than speech-making. You need someone who is prepared to provide bold leadership."

This is what he’s saying now:

"In recent days, there is a sense of movement and a sense of spirit. Something is happening in America, and people are prepared and ready to make that great leap… I’ve been very impressed with the campaign of Senator Obama. He’s getting better and better every single day."

If Lewis’s original endorsement of the Clintons was a huge blow to Obama, then his reversal is an even bigger blow to the Clintons. The Obama campaign has now not only built a rival machine to the Clintons’, it is poaching loyalists. A figure like Lewis also brings, for good reason, a vast moral credibility with him. He gives permission – even encouragement – for other Clinton super-delegates to move to prevent a bruising and bitter fight through the spring. It’s a tipping point. I predict others will follow. And what both Clinton and Obama have to avoid is a polarizing racial divide.

Obama answers Clinton’s ad:

Barbara Ehrenreich on Clinton:

Clinton can put forth all the policy proposals she likes – and many of them are admirable ones – but anyone can see that she’s of the same generation and even one of the same families that got us into this checkmate situation in the first place. True, some people miss Bill, although the nostalgia was severely undercut by his anti-Obama rhetoric in South Carolina, or maybe they just miss the internet bubble he happened to preside over. But even more people find dynastic successions distasteful, especially when it’s a dynasty that produced so little by way of concrete improvements in our lives. Whatever she does, the semiotics of her campaign boils down to two words – "same old."

For Aaron, from our wedding ceremony:

"When a man meets the half that is his very own, then something wonderful happens; the two are struck from their senses by love, by a sense of belonging to one another, and by desire, and they don’t want to be separated from one another, not even for a moment. These are the people who finish out their lives together and still cannot say what it is they want from one another.

No one would think it is the intimacy of sex  – that mere sex is the reason each lover takes so great and deep a joy in one another. It’s obvious that the soul of every lover longs for something else; his soul cannot say what it is, but like an oracle is has a sense of what it wants, and like an oracle it hides behind a riddle.

Suppose two lovers are lying together and Hephaestus stands over them and asks "What is it you human beings really want from each other?" And suppose they’re perplexed and he asks them again:

"Is this your heart’s desire, then, for the two of you to become parts of the same whole, as near as can be, and never to separate day or night? Because if that’s your desire, I’d like to weld you together and join you into something that is naturally whole, so that the two of you are made into one. Then the two of you would share one life, as long as you lived, because you would be one being, and, by the same token, when you died you would be one not two in heaven.

Look at your love, and see if this is what you desire: wouldn’t this be all the good fortune you could want?

No one who received this offer would turn it down. No one would find anything else more precious."

– The Speech of Aristophanes, The Symposium, Plato.

Whose jurisdiction does this fall under?

(hat tip: Orin Kerr)