2008

Tonight's primaries in Ohio, Texas, Rhode Island, and Vermont will settle nothing. It's already decided.

Barack Obama's still-likely nomination owes a debt to John Rawls: the inequalities built into the Democratic delegate selection system benefit the little states and history's most aggrieved figure -- the liberal activist. Let's say Hillary Clinton romps to victory in Ohio and Texas and Rhode Island. Tens of thousands of extra voters. At most, a few extra delegates. But a win is a win, right? Twenty-four ... okay, forty-eight hours later, when the afterglow has faded and the Hill raisers are on vacation, Clinton delegate guru Harold Ickes will sit down at his desk, scratch his chest through the open folds of his shirt, and have the same problem he has right now: Barack Obama's earned delegate lead is virtually insurmountable.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama square off in what is very likely to be their last debate.

For those of us who've watched about seventeen million Democratic primary debates since the campaign kicked off, last night's debate was profoundly unedifying. Wrangling over the question of an individual mandate to purchase health insurance does not, for example, become more interesting on repeat viewing. Worse, a large number of left-of-center experts believe that this disagreement isn't actually important, and has only come to appear significant because it's been talked about so much. To admirers of Bill Clinton's record on trade policy, it was somewhat painful to watch Barack Obama assail it followed by Hillary trying to insist that she'd never said anything positive about NAFTA rather than defending her husband's eminently defensible record (and her own history of public statements) on the merits.

Perhaps the debate's most noteworthy moment was when Tim Russert managed to remind us all once again why he's one of the most pernicious forces working in journalism today, seeking to link Obama to Louis Farrakhan's record of anti-Semitic statetements. Obama, of course, reiterated the fact that he harbored no such sentiments and had condemned Farrakhan on many occasions. Clinton responded with a bizarre salvo that sums up much of what's gone wrong with her campaign -- haranguing Obama for "denouncing" Farrakhan rather than "rejecting" his support.

As a result, the Democrats appear set to nominate a candidate with both a record and a platform that are a good deal more liberal than what the party's offered in recent years without him ever having faced sustained criticism from the right. For a liberal, freedom from the timidity that's reigned in the Democratic Party ever since 1994 is an exciting prospect, but a moment's thought of how untested the new, more self-confident liberalism actually is is also a bit frightening.

The New York Times hints at a McCain affair, and the crowd goes wild.

That wheezing noise you hear is the sound of Rush Limbaugh climbing down from his tree. Having inveighed against John McCain for months -- the wearisome Ann Coulter said she would support Hillary Clinton over him -- assorted right-wing commentators found their bluff called as he locked up the nomination. But, putting a new twist on the proverb that the enemy of your enemy is your friend, The New York Times has tossed the commentariat a line by publishing its report on McCain's coziness with lobbyists. "The lesson is liberals are to be defeated," Limbaugh grumbled, as he maneuvered his bulk earthward. Meanwhile, the chin-stroking has begun: Should the Times have hinted that McCain had a special interest in one lobbyist? Should it have run the story at all? Quibbles aside, the piece was legitimate, and press critics should be grateful that as their advertisers slip away, their stock prices sink, and their armchair critics multiply, the big papers are still ponying up for long-term investigations. What's too bad is that some truly shocking revelations haven't gotten so much attention. Maybe it's just not a scandal without sex. MORE

Hillary Clinton campaign struggles to recapture her once-formidable lead over Barack Obama.

Barack Obama may well be ready to destroy the deepest, most fundamental law of the political universe: that somewhere, somehow, the Clintons will find a way to win.

How can Hillary Clinton possibly pull this off? The mathematics are there. If two-thirds of the remaining superdelegates -- what her campaign cleverly and class-consciously insists on calling the “automatic” delegates -- break her way, then she will win.  The history is there, and this race has been full of black-swan moments.

The remaining 16 states and 816-odd pledged delegates will probably cut in her favor. Forget these static factors: for the first time, the elite political class is finally beginning to question -- or at least, to be aware of -- some of the irritating messianism of Barack Obama. 

The Clinton campaign calls for seating Democratic delegates from Florida and Michigan.

Hillary Clinton is going to have a comeback. A respectable showing in Wisconsin will propel Clinton forward in Ohio and Texas, where she enjoys deep reservoirs of support and demographic terrains that play to her strengths. So why, ask her Democratic critics, is her campaign so aggressively pushing the idea of seating delegates from Michigan and Florida? Keep in mind that all candidates agreed not to contest these elections as a nod to the first-in-the-nation caucus and primary states, and that there was an understanding that delegates selected in these uncontested primaries would not be seated. To many, this smacks of changing the rules in the middle of the game. Julian Bond, ostensibly neutral in the Democratic race, has argued that failing to seat the delegates would represent an effort to deny minority voters their basic rights -- an entirely novel charge that wasn't raised earlier on, before Obama established a small but significant lead. Obama supporters are horrified. 

Barack Obama wins convincingly in Maryland, D.C., and Virginia.

Is the Democratic race over? Has the momentum so decisively shifted to Barack Obama that Hillary Clinton no longer has a realistic chance? The most striking thing about last night's round of Potomac primaries is that results overturned the emerging consensus over "wine track" versus "beer track," women and men, blacks and Latinos. After Super Tuesday, Kenneth Bear noted that Clinton had become the candidate of the silent Democratic majority of working-class whites, Latinos, seniors, and women. But now that's changed as Obama racked up significant gains in these and other groups. To demonstrate that he's more than the candidate of feel-good politics, Obama is now training his guns on "Bush-McCain Republicans." And now the bruising counterattacks, the skullduggery, and the alarmism will begin anew.

Senator Clinton writes her own campaign a check for $5 million.

Politics has been good to the Clinton family. It has certainly been good for the Clinton family's wallets. Had Hillary and Bill Clinton never entered long, grueling careers in public life, it's easy to imagine that they would have become quite wealthy. But would they have somewhere between $10 and $50 million? And would they have nearly as many generous friends, willing to open their hearts and their homes and their wallets at a moment's notice? So when Senator Clinton loans her own campaign a tidy sum, perhaps it is best understood not as an act of desperation -- there is every reason to believe she will win the Democratic nomination -- but rather as a sound investment. While $5 million is an extraordinary sum for mere mortals, a Clinton restoration all but guarantees that it will be repaid comfortably and quickly, especially since her campaign was never really in dire financial straits. Don't cry for me, Chappaqua.

Mitt Romney withdraws from the presidential race, citing a love of America and an unwillingness to "surrender to terror."

So what does that say about Mike Huckabee, who isn't dropping out? One assumes that Huckabee also loves America, and indeed that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama feel much the same way, despite their alleged eagerness to "surrender to terror." A valedictory speech is meant to be gracious, and to be sure there are uplifting moments in Mitt Romney's swan song. But what is most striking is the strident tone. Against the conciliatory politics of an Obama or a McCain, Romney portrays political disputes as a form of warfare against culture-killing liberals. This sounds particularly odd from a passionless technocrat some call the Republican Al Gore. Granted, the speech was given at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where red meat is in high demand. It seems that Romney is hoping to establish himself as the conservative standardbearer in 2012. Steve Forbes, you'll recall, tried something eerily similar. And we all know how that turned out. 

McCain hasn't won the Republican nomination yet, but the fat lady is just about read to sing. So will the celebrated maverick right Rove's wrongs, win the White House, and build a more inclusive Republican majority? Or is he the second coming of Bob Dole, an irascible, ornery war hero with a temperament unsuited to the times? There have been moments when Americans valued the martial virtues most: duty, honor, courage. But these have been, in truth, brief moments, which followed the most serious, sustained, bloody conflicts -- the Civil War, the Second World War. Americans then inevitably turned to what you might call our national equilibrium, a state that is diverse, disputatious, commercially-minded, perhaps to a fault. It is this bustling, grasping, devout, disorderly country the aristocratic McCain hopes to lead, despite self-professed ignorance of matters economic, despite an apparent indifference to matters of the spirit. Republicans having second thoughts are running out of time ...  

Is the primary process broken?

We all know that John McCain crushed Mitt Romney in Tuesday's string of primaries. But what if the rules were just slightly different? Some states award their delegates on a proportional basis. Others are winner-take-all. Had you flipped around the states that were proportional and the states that were winner-take-all, Romney might have been in a much stronger position. Then there is the order of nominating contests. Would Fred Thompson still be in the race if South Carolina had gone first? Would Bill Richardson be the Democratic nominee if Texas came before Iowa?

Can John McCain be stopped?

Last night the battle for the Republican presidential nomination drew to a close. Or at least it seemed to draw to a close.  MORE

How John Edwards remade the Democrats

So who will John Edwards endorse? That's the question on the minds of Democrats everywhere now that the former senator and vice presidential candidate has bowed out of the race. MORE