Reason Magazine - Staff

Union Rules

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

If you ever want a window into the needs and desires of the labor movement, you should listen to Stewart Acuff. And if you get within 50 yards of Acuff, you’ll be listening: The snow-bearded activist, now the AFL-CIO’s director of organizing, projects his voice like an opera singer. He grips the podium, white-knuckled. He clasps his hands, then pulls them apart with a snap. When I saw him at the Take Back America conference in Washington in March, his reedy voice grew rougher and louder as his speech went on.

“My brothers and sisters,” he said, “if we go into 2008 with an even larger mobilization of workers behind this legislation, with even more commitment to win the election in 2008, and put this on the agenda in 2009, I’m here to tell you today that we will pass this legislation, in the House, overwhelmingly! We will pass it in the Senate! We will defeat a Republican filibuster! And we will have a president who signs the Employee Free Choice Act! And we can get back to the business of restoring the American dream for millions and millions of workers!”

What’s the Employee Free Choice Act? If you aren’t a lobbyist in Washington, a union worker, or an employer nervously trying to prevent your staff from organizing, you might not have followed the twisty history of the latest attempt to increase private-sector unionization. “Card check,” as it is usually known, would allow employees at a company to bypass secret-ballot elections and declare their intent to unionize by simply signing cards. If adopted, it could portend the most revolutionary change to labor law since the 1940s.

The battle over card check is part of a much larger story of Campaign ’08: the coming-out party of Democratic interest groups. For the first time since 1992, Democrats are eyeing complete control of the executive and legislative branches, with all of the spoils of appointment and legislative scheduling that would entail. Unions want to grow their numbers. Green industries want tax incentives. Trial lawyers want a ceasefire in the war on torts.

If these groups could actually form a line in January, the unions would be at the front. Card check was the brainchild of organizers who had watched their numbers tumble as manufacturing jobs moved out of the rust belt and successive conservative administrations made it tougher to organize. President Bill Clinton, signer of NAFTA, did little to stop the skid from labor’s point of view. The organizers have learned their lessons, pushing members of the House and Senate—including the junior senators from New York and Illinois—to commit in writing to card check.

“When we started working on this legislation five years ago,” Acuff said at Take Back America, “people in Washington said it would never be taken seriously, never pass the laugh test.” Bills were introduced in 2003, 2005, and 2007. The first two times, they never reached the floor, with Republicans arguing that labor organizers usually win unionization elections anyway and that 90 percent of those results are approved by the federal government’s National Labor Relations Board within two months. In 2007, with the Democrats in charge of the legislature, the same bill passed the House easily and won 51 votes in the Senate, but that wasn’t enough to proceed to an up-or-down vote. All along, the effort has faced a veto threat from President Bush.

Things are different now. Democrats believe that as many as nine Republican-held Senate seats are vulnerable in 2008. The AFL-CIO, Change to Win, and allied unions plan to spend $360 million on the 2008 election. That’s around $200 million more than the unions spent in the Kerry-Bush race. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton slug it out for the nomination, the AFL-CIO is running a $53 million campaign attacking John McCain—portraying him as a right-wing ideologue who co-sponsored the Secret Ballot Protection Act, the GOP’s attempt at making kryptonite against card check.

All that union money comes with a promise: What’s good for unions will be good for the Democrats. Greg Tarpinian, a Change to Win organizer who spoke at the Take Back America panel, pointed out that union membership was one of the strongest determinants for a voter choosing a Democratic ballot. “If union membership was 10 percent in Ohio in 2004,” he argued, “John Kerry would be president.”

If card check passes, Tarpinian has only one worry: the ability of the National Labor Relations Board to “keep up with the demand” for brand new unions. Those new brothers and sisters of the labor movement will start paying dues; said dues will find their way to new Democratic campaigns like salmon finding their way upstream.

Republicans and business lobbyists are watching all of this with a sense of resigned horror. They know Democrats will have the votes, and they believe that the end of secret ballot elections will be not just bad for business, but bad for democracy. They also see card check as the tip of a spear. One Republican staffer worried to me about collective bargaining rights for public employees. “Do we really want fire-fighters to start striking?” he asked.

The unions stand to be the biggest beneficiaries of an all-Democratic Washington. Affordable housing advocates, meanwhile, want the 2007 Federal Housing Finance Reform Act, which created a $3 billion fund bankrolled with tax revenue and the profits of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, to be spent on more housing units instead of held up by concerns over budget deficits. Trial lawyers have paid their dues: The American Association for Justice spent $6.3 million to elect Democrats in 2006 through its political action committee, the most of any single PAC. For the first half of this decade, the plaintiffs industry fought a rearguard action against the tort reform movement, which Republicans have been using to limit the size of settlements. Trial lawyers lost a big battle when the Senate passed class action lawsuit reform in 2005, but they haven’t given much ground since then. When the Democrats come back, plaintiffs expect to go back on offense.

The Consumer Product Safety Reform Act, passed this year, is a model of what to expect in a Democratic future. The law doubled funding for the eponymous safety commission to $155 million by 2015, set no caps on damages, and empowered state attorneys general to make federal cases if they have “reason to believe that the interests of the residents of that State have been, or are being, threatened or adversely affected by a violation” of consumer safety. It passed the Democratic-controlled Senate by 79-13, aided by the scare over tainted toys from China.

But unions outmatch every other member of the Democratic coalition in demands and expectations. Now is their time. One organizer told me that a Democratic comeback would mean that the party had “no more excuses” for not giving them what they wanted. At Take Back America, Acuff said the party should gift-wrap anything wavering Republicans want if it will get the bill to a floor vote. “If we have to build a bridge somewhere to get it passed, then build the damn bridge!” he said. “If we have to rename a highway after somebody, rename the highway!”

Another activist, relaxing after a day of sessions and meetings, regaled me with stories of how businesses bust unions, how the National Labor Relations Board punctures budding movements, and how essential it was to change the system. He repeated my question back to me. “If we get a Democratic president, are we going to pass card check?” He leaned back and grabbed a Miller Lite from one of his brothers coming back from the bar. “If the sun comes up in the morning, we’re passing card check.”

David Weigel is an associate editor of Reason.

R.J.'s Law

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 13 May 2008 12:00:00 EDT

Sixteen years ago, R.J. Feild was born to a heroin-addicted welfare mother in Southern California. Brought into the world underweight and premature, he has trouble walking, and his bad eyesight makes it hard for him to read. He was, however, able to enter an essay contest sponsored by Assemblyman John Benoit (R-Palm Desert) called “There Oughta Be a Law,” in which the winner’s proposed bill would be brought to the floor of the California legislature. Feild’s essay suggested giving random drug tests to welfare recipients and stripping benefits from people who tested positive.

He won the contest. “You can’t make up this story,” says Assemblyman Benoit. “The beauty of this bill is that it comes from a real-life, lovable young man who’ll the suffer rest of his life for mistakes of his mother. When you see him make this argument, you can’t help be sympathetic to it.”

“R.J.’s Law,” as submitted by Benoit, is actually a little less strict than what the 16-year old proposed. It offers people who fail the drug test a choice between losing their benefits and entering rehab, although if they test positive in rehab they’ll be out of luck. “I live in a political world,” Benoit explains. “We should give these people a chance to walk down the right path. Of course, if they walk off that path, then we can’t help them.”

Benoit’s detractors point out that welfare program managers are already empowered to test recipients if they suspect they’re using drugs. Benoit doesn’t think that’s enough. “The average lady behind a counter is not trained to recognize the symptoms of drug addiction,” he says. “You need occasional random sampling. It works for professional baseball players, it works for the clerks at Wal-Mart, and it will work here.”

R.J.’s Law might not pass the Democrat-dominated legislature, but Benoit is optimistic. He is pondering another “There Oughta be a Law” contest this fall, when kids return to school.

Edwards for Obama

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 17:11:00 EDT

Marc Ambinder thinks he's uncovered the Mystery of Barack Obama's 6:30 p.m. "major endorsement." A top staffer is out of the office today. And...

What's Wendy Button, Edwards's longtime speechwriter, been doing lately? I hear she's been writing a secret speech... (Her facebook profile includes this entry for 3pm: "Wendy just finished writing the speech.")

How come Edwards's brain trust -- all of them -- are unreachable?

Who's on this flight?

That's some pretty good reporting. A little while after Ambinder posts a link to a lear jet flightpath from North Carolina to Michigan, the Associated Press reports that Edwards will endorse Obama.

reason's coverage of Edwards, never very positive, is collected here. The network chatter right now seems to focus on Edwards' appeal to white voters, and indeed, Clinton's recovery of late has come from downloading Edwards rhetoric and booting it up on her system. Something that really drives a stake into Hillary: Edwards has delegates. He has a mere 19 left over from the four primaries he participated in, but he has, at the lowest estimate, 13 delegates from currently-disqualified Florida. If Clinton succeeds in seating all of Florida's delegates as elected in the state's non-contested primary, she'll net only 28 delegates more than Obama and Edwards combined. Joe Trippi's fantasy about his ex-client as a kingmaker isn't that far-fetched.

Everyone Hates a Sad Professor

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 16:53:00 EDT

I think culture wars progress on a bell curve. A decade or ago conservatives ran Colorado from stem to stern and routed liberals on taxes, abortion law. In the late 90s and early 2000s the culture wars simmered down (we can argue about the role Columbine had in this) and the Democrats became more competitive. In 2004 the Democrats wrested a Senate seat and the state legislature from Republicans, and voila: the Ward Churchill scandal erupted. The fight is back in conservatives, but the stakes and gains are smaller.

Churchill's gone, and the University is poking around for a "professor of conservative thought." Tom Tancredo applies (with his tongue firmly in cheek):

I should be the clear favorite for the job, Tancredo said. Who doesnt want a slightly used Congressman, with a 98% lifetime rating from the American Conservative Union, educating their children?

As for his references, Tancredo listed conservative commentator Pat Buchanan as well as the entire Minutemen organization.

The Tancredo suggested curriculum would include Western Civilization and the threat of Islamofascism, English Only 101, and American Assimilation, which would replace Chicano and ethnic studies.

Tancredo also plans to secure the border around the CU campus with a 20 foot high fence.

Tancredo concluded, In addition to my experience as a teacher and politician, I promise to have immigration officials check every student prior to all my classes.

Via Michelle Malkin.

You Won't Fool the Children of the rEVOLution

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 12:30:00 EDT

Before there was Ron Paul the New York Times best-selling author—go on, keep rolling that around on your tongue—there was Ron Paul, the Texas congressman who made floor statements in the House of Representatives when no one was listening. Before that there was Ron Paul, the roving libertarian politico and the publisher of countless monthly newsletters written in a voice curiously wittier than his own. And before that there was Ron Paul, founder of the Foundation for Rational Economics and Education, table-pounding advocate for the gold standard, a lecturer to anyone who would listen.

Paul is 72 years old. He has been reading libertarian philosophy for close to 50 years and writing it for more than 30. That his labors should finally bear fruit now, at the end of a presidential bid where he succeeded beyond a fool's dream by simply reiterating all those decades' worth of opinions, carries a kind of irony. All of the quirks of his presidential bid make more sense. Why did he give the same dense, 40-minute speech at every stop? Why didn't he get into the muck with the rest of the GOP candidates, even when he started to out-fundraise them? Hey, he was trying to tell you people: He wasn't running for president; he was spreading a message.

It is impossible to imagine his new book, The Revolution: A Manifesto, selling in droves, or even being published at all, if Paul had not run his quixotic presidential race. We have proof. Sharing the shelves with Paul's book is another political tome that, if you based your judgments on the elite-media love machine, you'd assume would be racing up the charts. Republican Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel's policy sheaf-cum-memoir, America: Our Next Chapter, (with the additional and aggrandizing subtitle Tough Questions, Straight Answers) comes after three fat years of Sunday show bookings, warm profiles in magazines such as GQ, and unkillable rumors that he was about to announce a presidential bid. Released two months ago, the book is already forgotten.

Hagel was supposed to be the Republicans' anti-war presidential candidate. Failing that, he was supposed to be the natural vice-presidential candidate of a third party "unity" candidacy. The praise and hopes cascaded because Hagel, who voted for the 2002 Iraq resolution, was nonetheless the highest-profile and most-credible (by dint of his service in Vietnam) Republican critic of the war in Iraq.

High-profile does not necessarily mean high-minded. In an early, critical profile of Hagel, National Review's John J. Miller bitingly labeled the senator's attacks on Bush policy as "Hagelian dialect" and "declamations that may sound weighty when spoken but become insubstantial on the printed page." God only knows why Hagel decided to prove this by putting words on a page. There are two recurring motifs in America: Our Next Chapter, and both are devastating to Hagel's image as a deep political thinker.

The first is simple banality. There is enough corn in these pages to solve the world food crisis and forge ethanol with the leftovers. "I remember the first time that I had a real sense of the stakes in global power politics," Hagel writes. "I was in Mr. Sheridan's history class at St. Bonaventure High School, in Columbus, Nebraska." How does he view the Senate? "The floor...is a more majestic setting than a crab bucket, but the behavior of the inhabitants is quite similar."

The second Hagelian device is what I'd call the "outsight"—the opposite of an insight, already quite obvious to readers but thuddingly profound for him. Yes, Hagel was right about Iraq, but the way he writes about foreign policy starts you wondering if he just lucked out this time. "Like its rival India," he writes, "Pakistan is an enormous, sprawling, chaotic land." Albeit one-quarter the size of India and the victim of four successful military coups to India's none. When Hagel isn't thumbing a world almanac, he's recounting the meetings he's held with world leaders, diplomats—people who, in their wisdom, agree with him about most things.

Hagel writes like this because his ideas are not powerful enough to inspire much more. He is not a non-interventionist; his big insight about America's proper place in the world is that the world is changing. "Of course I want our country to ‘win,'" Hagel writes, "but we must ask precisely what does ‘winning' mean and we need to ask that question before the first shot is fired." But this is the only problem Hagel sees with intervention. He has nothing to say about the interventions of the 1990s, even though he voted against them after entering the Senate in 1997. Hagel is a big believer in soft power. But if pushed, he says, "We would mount preemptive strikes against our enemy." The problem with the Iraqi preemptive strike was that the enemy we should have been preempting was stateless. This isn't much of an ideology. It's John Kerry's 2004 platform.

By contrast, Ron Paul's The Revolution could have been written if the congressman had passed on 2008. Paul's arguments about the money supply, foreign policy, and the Constitution have been honed for decades. The only new thing between these covers is confidence. "I have never seen such a diverse coalition rallying to a single banner," Paul writes of his campaign. "Republicans, Democrats, independents, Greens, constitutionalists, whites, blacks, Hispanics, Asian-Americans, antiwar activists, homeschoolers, religious conservatives, freethinkers...these folks typically found, to their surprise, that they rather liked each other."

The Revolution is filled with long quotes from Paul's favored philosophers and economists. It is one giant annotation to his campaign speeches. It's also a correction to some parts of his campaign. The people who thought Paul's aggressive Tom Tancredo-esque push against illegal immigration was a mistake are proven right: There is almost nothing about immigration here. There is nothing you could call right-wing populism, and while this will probably become the most popular work of Murray Rothbard-inspired libertarianism, it rejects Rothbard's late-life strategizing about the benefits of resentment politics. The Revolution is as colorblind and class-blind as any Sesame Street script. The only people readers are told to resent are the politicians and the media bosses—whom Paul compares to Pravda editors—who tell Americans there is no alternative to fiat currency and American empire.

Hagel and Paul both confront readers who, like the rest of the country, have absolutely no confidence in their leaders and no trust in what they say. Hagel tells them to buck up: "The urgency of our unsettled times demands that America acts wisely, with resolve and a common purpose." Paul tells them that they're being lied to, and he's here to tell the truth. "Few Americans realize just how costly our foreign policy is," Paul writes, referring to human lives as well as trillions of dollars. "The terrorists have played us like a fiddle." Americans are also misinformed about how our current health care system evolved, or why their dollar is worth less. They're being lied to about trade: "True free trade occurs in the absence of government intervention in the free flow of goods across borders." Paul attacks the World Trade Organization because it "makes trade relations worse by providing our foreign competitors with a collective means to attack U.S. trade interests." In each case, a foreign or elite power is hoodwinking Americans into trading the system of the Founders for a system making them less free.

Paul never sounds as certain as when he gets to link this all to monetary policy. He's rarely less convincing. Paul sees a direct link between central banking, fiat currency, and the economic crises that he argues wreck the average American's prosperity and empower thugs. A financial collapse, he prophesies, "becomes more likely every day." He proposes legalizing precious metals as currency and killing sales and capital gains taxes on metals to stave off the crisis. It's all packaged as a monetary twist on Pascal's wager: "If we're wrong, then all we've done is eliminate some taxes on gold and silver. No harm done." This is awfully optimistic. The 19th century's booms and busts were far more damaging to livelihoods and to economic systems than anything in the fiat money era. They provided much steadier footing for radical movements. Paul's overheated worry about a Weimar Republic-style collapse kicks the legs out from underneath the argument.

That's what doesn't work. Paul's narrow-eyed certainty about the elites' concealment of the truth can be irritating, especially when he marshalls so many libertarian thinkers—Nozick, Hayek, Mises—to undergird an occasionally specious ideology. But it is an ideology. Paul has a grand unified theory to offer readers, knowing full well that he's opening minds, not programming them. Hagel offers his readers safe ideas and easy paeans to "leadership." Paul offers readers, first and foremost, the lesson that "leaders" and universally accepted concepts shouldn't be trusted. It is worried and informed neostructuralists who can change things, not historical "great men." If Ron Paul doesn't provide perfect solutions, he certainly provides a blueprint.

David Weigel is an associate editor of reason.

Sweet Childers of Mine

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 14 May 2008 10:48:00 EDT

The big election news out of last night was the victory of William Faulkner impersonator Travis Childers (D) in the blood-red first Misssissippi House seat. A district that voted 63-37 for Bush over Kerry (up from 59-40 for Bush over Gore) went for the Democrat by eight points. The excuses for Republican loser Greg Davis just aren't there.

After losing special elections in Illinois and Louisiana, the House GOP conference already expects a bad year for their party. But those two districts voted for President Bush by eleven and nineteen points, respectively, not by a whopping twenty five points. "People are going to want change," said a top aide to a leading House Republican. "The excuses, that [Davis] didn't have the resources or that he wasn't from the right part of the district, that's just not going to hold up."

The party's official statement is actually pretty bleak:

Tonight’s election highlights two significant challenges Republicans must overcome this November. First, Republicans must be prepared to campaign against Democrat challengers who are running as conservatives, even as they try to join a liberal Democrat majority. Though the Democrats’ task will be more difficult in a November election, the fact is they have pulled off two special election victories with this strategy, and it should be a concern to all Republicans.

There's still some lame spin buried in there. Of course Democrats running in conservative districts are running as conservatives. For starters, they're conservatives. Childers is going to join the Blue Dog conference in the House and vote against his party on basically every social issue. Republicans don't run stone-cold conservatives in northeastern, Democratic-leaning districts, and the people they do elect are like Chris Shays and Linc Chafee—reliable votes for a Republican speaker, reliable back-stabbers on a bunch of other stuff.

A fun footnote: In 1989, Trent Lott was serving his first term in the Senate when Larkin Smith, the Republican elected to his old House seat in southeast Mississippi, died in a plane crash. Lott forced Smith's widow out of the race and installed his aide Tom Anderson, who blew the election by 30 points to still-Rep. Gene Taylor. How did Mississippi's first district open up this year? Trent Lott quit his Senate seat and the GOP elevated MS-01 Congressman Roger Wicker to fill his slot.

So, Trent Lott: He turned two of Mississippi's House seats blue.

West Virginia: Our Most Important State

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 13 May 2008 17:40:00 EDT

West Virginia (7:30 p.m.) Barack Obama is lucky, damn lucky, that he convinced the punditocracy of his inevitability last week. If he had lost Indiana by a landslide and North Carolina by a little, West Virginia's primary would be getting more attention than it is. And even the little attention it's getting is focusing on Obama's crippling weakness with a certain segment of white voters. The Politico's roundup of the primary includes this wonderfully depressing facts for Obama:

- He's trailing by 49 points in Morgan County, the state's reliable swing county.
- His positive-negative numbers are 44-41, compared to Clinton's 70-21.
- One pollster, reading this, says "Obama may have to write off West Virginia come November."

The good news for Obama? The states he's losing aren't worth as much as the states he's winning. I discussed this with Eric Dondero on BlogTalkRadio last night. Dondero was crowing that the Democrats were losing Southern whites forever with their foolhardy Obama nomination, and I argued that they could afford to, because the electoral power of those voters is vanishing. West Virginia's a good example. From 1913 to 1963, the state had six congressmen and eight electoral votes. Now it has three congressman and five electoral votes. It's the 10th slowest-growing state: A political party would get far more out of locking down Hispanic votes in Nevada (5 electoral votes, set to become 6 electoral votes in 2012) than locking down poor whites in West Virginia or even Kentucky. Congressional re-districting is going to pulverize these states.

Look at it this way. Say the Democrats win the White House with the states Al Gore won in 2000 plus West Virginia. In 2000, they would have been worth 271 votes. In 2008, they will be worth 269 votes—enough to toss the election into the House of representatives. In 2012, they will be worth only 259 votes, as the rust belt and mid-Atlantic states lose clout to the West and sun belt. The smart thing for either party, then, is to win those latter states. The GOP would gladly give up its West Virginia surge if it could stop bleeding support in Colorado and (to a much lesser but more worrying extent) Texas.

So, having argued that West Virginia doesn't matter much... Clinton will beat Obama like a country drunk who's walked in on his wife and the milkman. It will be called within one tenth of one nanosecond of the polls closing. Obama could well lose all 55 counties: The only places I'd give him a chance are Cabell (home of Marshall University) and Monongalia (home of Morgantown and WVU). There's a little mystery about how many votes the still-on-the-ballot John Edwards will get, but not much mystery. I'd predict Clinton 67 percent, Obama 30 percent, with Clinton netting 8 delegates.

Mississippi-01 (8 p.m.) - The Democrats have a good chance at winning this open U.S. House seat tonight, vacated by Rep. Roger Wicker (R) when he replaced Trent Lott in the Senate. They came within 400 votes of doing that in the first round of the primary, but Democrat Travis Childers fell below the 50 percent mark, and Republican Greg Davis rallied his troops for this runoff. It's gained national attention for two reasons. First, if the GOP loses, it would be its third straight special election loss after blowing Dennis Hastert's Illinois seat and the Baton Rouge-area seat of Richard Baker. Second, if the GOP wins, it will be the first time a candidate rode to victory by linking a Democrat to Barack Obama. A series of TV ads accused Childers of being endorsed by Obama (not technically true). The Democrats have outspent the GOP, their local machine is pretty good, and Childers only needs about 27 percent of the white vote to win, but I feel like Davis will hold on.

Inspired by the comments, one more video...

UPDATE 7:50: Clinton wins by 2 to 1, at the higher end of expectations. A week of "check out this rube who hates black people!" stories comes mercifully to an end.

Could Obama have kept it closer? He's losing groups he's won before, like under-30s (by 16 points), college graduates (by 11 points) and people making more than $100,000 (by 6 points). Mystifyingly, he does better with white Catholics than Protestants. But the numbers of people who think he ran a dirty campaign and isn't trustworthy blows away anything we've ever seen before. It's incredible that his campaign once hoped for a 12-point loss.

The number of whites who said race mattered in their vote was almost as high as the number in Mississippi. It's a bit too much for Obama to write off. So, here's a question: What would have happened had the DNC juggled the states and made West Virginia, not Iowa, the first contest? Would Barack Obama have managed to recreate his appeal in that state? Would he have hit a wall and come in third to Edwards and Clinton, maybe in that order? With black voters convinced that they had no shot at electing a black president, would they have stuck with Clinton and helped her beat Edwards? That's how I see it playing out.

One possible preview of the fall: John Kerry lost this state handily to George W. Bush. Yes, 50 percent of those voters were Democrats... but Bush won one in three Democrats. Compare that to Pennsylvania, where only 15 percent of Democrats voted for Bush. This is one state where those voters promising to drop out and vote McCain in November are going to stick to that.

UPDATE 8:15: No numbers from Mississippi, but apparently DeSoto County -- Davis's strongest county -- had to request extra ballots.

UPDATE 8:28: Wow. I expect these numbers to shift through the night, but the protest vote in WV is enormous. With barely anything in, 7 percent of the vote is going to neither Clinton nor Obama. In the GOP race, 11 percent is going to neither McCain, Huckabee or Paul. This won't matter delegate-wise for either party, though. The Democrats re-weight their votes, discounting anyone who doesn't hit the 15 percent threshhold.

UPDATE 8:43: Are the days of Obama underperforming exit polls over? CNN has gently massaged its poll, and now shows Clinton getting closer to 64 percent of the combined vote... down from about 67 percent earlier. I'd be shocked if an electorate so anecdotally Obamaphobic lied to pollsters about this.

UPDATE 8:48: I think the GOP will hold MS-01. Childers is underperforming, and he only won by 49-46 last time.

UPDATE 9:10: Every time the Clinton camp breathes heavily about "no Democrat winning the White House without West Virginia," keep in mind that Dukakis, Carter (in 1980), Humphrey and Stevenson all won the state and lost the presidency.

UPDATE 9:13: Maybe I was wrong about MS-01. About 1/3 of Davis's base county, DeSoto, is in. He won it by 65 points last time, and is winning it by 45 now. If that margin holds (admittedly a dubious proposition) it's 1000 votes or so in Childers' pocket. Also, those DeSoto turnout predictions seem fishy... so far it's casting about as many votes as last time.

UPDATE 9:17: Good news for Childers. Last time, Yalobusha County cast 1,161 votes and broke 48-46 for Davis. This time, it cast 2,239 votes and broke 59-41 for Childers.

If the Democrats pull this off, expect to see Paul Begala mocked for this quote:

[What Howard Dean] has spent [the DNC's money] on apparently, is just hiring a bunch of staff people to wander around Utah and Mississippi and pick their nose. That's not how you build a party. You win elections. That's how you build a party.

If the GOP loses, not so much.

UPDATE 11:34: Childers won by 8 points, after winning the first round of the election by only 3. To recap, here was one of Davis's ads against him.

Mixed message for superdelegates tonight. On the one hand, Obama's still hopeless in Appalachia. On the other, Republicans tied a Democratic candidate to him and failed... in Mississippi.

I Am A Man of Constant Sores

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 13 May 2008 10:49:00 EDT

Barack Obama, trying to stitch back together his reputation with Jewish voters, gives a hearty interview to Jeffrey Goldberg. They talk about Israel and the settlements.

BO: Look, my interest is in solving this problem not only for Israel but for the United States.

JG: Do you think that Israel is a drag on America’s reputation overseas?

BO: No, no, no. But what I think is that this constant wound, that this constant sore, does infect all of our foreign policy.

Republicans respond:

It is truly disappointing that Senator Obama called Israel a ‘constant wound,’ ‘constant sore,’ and that it ‘infect[s] all of our foreign policy.’

Warbloggers respond (it's at Little Green Footballs, so I won't link it):

Obama: Israel is a "Constant Sore."

Look: You have to be a liar, idiot, or both to think Obama was referring to Israel with that. How can a country be "constant"? A struggle can be constant, as can a conflict, or a "problem." That's the antecendent of Obama's "constant sore" comment. If the Republican strategy to turn Jewish voters against Obama is to prey on their lack of basic reading skills, well, good luck.

The irony is that Obama provides plenty of grist for honest skeptics, and David Frum goes over them here:

Notice what is embedded here:

(1) a condescending assumption that the so-called hawkish position on the Arab-Israeli dispute is "blind" and adopted by US politicians only because they seek political safety - there's no acknowledgement that the dovish position was ever tried or that it in fact produced a terrible war in 2000-2003;

(2) the attitude, common on the Democratic left, that real friendship to Israel consists in compelling Israeli governments to do things that most Israelis regard as dangerous;

(3) acceptance of the red herring that it is "settlements" that are the source of the Arab-Israeli dispute;

(4) enormous and unexplained confidence that he can solve a problem through his personal intervention.

Could Tom Tancredo Have Been... Wrong?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 13 May 2008 09:55:00 EDT

The Washington Post reports on a new study revealing the quicker and quicker adaptation of immigrants to American norms.

In general, the longer an immigrant lives in the United States, the more characteristics of native citizens he or she tends to take on, said Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor at Duke University and author of the study. During periods of intense immigration, such as from 1870 to 1920, or during the immigration wave that began in the 1970s, new arrivals tend to drag down the average assimilation index of the foreign-born population as a whole.

The report found, however, that the speed with which new arrivals take on native-born traits has increased since the 1990s. As a result, even though the foreign population doubled during that period, the newcomers did not drive down the overall assimilation index of the foreign-born population. Instead, it held relatively steady from 1990 to 2006.

"This is something unprecedented in U.S. history," Vigdor said. "It shows that the nation's capacity to assimilate new immigrants is strong."

What left-wing, Soros-and-la-Raza-funded "think tank" belched this out, anyway?

The study, sponsored by the Manhattan Institute...

Oh. Well.

Obviously, a large school of restrictionists believe in restriction as a means of assimiliation. This is an old Peter Brimelow hobby horse: The immigration waves before the 1920s were so successful because the "time out" between then and the 1965 Immigration Act stopped flooding cities with new arrivals who would have retarded the assimiliation of the old arrivals. But if assimiliation is quickening without a strategic pause...

Mike Gravel on the Libertarian Party, Nuclear War, and Spineless Democrats

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:38:00 EDT

A week ago, I had a lengthy conversation with Mike Gravel about his run for the LP nomination. To my knowledge, this was before he cut the "Obama Girl" video, but it makes an interesting contrast... if you were told "a former Democratic senator has entered the Libertarian race on a platform of direct democracy and radical civil rights expansions," you'd probably thoughtfully stroke your goatee. When you're told "wacky video guy Mike Gravel said something," you laugh and move on.

I've uploaded the whole 90-minute talk here, and I'm taking my sweet time transcribing it but want to make it available before a coming reason event with Gravel and other Libertarian candidates.

Bob Barr's Announcement

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 12 May 2008 14:04:00 EDT

The smallish room Bob Barr booked for his presidential announcement was overflowing with journalists. I've seen every Ron Paul 2008 event held at the venue, and they never drew this sort of interest: There were, I think, four working reporters at the press conference announcing the haul from the first moneybomb. But Barr's announcement drew live reporters from the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post (even if it was the famously snarky "Sketch" author Dana Milbank). Barr foreign policy pal Doug Bandow stood by him at the podium, and foreign policy maven Jim Bovard sat in the audience.

I doubt the interest will keep up unless Barr's promises come true and he becomes a "credible candidate" for the White House with a chance to win a plurality of the vote. The press corps wanted to know two things: Could Barr be stumped on any policy questions? Did he explicitly want to spoil the election for McCain? The answers were no and no, although Barr's "spoiler" answer wasn't entirely credible. "The thought has never crossed my mind," he said. Well, sure it has. After the conference, Barr's political adviser Russ Verney told me that Barr had tested the waters with an exploratory committee because he didn't want to run if he couldn't win. "There are substantial risks," Verney said. "We're talking about alienating life-long friends. We're talking about putting your credibility on the line." The main thing that would cause Barr to lose friends would be, of course, if he Nadered McCain.

So the media attention puts to rest the claims of rival candidates, like Christine Smith, that Barr is anything but the biggest publicity draw in the race. He was notably less dry than the figure the Washington press remembers from the Clinton impeachment. Ralph Z. Hallow of the Washington Times framed a question about immigration in terms of public "compassion." Barr filibustered a little. "No one's ever accused me of being a compassionate conservative," he said. "Am I compassionate? You could ask my wife." A bit after Barr said he opposed a specific timetable for withdrawal from Iaq, Sean Higgins of Investor's Business Daily asked if Barr knew which states he'd be targeting. "Yes." Higgins asked him to elaborate. "Just as it's not strategically sound to tell the enemy your timetable for withdrawal..." Barr explained.

Is Barr picking up the Ron Paul vote? He acrobatically avoided tying his campaign to Paul, but I talked to a few familiar Paulites in the audience. Ron Paul Rider Michael Maresco, who staged a 60-day bike ride across the country to support Paul, shook hands with Barr then told me he would back him. Brad Jansen, a ubiquitous DC organizer for Paul and manager of one of the Ron Paul Republicans' campaigns for the House (Vern McKinley, in the DC exurbs), talked to Barr about writing a follow-up to his 2002 Liberty article defending him against attacks by the then-leadership of the LP.

The audio of the press's questions is here. The reporters are hard to hear, but Barr's voice should be clear.

What About Bob?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 12 May 2008 10:33:00 EDT

Ralph Z. Hallow has the latest on Bob Barr's presidential bid: Republicans are grabbing him by the collar and begging him not to run. Figuratively speaking.

Mr. Barr says even people who have tried to dissuade him understand why he thinks it important to raise issues from what he calls a "genuinely conservative" perspective and to offer alternatives to the positions of the two major-party candidates.

"In the month since we formed our exploratory committee, not a single Republican who has spoken with me to try and convince me not to seek the Libertarian nomination has disagreed with my reasons for considering a run," Mr. Barr told The Times yesterday in an e-mail exchange before leaving London on a flight to Atlanta.
...
Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told The Times yesterday that "Bob Barr will make it marginally easier for Barack Obama to become president. That outcome threatens every libertarian value Barr professes to champion."

I don't see a lot in Gingrich's ever-shifting "real change" agenda (last week, it featured a temporary gas tax cut. Real! Change-y!) to prove Barr wrong. Stacy McCain simply laughs at the re-packaging of John "political free speech is overrated, anyway" McCain as a vessal for libertarian values.

Barr's announcement comes at 11 a.m. in downtown D.C., and I'll have a report afterward.

Radio is Cleaning Up the Nation

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 12 May 2008 09:53:00 EDT

My voice will travel the ether twice today, packaged for delivery into your home—if you want it. At 11:35 a.m. I'll be on the Mark Carbonaro Show (listen here) discussing Big Labor's coming power grab with the Employee Free Choice Act. At 8 p.m. I'll be on Blog Talk Radio talking aout the Libertarian Party nomination fight.

The Weekend Political Thread: Long Goodbye Edition

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Sat, 10 May 2008 10:36:00 EDT

Unconvincing Quote of the Week
"Some call you swing voters. I call you Americans." Hillary Clinton, speaking to white people.

The Week in Brief
- The Democratic primaries effectively ground to a half as Barack Obama won a landslide in North Carolina and narrowly lost Indiana.
- Hillary Clinton refused to quit the race, praying for expected (Kentucky, West Virginia) and surprise (Oregon) wins in the remaining primaries to rattle the superdelegates.
- Bob Barr geared up for an official entry into the presidential race.
- Ron Paul's book rocketed to the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
- Rep. Walter Jones, the last anti-war Republican on the ballot in 2008, handily won re-nomination.

Below the Fold
- Libertarian Party co-founder David Nolan crafts a nomination strategy for the top 6 LP candidates. (One striking thing about this race is that the anti-Barr, anti-Root forces don't deny that Barr could get more votes than a candidate in the Badnarik mold. It brings to mind the war against McCain in the GOP primary: Conservatives were willing to trade the more electable McCain for the more doctrinaire, for the moment, Romney.)
- Brian Friel talks to Democrats about their coming, 1932 or 1964-sized landslide.
- John Judis wrings his hands about Obama's electability.
- Most of the Libertarian presidential candidates (except for Barr, Root and Phillies*) demand a new 9/11 inquiry.
- Matt Labash goes to the prom.

Did someone request mid-decade Marillion live? No? Too bad.

*This has been corrected -- I forgot about Phillies when I originally posted.

Will Ron Paul Support a Third Party Candidate? Ask Ron Paul.

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Fri, 09 May 2008 13:06:00 EDT

Constitution Party presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin has launched his web site, and as the boys at Third Party Watch point out, it's calculated to make him look like Ron Paul's heir. No surprise there. Constitution Party founder Howard Phillips pushed delegates to nominate Baldwin over Alan Keyes on the cryptic promise that Paul secretly supported Baldwin and that the vast riches of the Paul campaign were "resources we can look to."

I saw Ron Paul on Wednesday, at a signing event for The Revolution, and he told me he won't endorse Baldwin or Barr. He'll kinda-sorta endorse both. He won't stop them from using photos of him or talking about his campaign.

"Chuck was in my office today to say hello," Paul said. "but I haven't said anything about supporting either one of them. I support both of them in what they're doing, and I encourage them, but that's all."

"Maybe you'll endorse McCain and surprise everybody," asked one of the people walking out of the event with us. "That would surprise me, too!" said Paul. But this is actually a sticking point in the Paul campaign: Some people in his circle want him to swing his weight behind McCain once the primaries are over. At the moment, they're being overruled.

On a related note, back in Pennsylvania I asked Paul if he'd weigh in and help the "Ron Paul Republicans" who are running for office using all or part of his platform. He's started doing so in earnest, buoyed by the easy victories of candidates like BJ Lawson. Here's a quick-'n'-painful endorsement he shot for Amit Singh, fighting for Virginia's 8th district (a safe Democratic seat held by the deeply flawed Jim Moran).

If Dirty Want His Money, I Think Y'All Should Give Him His Money

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:50:00 EDT

I predict that Steven Ybarra of Sacramento will end this primary as the Democrats' least popular superdelegate. Why?

He says he'll sell his vote for a price. A very high price: $20 million.

Steven Ybarra of Sacramento says that eight-figure price is peanuts for the presidency.

When asked whether it was right to offer what is clearly a quid pro quo, he responded, "yeah, absolutely. People do it all the time," answered Ybarra.

But not in public! And not for $20 million. J.D. Rockefeller bought the Senate for less than that!

Ybarra isn't trying to enrich himself—he's bribing the party to spend money "registering and educating eligible Mexican-American voters, who he calls the key to the White House." It's yet another reminder of how foolhardy the Clintonites sound (or in-kind allies like Rush Limbaugh) when they talk about the small-d democratic values of the primary. There's no election less democratic than a Democratic primary. Wintry, tiny states get godlike powers over the citizens of the other 48. Electoral vote-less places like Guam and Puerto Rico have a say. "Momentum" is almost totally hostage to quirks of the calender—how strong would Obama look now, for example, if Indiana (swing) and Pennsylvania (strong Clinton) had had their primaries on Tuesday, and not Indiana and Obama's sure-thing North Carolina?

Bob Barr is Your President

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 08 May 2008 11:49:00 EDT

Former Rep. Bob Barr's campaign won't confirm or deny it, but John Martin is reporting that Barr will move from an exploratory bid to an official presidential run on Monday.

As I reported last week, Barr is the frontrunner, narrowly, for the Libertarian Party nomination—it's been a close three-way race between him, Wayne Allyn Root, and Mary Ruwart. Root-backing South Carolina delegate Stewart Flood tells me that he was "on the fence" as long as Barr didn't officially declare, but he's "definitely supporting him" come Monday. "I'm sure Wayne's not happy," Flood says, "but he knows my position. I think he'd make a great running mate." (I pointed out to Flood that Root has said he'd turn down the vice presidential nomination: "If Wayne doesn't want the VP under Bob, I'll buy a hat so I can eat it."

Candidate George Phillies, who has theorized that Barr was going the "exploratory committee" route because he didn't think he could win the nomination, didn't express much surprise. "If he tried announcing his bid at the convention it would get complicated," Phillies says. "This way he has a chance to make a legitimate case to the delegates. He must think he can pull it off." (Phillies has his own motives, obviously, but the "Barr won't get in because he's scared to lose" meme was swirling around when I talked to delegates.)

Phillies isn't intending to step aside for Barr. "My current reaction is that if he’s the nominee he’ll blow the party apart," he says. "The entire radical wing will walk. Some of the centrists will walk. Bob may get the nomination and go after some of those disaffected conservative voters, but it would be a dismal result for the party."

UPDATE: A statement from Wayne Allyn Root:

Bob Barr is a fine man and a solid candidate- with a well-known name in D.C. political circles.
But the Libertarian Party is an anti-establishment, anti-big government, anti-tax, anti-D.C. insiders party. Bob is a politician, ex-prosecutor and lawyer- just like virtually every single candidate offered by the Republicans and Democrats.

On the other hand, I offer a very different and unique image and attitude for the LP. I'm the ANTI-POLITICIAN. I'm a son of a butcher, 2nd generation American, small businessman, home-school father of 4 young children (including a brand new baby), and a citizen politician. I'm the quintessential Washington D.C. outsider. I've never worked in DC, never lived in DC, never done business with the government, never collected a check from government (other than a student loan - which I paid back in full). That's a very different resume for a Presidential candidate.

Amazingly, I've actually created jobs. I've actually risked my own money to start businesses. I've actually made payrolls and signed checks so others could live the American Dream. I've actually paid the health insurance for my employees. How's that for different? I don't just talk about jobs...and the economy...and the problems of small business...and the health insurance crisis- I've lived it. This is the stuff that politicians, prosecutors and lawyers just talk about!

And in a country where small business now creates the majority of non-government jobs, I think a President who understands the unique issues and problems facing small businessmen and women is the perfect person to put in the White House.

If a third party wants to think "out of the box" and present a unique candidate that fires up the spirit and passion of American voters who are obviously sick of "the same old, same old" and the same D.C. status quo, I'm the rebel with a pitchfork. That's a picture that will make huge inroads versus the 2-party system in 2008. As opposed to running a politician, ex-Congressman and lawyer to defeat who? A bunch of politicians, Congressman and lawyers. And where is Congressman Barr announcing his decision? In Washington DC of course. I spend my life figuring out ways to avoid going near the federal government or stepping foot in D.C. Quite a difference in image and attitude.

As far as media, let's compare my record to former Congressman Barr or former Senator Gravel. I'm able to attract major national media because of who I am and what I have to say, not what I've been (an ex-politician).

The media is attracted to me because I have interesting things to say and because I always say it in a dynamic, passionate and colorful way that makes Americans stop the channel and take notice. That's precisely what the LP so desperately needs. Not just someone with a great Libertarian message- but someone who can translate that message in a way that appeals to mainstream American voters.

Having said all that, I look forward to presenting our messages and visions to LP voters at our convention in Denver.

UPDATE: Mary Ruwart responds.

There are a lot of good things about Barr candidacy, and there are some things that trouble me. One thing that bothers me is his endorsement of the Fair Tax. I think we should eliminate the income tax and replace with nothing. That’s something we’ve been saying for years in the Libertarian Party. The fact that he wants to replace the income tax suggests that Bob is not serious about cutting spending.

There's something else I talked about with Bob several weeks before: The legalization of hard drugs. He said he'd come down on the side of liberty, and he said he'd express that in the media. But when he went on Hannity and Colmes he got pushed to the wall by those guys. And once again he took a different position than the LP has taken.

He sponsored the Defense of Marriage Act, something that's making a lot of gay couples very unhappy, and the gay community has produced some of the biggest supporters of the LP. I'd hate to think of doing anything that would antagonize that community.

Bob has made quite a turnaround in his views, and that's a good thing. He's seen the light: That's a powerful message to Republicans disillusioned with the major parties. If I were in Bob’s shoes I’d certainly run for president, but four years ago, not this time. I'd correct my record on DOMA, my hard drugs stances, my tax stances. Our standard bearer should epitomize the libertarian philosophy in entirety, and present it in an attractive package to the country. If our standard bearer doesn’t believe in liberty, how can we convince the American people to do so?

Ruwart didn't rule out running as a VP candidate to Barr "if I felt it would be good for the party."

Jesse, Are You Listening?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Thu, 08 May 2008 09:32:00 EDT

Q: Could the Libertarian Party nomination fight draw in a third legendary former-office holder?

A: No. No, it couldn't. But former Minnesota Gov. Jesse "the Mind" Ventura gave an interview to Maria Heller a week ago, from his Mexico hideaway, where he opened the possibility of the LP gratefully awarding him its presidential slot. Thirty-two minutes into the video he starts discussing it.

I had somebody from the Libertarians contact me, and they said their convention is in May, and I don't know if this is true but he claims they have ballot access in all 50 states.

They actually don't, but Ventura says he'll explore it "when I get back in country May 15." He follows up this thought with a discussion of the 9/11 "truth" movie Loose Change. If the party could reject the brainy-but-conspiracy-minded Aaron Russo, the chances of Jesse Ventura parachuting into the race a week before the convention and seizing the nod are... slim.

There was a time in 1999 and 2000, dimly-remembered now, when Ventura really could have jumped into the presidential race, gotten taken seriously, and as much as 22 percent of the country would consider voting for him. Ventura has definitively joined the Chuck Hagel Memorial Home for Candidates Who Blew Their Chance.

In the "candidates who didn't blow their chance" file: Ron Paul's The Revolution will be #1 on the New York Times bestseller list this weekend.

Headline disturbingly explained here.

You Make Me Feel Mighty Real

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 07 May 2008 12:25:00 EDT

I'm at a bipartisan Cato Institute event with South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford (R) and Montana Sen. Jon Tester (D), both of them opponents of the REAL ID Act.

Sanford, who turned back threats from the Department of Homeland Security, starts with some throat-clearing quotes from Jefferson about human freedom. "You could look up Locke, you could look up Hume, you could look up Burke. This debate is not about REAL ID - it's about the tenuous balance of liberty."

More Sanford: this represents the "Maginot Line" of the 21st century's debate on freedom. He rejects the scaremongering about what terrorists will do if we don't have a REAL ID. "Terrorists will always be asymmetrical in their attacks."

He goes after Congress: "There have been more debates about steroid use in baseball players than there have been about this issue." The REAL ID is "the mother of all unfunded mandates. If Washington can no longer afford the bill, the last-ditch effort is handing the bill to someone else."

"Outside of the liberty component, outside of the security standpoint, if you care about spending you'd ought to care about REAL ID."

On the time it'd take to assign people their IDs: "Two hours is a lot of time on earth. You can spend it with friends, you can spend it with family, or you can spend it in a DMV line."

Sanford rattles off a list of information abuses, like the passport file breaches of the presidential candidates. "One-stop shopping for every computer hacker around the world is not a good idea for our security."

Tester gets up to speak and tosses down the gauntlet. "When our rights get trampled upon, the terrorists win."

Tester calls the application of the law-"cringe"-worthy, especially the "arbitrary deadline" that states were given to comply. DHS is "using federal resources to bully states to go with the program." He points out that full agreement with the Act isn't mandated until 2017.

"Creating a national ID -- make no mistake, that's what REAL ID is -- will create countless opportunities to access our information in a way we have not agreed to."

"Just as the warrantless wiretapping issue has prevented Congress from passing actual legislation" to let us prevent terrorism, "so too has REAL ID distracted us."

More Tester: "There's a real tendancy for legislators to overreact because of what happened on 9/11." A modest proposal: "We ought to have some radar on the northern border. On a dark night, if you fly across the border, no one can see you. If they've got a REAL ID in their pocket, who gives a damn?"

Sanford shouts out to Bob Barr: "He's now travelling the country talking about the problems with the PATRIOT Act." He calls federalizing the TSA "a gut-check vote" for real conservatives."

Tester gets an easy question from the audience about Montana's local effort to improve driver's licenses. "You're dead spot-on. If Montana can make a non-counterfeitable driver's license, any state in the union can do it." He has to skedaddle early: "I could talk about this stuff all day!" Sanford echoes him on cost: Jim Harper, the moderator, says the biggest worry is the national database.

One of the questioners asks if nullification is an option for states. "I'm not a lawyer," Sanford says. "What's that mean?" The questioner gives a Jeffersonian example. "Huh," says Sanford. (John Calhoun could not be reached for comment.)

Sanford gets a question about the exact cost. He doesn't mark it, but he notes that the federal money that would come for this would be diverted from exisiting DHS grants. "We don't know if we're going to get hit by a terrorist, but we're going to be hit by hurricanes." So the money they want to spend on radios and evacuation plans would be blown on ID cards.

Sanford pounds home his objection to data centralization. "You can go back to the time of Pearl Harbor and the navy will say, 'I tell you what, it's not a good idea to keep all our ships in the same place." He doesn't have a problem with e-verify, since Social Security numbers are already in the system.

Sanford is asked what he'd do if he was still in Congress and "strong-armed" to vote for REAL ID. He doesn't think it's a huge worry because Congress is so congenial. Hm.

A questions comes about the penalties non-compliant states face. Sanford isn't worried about it, but he mocks "the bizarre legalistic dance" wherein he'll send a letter to DHS announcing South Carolina's non-compliance and "you'd get a letter back saying 'we very much appreciate it and we'll grant you an extention."

A long-winded questioner compares Sanford's fight against DHS to Fort Sumter. "That movie didn't end well," Sanford says.

Sanford tries to make some news by comparing the effort to fight REAL ID to the Obama campaign. "You'd have never have bet against the powerful apparatus" he was up against, but he built a grassroots network. "Talk to two friends, talk to three friends."

Landslides and Freedom Fries

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 07 May 2008 11:06:00 EDT

Two big stories that got mostly cut out of the coverage last night: The victory of Rep. Walter Jones in North Carolina and the narrow victory of Rep. Dan Burton in Indiana, both Republicans. Jones, who joins John Duncan and Ron Paul as one of the only anti-war, anti-surge Republicans in Congress, dispatched pro-war former Army officher Joe McLaughlin by 19 points, carrying 14 of 17 counties. Harbor no illusions that he did it because voters turned against the war. Jones simply finessed the issue, talking about health care and benefits for soldiers the way that Ron Paul does when he's hit on this.

"I think more and more Republicans are starting to understand after five years that the Iraqis need to step up and take responsibility," Jones said.

Jones retained some strong military support in his district, particularly among retired Marines and other veterans.

"We are close to the veterans and they knew it," Jones said.

Burton, meanwhile won by only 7 points (52 percent of the vote in a multiple-candidate race) over an emergency room doctor who hammered him on corruption.

Dr. John McGoff, who hammered Burton on ethics, thought he had a good shot to dethrone Burton, who has been in office since 1982 and routinely wins elections with about 70 percent of the vote.

McGoff's campaign had criticized Burton for missing votes in order to play golf and for spending $200,000 in taxpayer funds to send mailers to constituents during the heat of the campaign.

Burton -- who has been unbeatable and, apparently, unfazed about negative media coverage in the past -- may have received an assist from Republicans choosing to vote Democrat today.

I think it was a combination of that and Burton belatedly engaging in the race. If Burton had fallen asleep at the wheel and the GOP had a competitive presidential race yesterday, McGoff would be heading to Congress.

The third underreported story: John McCain's dramatic underperformance in his uncontested, beauty contest primaries. Even as activist, talk radio-listening Republicans (who don't like McCain) bolted into the Democratic race, McCain won only 78 percent of the vote in Indiana and 74 percent in North Carolina. That's compared to George W. Bush's 81 percent and 79 percent in 2000, at the same time in the primaries, when he also had it locked up. McCain plunged as low as 67 percent in Indiana's Whitley county and 57 percent in North Carolina's western Madison County. (The famous Madison County is actually in Iowa.)

Ron Paul came in third in both states, but his campaign crowed about hitting a "milestone."

"The big picture is that now onemillion Republicans have voted or caucused for Ron in this primary," said Paul's spokesman Jesse Benton. "Once people come and get behind Ron, they're not soft supporters. They're committed. I think it sends the message that people want limited government."

I've chattered about "Operation Chaos" (the Limbaugh voters-for-Clinton plan) plenty, but after last night I realized exactly how bad it is for the GOP. The party's hardest hard-cores can't stand their nominee. They're driving to the polls to vote for Hillary Clinton in part because it's more fun than casting a McCain ballot. It's more fun to vote for Hillary Clinton. How the hell do you motivate them to turn out, phone bank, donate to their ticket in the fall?

Wave Goodbye to Hillary Clinton

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Wed, 07 May 2008 09:27:00 EDT

I said it almost three months ago: After Barack Obama's delegate-hogging blowouts through the month of February, there was no way Hillary Clinton could still become president. Sure, she's performed better than I expected in the post-February states. I always thought (as the Obama campaign thought) that she would lose Indiana. But her win there was ephemeral and will net her one (1) extra delegate, and it came after public and internal polls showed her winning another clear, thank-you-white-working-class-of-which-I-am-a-part victory of 5 to 10 points. Expectations ran away from the Clinton campaign. Today the pundits are discounting the squeaker win and saying, louder, what they've known since February.

Andrew Sullivan quotes the New York Times, assessing Obama's resilience under a monthlong scandal/negative storyline cloud, and jumps for joy.

Wright is a grenade that will fizzle. The right will try other gambits - the Ayers crap and if that doesn't work, look for them to take aim at Obama's wife. But Obama's survival - or rather the voters' refusal to make this election about the Freak Show - suggests that Newt is right. This will not work this year.

The Wright stuff, and a few other developments in the campaign, had me openly rooting against Clinton last night. There was a time at the start of the primaries when I credited Clinton for a more substantive campaign than Obama. When I saw Obama on the trail (I never caught a town hall, though West Virginia's not too far away...) his campaign would fabricate a rally that felt like the concert portion of an auto show. Hours early, voters would stream into the venue. They'd chatter and wave signs as the event got off to a late start. Obama would arrive and give a soaring, but warmed-over, speech of crescendos and promises and Mick Jagger moments. Then he'd leave. Clinton, on the other hand, would hustle in to a less-crowded event, give a short speech very long on policy, and start taking audience questions. Sometimes she'd get an odd one and answer it with a howler. But she was never uninformed.

This, we were told, was why Obama was winning and Clinton was losing. I thought that was unfair. Clinton's microtrendy town halls, her dull, wonky events, and her long debate answers seemed like the sort of stuff a candidate should do, and Obama's events and answers seemed like the stage-managed crap that lulls the electorate into electing a cypher.

That changed sometime after the February blowouts. Clinton's people looked at the numbers and saw which voters were sticking with them--which voters had moved to Obama, but could be snagged back. They saw whites with less income and less education. So they made a virtue out of that support. They retooled the campaign to go after them and to argue, implicitly, that to not do so, and to not win them, was rank elitism. This is what Noemie Emery found so appetizing about Clinton over the last leg of the campaign.

She is becoming a social conservative, a feminist form of George Bush. Against an opponent who shops for arugula, hangs out with ex-Weathermen, and says rural residents cling to guns and to God in unenlightened despair at their circumstances, she has rushed to the defense of religion and firearms, while knocking back shots of Crown Royal and beer. Her harsh, football-playing Republican father (the villain of the piece, against whom she rebelled in earlier takes on her story) has become a role model, a working class hero, whose name she evokes with great reverence. Any day now, she'll start talking Texan, and cutting the brush out in Chappaqua or at her posh mansion on Embassy Row.

Cultural feints like that were part of the strategy. The other part was dumb policy, like the "gas tax holiday" that Clinton spent the final week of Indiana/North Carolina pushing at events and on TV. I'm flabbergasted that it didn't work, but it didn't deserve to work. Coronation, 30-point-lead-era Clinton was comfortable enough to talk to voters like grown-ups.

The North Carolina/Indiana Primary Thread

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:00:00 EDT

A word about exit polls: The early ones suck. I do lots of parsing of the first, post-poll-closing wave of numbers, but they are faulty and they get massaged as the night goes on. I anticipated a closer-than-my-prediction race in Pennsylvania when the early exits had him winning the Philadelphia suburbs, but as the night went on Obama's 16-point lead there vanished. So if, for example, the first exit polls show Obama tying Clinton among west North Carolina whites, assume the data sucks.

Indiana (7 p.m.)
The Democrats. If Rev. Jeremiah Wright had greeted the new year with a self-imposed exile to Tibet, or if—even better—he'd turned off the cameras in Trinity United Church and never recorded himself saying "God damn America," Barack Obama would be knocking Hillary Clinton out of the race today. Sure, she would have tried to stagger on after losing Indiana and North Carolina. As Phil Klein points out, her "incredible resilience" is mostly a function of the fact that she's Hillary Clinton and started this race with legions of delegates in her pocket, one of the biggest fundraising lists on the planet, and a list of owed favors that approached Santa Claus naughty-or-nice-list-length.

But if not for Jeremiah Wright, Obama would be crushing her in both primary states. In its widely-circulated post-Super Tuesday spreadsheet of coming delegate fights, Obama's campaign predicted a 7-point win in Indiana. It was even more fertile territory than Wisconsin (they predicted a 7-point win and won by 17) or Virginia (they predicted 2 points and won by 29). It borded Illinois, and voters in the 1st and 8th congressional districts already knew and liked Obama. It was lousy with college towns. It had a small but energized black population that would pad his margin. Obama only needed to win about 40 percent of the white vote to carry the state, and he'd done that in Missouri, a demographically similar state.

Obama is weaker now and will probably lose what he called (in April) a "tiebreaker" state. He won't lose by the 10-point margin of Ohio or 9-point margin of Pennsylvania, because Indiana is more Midwestern than either of those states, and it doesn't touch on the Appalachian Mountains—the single strongest region for Clinton in the entire country. A win wouldn't be impossible, actually, because (as Robert Novak pointed out), Obama could pummel Clinton in the five most vote-rich counties and win, as long as he wasn't totally blown out in the other 87 counties. I think he'll win more than five counties but lose anyway. Clinton 53.5, Obama 46.5, with Clinton netting 5 delegates over Obama.

- Counties to watch: Hamilton, the wealthy, fast-growing county north of Indianapolis. If Clinton's winning easy there, Obama's coalition is coming apart. The Politico suggests that Howard County will be the swing area.

- Demographics to watch: Whites, of course, with a quick glance at the black vote. (The pollsters that show Clinton winning handily show her recovering ground with black voters, but they showed that in Pennsylvania and she lost them by 80 points.) In Pennsylvania Clinton won white Democrats by 30 points. If Obama closes that number to less than 20 points, he wins. If it expands, she wins easily.

- Voters to watch: Republicans. The impact of Rush Limbaugh's campaign (joined by some local hosts) to get Republicans to vote Hillary is really hard to measure, especially now that Obama's image has been damaged by Wright. Republicans went for Obama by 44 points in Wisconsin; they split 50-50 between the candidates in Ohio. (They weren't allowed to vote in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary.) Anecdotal evidence is that the Limbaugh voters are matched by the good-faith Clinton and Obama Republican voters.

- Issue to watch: The gas tax holiday. If exit pollsters ask about it, let's see if the Clinton pander worked.

The Republicans. It's really hard to tell what McCain's margin will be here, as thousands and thousands of Republicans will be bolting their primary to vote for Clinton or Obama. Huckabee, Romney, and Paul are all on the ballot. In 2000, Bush only got 82 percent of the primary vote even though he'd defeated McCain weeks earlier. So I'll guess McCain 78, Paul 10, Others 12.

North Carolina (7:30 p.m.)
I simply don't believe the tightening polls in this state. Not the ones that show it becoming a toss-up.Todd Beeton, a Hillary-leaning blogger, points out something in this expectation-setting post: Southern polls have always underestimated Obama's support as they underestimate the black vote gap between Obama and Clinton (they usually peg it at 50 points, and it ends up around 80) and lowball Obama's white vote. Of course, we haven't had a Southern primary since Wrightgate, and Clinton has worked North Carolina harder than any Southern state since Tennessee, which she won easily. Obama 55, Clinton 44, with a net gain of around 9 delegates for Obama.

- County to watch: Watuga. John Vaught LaBeaume explains why: It's the kind of rural whites-plus-blacks-plus-college kid county that Obama used to dominate.

- Voters to watch: Independents. They've padded Obama's margin in all of the pre-Wright states. What are they doing now?

- Issue to watch: Jeremiah Wright. Apparently voters were split 50/50 on whether they factored him into their vote. What did whites think?

The Republicans. This could actually get interesting. When John McCain criticized the state GOP for running an ad linking Obama and Wright to the state's Democratic gubernatorial candidates, he won his usual dollop of national praise and pissed off a lot of Republicans back here. McCain 72, Paul 12, Others 16.

Other races to watch: The 3rd and 4th district congressional races in North Carolina, and the 5th district race in Indiana. The former to see if Ron Paul endorsees are winning their elections, the latter to see if the grassroots can purge a well-fed insider Republican.

UPDATE 6:08: The Daily Kos has the only early exits that are ever any good: racial voting. Blacks went against Clinton in both states by about 85 points. That's nightmarish and much worse than in the polls that showed her closing strong--they showed her climbing back into the teens. In North Carolina, this matters. Assuming 33 percent black turnout, the difference between a 70-point loss of the black vote and a 85-point loss is about 4 points overall. She'd have to win about 71 percent of the white vote to overcome that.

UPDATE 7:03: NBC calls Indiana "too early to call," which must mean they have clear exits (or else they'd say "too close"). I'm guessing Obama isn't pulling the votes he needs in the Chicago burbs, which have been bombarded with Wright coverage.

UPDATE 7:06: Early, bullshit exits have Clinton winning by 4 in Indiana as Obama carries everything but the rural south and central parts of the state. I'm sure this'll get massaged.

UPDATE 7:11: On MSNBC, John Kerry is really pushing the "Rush Limbaugh is begging Republicans to vote Hillary" meme. They want to discredit a Hillary win if she takes it by the margin of crossover voters. Indeed, the exits have her winning Republicans.

UPDATE 7:30: North Carolina is called a nanosecond after polls close for Obama. Hey, Mickey Kaus, how's that "Obama by 3 or less" prediction holding up?

UPDATE 7:35: North Carolina exits look good, not great, for Obama. He held but didn't gain among white voters: He'll win about 38 percent of them, his best result outside of Virginia and Georgia. Also -- and expect this to change -- he's winning every region of the state. Landslides in the Research Triangle and Charlotte, single-digit wins everywhere else.

UPDATE 7:55: Basically nothing has been counted in the NC-3 and NC-4 races, but Jones and Lawson won big in early voting. Jones is up by 17 points, Lawson is up by about 40 points.

UPDATE 8:01: Unless northwest Indiana breaks for Clinton, she's not holding the current 14-point lead. Her vote is coming in early: Counties like Vigo, Jefferson and Floyd are counted, while Marion (home of Indianapolis) is 15 percent in and Lake (home of Gary) is completely out.

UPDATE 8:45: Good news from Marc Ambinder:

Campaign advisers are saying that the gas tax pause debate helped him ... though they're not terribly happy that the question wasn't on the exit poll questionnaire

Said one adviser:

"It blunted her appeal with middle and downscale and helped us in the burbs with upper income/college educated voters; it showed why Obama was different than her, which we needed to make people make the leap to vote for us. That didn't happen in PA or OH."

Ha. Also, ha.

UPDATE 8:51: Maybe Paul's biographical links to Pennsylvania made the difference for him, because he's running third behind Huckabee in both states. If he's lucky, though, he'll get 80,000 votes from both states, and cross the 1 million vote mark.

UPDATE 8:54: I don't know why NBC hasn't can't Indiana, as the crucial counties that needed to swamp for Obama are coming in rather weak for him. St. Joseph County (with South Bend) by 6 points, for example.

UPDATE 9:04: I just spoke to B.J. Lawson, who is clobbering Augustus Cho 70-30 with more than 60 percent of the vote counted. "We're very excited," he says, although he won't declare victory until Cho concedes. "We're ready to run a positive campaign based on Constitutional values."

UPDATE 9:15: Hm... Obama altered the Indiana line in his speech. He added the word "apparent" when congratulating Clinton on her Indiana win. MSNBC, at least, is eyeing Lake County and calling it too close to call. (It looks in some ways like Missouri, where Obama was losing, and several networks called it against him, until the final precincts of St. Louis came in. The problem for him is that Gary is not St. Louis.)

UPDATE 9:28: NC-3 is going to take forever to report... all of those hard-to-reach coastal towns. But Jones is widening his lead over McLaughlin. Everyone I know thinks Jones has it won.

UPDATE 9:43: Tim Russert is reiterating the "gas tax hurt Clinton" storyline -- it took the focus off Wright at the 11th hour and showed voters the non-pandering Obama they liked in the first place.

UPDATE 9:51: B.J. Lawson wins.

It's a landslide, and a surprisingly big total for a low-turnout GOP primary.

9:56: I can sense the spin moving away from "split decision" to "Obama wins." Even if Clinton wins Indiana now, it's within the margin of Limbaugh-listening spoilers.

10:15: The Daily Kos (yes, I'll link 'em again) begs Clinton to stay in for two weeks in order to reduce the embarrassment of Obama's coming West Virginia (May 13) and Kentucky (May 20) losses. He's on to something. Obama would lose both states even if Clinton dropped out five minutes ago. The question is whether Clinton can take Oregon (also May 20) from his column, something that seems less and less likely as Obama's coalition refuses to budge.

10:39: Clinton speaks! She claims to have "broken the tie" without actually declaring an Indiana victory. Because she can't declare it yet, if she can declare it at all. Sorry if I'm stepping on Ann Althouse's beat, but my God does Bill Clinton ever look red-faced and sad, standing behind Clinton. This is the body language of a mounting defeat.

10:47: With all but 5 (of 17) counties counted, Jones is winning his primary by 20 points. It's over. The pro-war bloc won't get its scalp.

Do You Remember Walter?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:01:00 EDT

Back in February, when anti-war Republican Rep. Wayne Gilchrest lost his safe Maryland House seat, anti-war conservatives wondered if the GOP was undergoing a purge. Ron Paul sent out a panicky fundraising letter, begging his friends to prevent him from getting Gilchrested. Joe McLaughlin, the county commissioner challenged Rep. Walter Jones in North Carolina's coastal 3rd district, crowed that he was closing in. There was plenty of anecdotal evidence for a McLaughlin surge, if you looked for it.

The walls at Cubbie's diner used to be plastered with pictures, stickers and campaign signs for Rep. Walter Jones, who championed the eatery's idea to serve up "freedom fries" in the days before the start of the Iraq war.

But the Republican soured on the war soon after it started, and now there's a new banner hanging above the grill: Joe McLaughlin for Congress.

"Walter abandoned us," said Cubbie's owner Neal Rowland. "Walter hopped on the bandwagon. But when the heat got turned up, he hopped off."

But today, I'm told to expect an easy Jones win, with McLaughlin unable to crack the 40 percent support floor. The last public poll showed Jones crushing McLaughlin by 38 points (with a high undecided vote); it was two months ago, but Jones has only consolidated since then.

He got lucky. McLaughlin talked to most of the right people in the district, and at least one D.C. conservative group was considering jumping into the race to help him. The meltdown of Republican congressional candidates in open seats and the paltry fundraising of the party's congressional campaign committee made a sure-thing incumbent with a fat bankroll look pretty good.

Meanwhile, in the Research Triangle-centered 4th District, B.J. Lawson is sounding confident notes about his primary. "We're getting an overwhelmingly positive reception when I meet people at the polls," Lawson says. "We have 20 percent of them covered. As far as I can tell, Augustus [Cho, Lawson's libertarian-bashing opponent] has signs out there but no one working the polls."

Turnout looks lighter than the general election of four years ago. When Lawson's wife visited a Wake County precinct, 600 voters had cast ballots by noon, compared to about 1200 in 2004. It's an open primary, where independents can vote in either race, and Lawson's seeing "the vast majority" of independents jump into the Democratic primary. (This is mixed news for Hillary Clinton: This is a district where Obama should be romping, and he needs high turnout, but independents are going to go heavily for him.)

Lawson wouldn't hazard a guess about how Ron Paul will do. "There isn't a get out the vote organization, but the guys from the MeetUp groups are doing a good job putting signs out there." The 4th district and its college towns will probably be one of Paul's best areas—it's the only place he campaigned.

Sort of related: Paul was asked about the "gas tax holiday" on Fox News today and pronounced it "a pretty good idea" but "foolish if you don't consider also cutting spending."

Wait... Ron Paul is Running for President?

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Tue, 06 May 2008 09:29:00 EDT

Drudge gives a traffic-driving link to Garance Franke-Ruta's short Washington Post story on the continuing Ron Paul campaign. The shocking headline: "Paul Campaign Never Ended, Spokesman Says."

Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) told supporters in early March, through a Web video, that he knew he was no longer in the running for the presidency, and aides said his campaign would be "winding down." But it turns out Paul never stopped running for president.

"He put out a video in which he said victory in the conventional sense was not available to us, but there was still much the campaign could try to accomplish," Ron Paul 2008 spokesman Jesse Benton said yesterday. "People in the press reported that as him dropping out when he was not dropping out."

So... shouldn't the campaign spokesman have, uh, corrected them? Paul hinted that he was dropping out twice. On February 9 he announced he was refocusing on his House re-election bid, a move interpreted as a strategic retreat to prevent Chris Peden from making the presidential bid an issue. Because it happened so soon after Dennis Kucinich completely quit the presidential race to save his House seat, the national press assumed that Paul was out. We got press releases, on the presidential campaign press release list, about endorsements in the 14th District.

The primary came, Paul won, and he made another cryptic statement about "winding down" the race. Was he just stating the facts, admitting that he'd shrunken his staff? Yes, he was. But the campaign basically let press and reporters report that Paul was quitting. It's not like they were caught unaware by reporters not caring about the campaign. I remember the press conference after the Dec. 16 moneybomb, where less than 10 reporters crowded a room built for 50 at the National Press Club to listen to Paul's financial team. (The Iowa press conference with the candidate himself was just as thinly attended.) The campaign didn't exactly get caught unaware by national reporters not taking the time to follow up, one-by-one, on a lengthy and opaque video where the candidate mutters Maoisms like "the campaign for freedom will continue in this new phase."

This had an effect on support. I was startled by how many people at Paul's Pennsylvania rallies actually thought he'd left the race, even after speeches where he talked about staying in the race. I wasn't startled when the campaign's last finance report showed monthly fundraising drying up. Now, Paul's doing so well with under-the-radar campaign work that all of this stuff starts to take on an air of cunning: Maybe if Paul was in the news, generic Republican voters wouldn't be about to give primary victories to two candidates he's endorsed in North Carolina, Walter Jones and B.J. Lawson. (One Paul ally joked to me over the weekend that the 16 percent Pennsylvania vote suggests "that Ron's biggest mistake was not 'ending' the campaign in November.")

The rEVOLution in North Carolina

dweigel@reason.com (David Weigel) — Mon, 05 May 2008 18:21:00 EDT

Book sales numbers aren't the only metric of success Ron Paul cares about now. He's finishing up a mini-tour of campuses in North Carolina and Indiana, reminding voters that he's on the ballot, bidding for protest votes that will (almost assuredly) pump his total for the primary season over one million. From the North Carolina stop:

Paul told the crowd that his hopes of winning the White House will continue to the end.

"If there's money in the bank and you want to continue the process and you want to go all the way to the convention and make sure our message is heard, that is what I intend to do," said Paul.

This from a two-city, two-campus stop in Durham and Chapel Hill. I assume the stops went as well as the stops I saw in Pennsylvania, probably with more repeat business by Paul fans driving from event to event. (Durham and Chapel Hill are closer than Gettysburg and State College.)

"It's improbable, but not impossible," said Bill Thompson, 75, who drives 150 miles round-trip from Sampson County to attend the weekly meetings of the The Wilmington Ron Paul 2008 Meetup Group.

You would have been hard-pressed to have missed the group's handwork over the past year. They've held signs at the intersection of College Road and Oleander Avenue, passed out anti-income tax leaflets on April 15, and even broadcast a continuous loop of an interview with Paul on a low-power radio station beaming on 1610 AM.

And, of course, they have put up roadside signs, which have sprouted like wildflowers. Many are hand-painted with slogans like "Dr. Paul Cured My Apathy," "Vote Ron Paul and Win a Free Country," and "Legalize the Constitution - Ron Paul '08."

"I don't think you can drive five minutes in Wilmington without seeing a sign," said Martin Goter, a computer repairman and a leader of the local group, which claims 160 members. Most are written on others' signs reclaimed from the dump.

The biggest libertarian event in the state won't be the presidential race, though. It'll be the 4th district congressional primary, where Paul activist B.J. Lawson is running against Augustus Cho, a deeply unimpressive candidate who's basically running to prevent a Paulite from getting the nomination. The second biggest event: The 3rd district primary, where Paul-endorsed anti-war Republican Walter Jones will beat pro-war challenger Joe McLaughlin like a drum. (I've met both of them and Joe's better than his campaign.)