William Katz: Urgent Agenda
Today's edition of SNIPPETS is here.
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Note to readers: Evening Update will be posted later than usual tonight as I'll be in a place with no signal. I regret the inconvenience.
AFTERNOON POSTING: MAY 9, 2008
Posted at 4:08 p.m. ET
LATEST POLLS
New tracking polls fail to show any new boom for Obama.
For the Democratic nomination: Rasmussen has Obama up eight over Clinton, but Gallup has him up only two. Two thirds of those in Gallup's survey were polled after this week's primaries in North Carolina and Indiana. The Clinton camp seems to be holding.
In the general: Rasmussen has Obama up three over McCain, but Gallup has him up only one.
Rasmussen has Clinton up five over McCain, whereas Gallup has her up four.
Clinton does better in the general than Obama, despite the fact that Clinton has been widely declared out of the race.
It's too early to make definitive statements about these results. But if they continue, the Democratic Party may have a serious problem with its Clinton contingent. They ain't gonna be pushed around that easily.
May 9, 2008. Permalink 
FRIDAY: MAY 9, 2008
Posted at 4:47 a.m.
THE OBITS
The obituaries for Hillary Clinton are already being written. Charles Krauthammer has one that's particularly perceptive:
WASHINGTON -- By the time Hillary Clinton figured out how to beat Barack Obama, it was too late. When she began the race in 2007 thinking she was in for a coronation, she claimed the center in order to position herself for the real fight, the general election. She simply assumed the party activists and loony left would fall in behind her.
However, as Obama began to rise, powered by the party's Net-roots activists, she scurried left, particularly with her progressively more explicit renunciation of the Iraq War. It was a fool's errand. She would never be able to erase the stain of her original war vote and she remained unwilling to do an abject John Edwards self-flagellating recantation. It took her weeks even to approximate the apology the left was looking for, and by then it was far too late. The party's activist wing was by then unbreakably betrothed to Obama.
And...
There's only one remaining chapter in this fascinating spectacle. Negotiating the terms of Hillary's surrender. After which we will have six months of watching her enthusiastically stumping the country for Obama, denying with utter conviction Republican charges that he is the out of touch, latte-sipping elitist she warned Democrats against so urgently in the last, late leg of her doomed campaign.
Yeah, he's probably got it right. We should always caution, though, that there's another major player in this race who gets very little mention - the president of the United States. We don't know what George W. Bush has in store for us these next eight months. Eight months are 100 lifetimes in politics. Bush does not strike me as the kind who will go gently or quietly, unless his father's crowd clamps down on him. I'd watch the Middle East or the Persian Gulf for moves that could have far greater impact on the presidential race than anything Obama or McCain could do.
May 9, 2008. Permalink
THE DIVORCE
Another grim remembrance. The Wall Street Journal writes of the divorce, without lawyers apparently, of the Clintons from the Democratic Party. It is painful, it is poignant. It is a paperback series:
Truth be told, this was always a marriage more of convenience than love. The party's progressives never did like Bill Clinton's New Democrat ways, but after Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis they needed his epic political gifts to win back the White House. They hated him for their loss of Congress in 1994, but they tolerated Dick Morris and welfare reform to keep the presidency in 1996.
But...
By the time Mrs. Clinton made her famous claim about dodging Bosnian sniper fire, Democrats and their media friends no longer called it a mere gaffe, as they once might have. This time the remark was said to be emblematic of her entire political career. The same folks who had believed her about Whitewater and the rest now claimed she never tells the truth about anything.
As the scales suddenly fell from liberal eyes, the most striking statistic was the one in this week's North Carolina exit poll. Asked if they considered Mrs. Clinton "honest and trustworthy," no fewer than 50% of Democratic primary voters said she was not. In Indiana, the figure was merely 45%.
Slowly but surely, these Prisoners of Bill and Hill are now walking away, urging Mrs. Clinton to leave the race. Chuck Schumer damns her with faint support by saying any decision is up to her. Columnists from the New York Times, which endorsed her when she looked inevitable, now demand that she exit so as not to help John McCain. With Mr. Obama to ride, they no longer need the Arkansas interlopers.
Ouch. Finally...
If the Clintons play to their historic form, they will ignore all this for as long as they can. They will fight on, hoping that something else turns up about Mr. Obama before the convention. Or they'll try to play the Michigan and Florida cards. Or they'll unleash Harold Ickes on the superdelegates and suggest that if Mr. Obama loses in November she'll be back in 2012 and her revenge will be, well, Clintonian.
The difference between now and the 1990s, however, is that this time the Clinton foes aren't the "vast right-wing conspiracy." This time the conspirators are fellow Democrats. It took 10 years, but you might say Democrats have finally voted to impeach.
Ouch plus. But I'm not so sure the Dems will slam the door completely on their 1990s couple-of-the decade. Jack Warner, the movie mogul, used to have a saying: "I don't want to see that SOB in my office again...unless I need him."
You never know when the Democrats will think they'll need the Clintons again. And if they don't, someone else might. If Obama loses, the Democratic Party could split. I can easily see Clinton, and Joe Lieberman, and Ed Rendell riding off in one direction, with Obama and Kerry and Howard Dean driving their Prius in the other. That could be such fun. Only political death, not the real kind.
May 9, 2008. Permalink
DANGER FOR OBAMA
Michael Gerson, the president's former speech writer, has emerged as an astute political columnist. Here he cautions that Barack Obama has two serious problems heading into the fall campaign.
Barack Obama -- the charismatic, weakened, patronizing, soaring, prickly, historic, inevitable nominee of the Democratic Party -- is now left with two related problems.
First, Obama's own missteps, amplified by Hillary Clinton's negativity, have defined a narrative likely to follow him until Election Day.
In politics, a narrative -- the widely held, sometimes-unfair shorthand that marks a candidate -- is difficult to shift. For Dan Quayle, it was fresh-faced intellectual vacuity. For John Kerry, it was a combination of hauteur and inconstancy.
The Obama narrative is intellectual and ideological (not social) elitism. Humble roots have never been a guarantee of intellectual humility, especially when a mind comes to flower at Columbia and Harvard. Obama's dismissal of small town views and values as "bitterness," "fear" and "anger" -- his dismissal of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as the relic of an angry generation -- come across as, well, dismissive.
And Obama's second problem?
Obama's disconnect with white religious voters (African-American religious voters are overwhelmingly supportive). He lost the white Protestant vote by 26 points in the Indiana primary and by 37 points in North Carolina. He lost the white Catholic vote by 26 points in Indiana and 17 points in North Carolina. Among Catholics in particular, this represents an improvement over Obama's dismal results in Pennsylvania and Ohio. But this religion gap remains a general election challenge.
It is also a striking reversal of fortunes. Obama is easily the most religiously fluent and informed Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter. But, over time, Obama has assumed a much more familiar, Democratic electoral profile -- the candidate of the young, the educated and the secular (he has consistently won religiously nonaligned voters), who also gets nearly universal support from African-Americans.
This is an excellent piece, and I urge you to read the whole thing. Gerson makes one particularly apt observation, in discussing the wearing of the American-flag lapel pin: "A president," he says, "is expected to be a patriotic symbol himself, not the arbiter of patriotic symbols." That is something many self-proclaimed "intellectuals" never understand, that the president is the servant of the culture, not its master. If the people want the president to wear a flag pin, he wears it. Period. It reflects not his political opinion, or even his patriotism, but his service.
Do you think the editorialists at The New York Times understand that?
May 9, 2008. Permalink
WE CAN'T WAIT
Finally, a new symbol of greatness emerges. Prepare to be excited.
Alec Baldwin may run for public office. Move over, Abe Lincoln:
A decade ago, Baldwin was interested in politics, but said he was only 39 and all the people who ran the world were in their fifties. Since then, he has publicly dismissed the notion of running for office. A few weeks ago, he changed his mind. "There's other things I want to do [besides acting]. I mean, in a matter of weeks, I'm going to be 50," says Baldwin, who turned 50 on April 3. "There’s no age limit on running for office, to a degree. [It is] something I might do one day," says Baldwin.
The eloquence, the clarity of thought, the Jeffersonian intellect. And he's really, really thought it over:
Baldwin says he is ready for the public scrutiny and realizes the tact one must use when running for office because he's learned a lesson about what he says and how it can affect others in the nasty divorce-custody battle with his ex-wife, Kim Basinger. The spat resulted in the publication of an embarrassing voicemail to his daughter in which he calls her a "thoughtless little pig."
Look, that quote doesn't have to be on his monument in Washington. There are other things he's said.
He can run for president on the same ticket with Rosie O'Donnell. What an inauguration.
Be back later.
May 9, 2008. Permalink
EVENING UPDATE: MAY 8, 2008
Posted at 7:36 p.m. ET
VICE PRESIDENT CLINTON?
Barack Obama has refused to rule out Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential choice:
"She is tireless, she is smart. She is capable. And so obviously she'd be on anybody's short list to be a potential vice presidential candidate," said Obama, who inched closer to winning the nomination by routing Clinton in North Carolina and almost defeating her in Indiana on Tuesday.
And of course it would be a "unity" ticket. It could also be hell. First of all, for a man committed to changing Washington politics to pick someone who is a symbol of everything he claims to oppose would be the height of cynicism. True, Kennedy picked Lyndon Johnson in 1960, and that was cynical to the max. I recall a number of Democrats choking on the choice and requiring immediate help from the local kid who took the Red Cross course.
Also, Clinton may not be such an asset. Most vice presidential choices make no great difference in the outcome of the presidential election. She might. A lot of people could come out just to vote against her. And I'm not at all sure that she can keep the potential McCain Democrats from defecting. They're interested in the top of the ticket, not the co-pilot's seat.
Finally, the ultimate nightmare: What if Obama wins? He'd have, down the hall in the White House, someone plotting to take his place. And he'd have her husband, who'd stroll in just to be sure the old rugs were being maintained.
If I were Barack Obama, I'd look elsewhere.
May 8, 2008. Permalink
CRISIS IN ISRAEL
Just as Israel is celebrating its 60th birthday, it's been enveloped in a political crisis. One thing about Israel - when the authorities there investigate the country's leaders, nothing gets in the way of the investigators. The prime minister, Ehud Olmert, is under investigation for bribery:
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in a dramatic statement late Thursday night, said he has never taken a bribe or "a single agora" for himself, but that he would resign if the attorney-general decides to indict him as a result of a new police investigation.
"I hope and believe that we will not get to this stage," he said.Olmert's brief statement at his Jerusalem residence came just minutes after a court decision lifted the gag order that had been preventing any publication of the details of the case and the publication of the name of Morris Talansky as a central figure in the investigation.
A police source said the funds in question were "very large," and were allegedly received over an extensive period of time, "both directly and indirectly." Hundreds of thousands of dollars are believed to be involved.
This could impact our election campaign by its effect on the so-called "peace process." Obviously, a prime minister under a cloud is in no position to negotiate a major agreement. However, if Olmert is forced out, a new prime minister, clear of any suspicions, would be under great international pressure to negotiate a peace deal with the Palestinians. Part of that pressure would come from our own State Department.
Cautionary note: There have been many official investigations of high officials in Israel. They often open with a bang and end with a whimper. So we must wait.
May 8, 2008. Permalink
LEDEEN ON IRAN
This morning we examined the idea that action against Iran could occur in the near future, and affect our political campaign. (See "A Changer?") Real Iran experts - the kind who've been right all along - are arguing that something serious must be done. The excellent Michael Ledeen says this:
I’m delighted that my friend and colleague John Bolton has joined me in a call for attacks on the terrorist training camps in Iran, from which killers are sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to kill American and allied soldiers. I have always seen this as legitimate self-defense. Iran is waging a proxy war against us, Iraqi and other Coalition forces, Lebanese forces, and Israel. There is every reason to respond. It is not legitimate for the mullahs to provide arms, money, intelligence, training and safe haven to their various killers without suffering any consequences; that is the ultimate sucker’s game for us to play, as I have been saying for years.
Fouad Ajami says the same thing, although not as specifically. Let’s hope the White House and the Pentagon finally get serious about engaging in a war that has been running for nearly thirty years.
That's the point. This war "has been running for nearly thirty years" without our political class acknowledging it. Now the war is hot, and if the Iranian nuclear program speeds long to success, will get much hotter.
During the Cuban Missile Crisis of October, 1962, the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave President Kennedy some very sound advice: Whatever you do, don't do it piecemeal. For thirty years we've been handling Iran piecemeal. President Bush, in his last months in office, has an opportunity to change that. Whether he does may have a substantial impact on his place in history.
May 8, 2008. Permalink
EARLY AFTERNOON POST: MAY 8, 2008
Posted at 2:18 p.m. ET
TRACKERS
Yesterday was the first full day of polling following the announcement of Tuesday's primary result. It won't be until Sunday or Monday that we have the result of tracking polls taken entirely after Tuesday. (They are taken over a period of three or four days.) Thus far there doesn't seem to be any hint of change.
For the Democratic nomination, Gallup has Obama up one over Clinton and Rasmussen has him up four.
In the general, Gallup has Obama up one over McCain, whereas Rasmussen has him up two.
However, Gallup has Clinton up two over McCain and Rasmussen has her up five.
So, with only one post-Indiana and post-North Carolina day cranked in, there is no hint at all of a Clinton collapse.
If the polls don't move at all in coming days, as it becomes clear that Obama will be the Democratic nominee, it could spell trouble for him. On the other hand, it's only May. The election is half a year away.
May 8, 2008. Permalink
THURSDAY: MAY 8, 2008
Posted at 6:51 a.m. ET
THE CAMPAIGN
There is nothing new of significance to report this morning about the Democratic race. You all know the story. Hillary soldiers on in the hope that some Obama mistake will part the Red Sea and consume his pursuing voters, whereupon she can enter the Promised Land in a hybrid. Chances are, it won't happen, but Hillary can pray to the God of her choice, whose identity will differ depending on which group she's addressing.
West Virginia votes Tuesday. There is no excitement.
We'll be watching the trackers in the next four days to see if Obama's good result on Tuesday will lead to changes in his standing for the Dem nomination or in his national standings against McCain. Hillary has been holding her own in most polls. If she starts to fade, that can have a substantial psychological effect. We should be able to publish trackers by mid-afternoon ET.
Meanwhile, George Will has a sound warning for Republicans who may read too much into statistical analyses of the voting thus far:
McCain's problem might turn out to be the fact that Obama is the Democrats' Reagan. Obama's rhetorical cotton candy lacks Reagan's ideological nourishment, but he is Reaganesque in two important senses: People like listening to him, and his manner lulls his adversaries into underestimating his sheer toughness -- the tempered steel beneath the sleek suits.
That's an astute observation. Obama is a street fighter with a velvet tongue. He can make himself sound tougher than McCain, even though McCain has walked the walk and Obama hasn't even crawled. Correction - hasn't even gotten out of the crib.
May 8, 2008. Permalink
We always look for things that can throw a race into turmoil. David Ignatius notes that Iran can play that role. He points out the recent spate of tough statements by American officials:
The United States is already fighting two of them, in Iraq and Afghanistan. But judging from recent statements by administration officials, there is also a small, but growing, chance of conflict with Iran.
The administration is signaling the Iranians that they need to stop supplying and training Shiite militias in Iraq -- or run the risk of U.S. retaliation. The Maliki government in Baghdad, worried about the danger of escalation, is passing this message to Tehran, but so far the only consequence has been that the Iranians have broken off talks in Baghdad that were aimed at stabilizing the situation.
Saber rattling from the Bush White House may seem almost routine, but pay attention to the comment last week by Adm. Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "Iran is not going away. We need to be strong and really in the deterrent mode, to not be very predictable."
How would an American strike on Iran play out in the campaign?
Obviously, that depends on how you read the American political mood. Usually, we assume that the nation rallies around the party of war, but that's less certain in this case. America is war-weary, and it mistrusts President Bush. So a military skirmish with Iran might backfire, adding to public dissent -- much as happened with the Nixon administration's attack on Viet Cong sanctuaries in Cambodia in 1970.
Finally...
The 2008 campaign has been so mesmerizing that it's easy to forget what's going on out in the real world that could disrupt, once again, the certitudes of the pollsters and strategists. The campaign in recent weeks has focused on pocketbook issues because of worries about a deep recession. But as these economic anxieties fade a bit, we are likely to return to the ground zero of the Middle East, and to the themes of war and peace that will be interwoven through the remainder of this campaign.
I'd be a bit more optimistic than Ignatius about how Americans would react to a strike on Iran. He mentions dissent in 1970, but 1970 wasn't a presidential election year, and the dissent was largely orchestrated by the militant left. Nixon won in a landslide two years later. Also, 9-11 still looms large. If Bush went beyond a strike at Iranian training camps and took out part of Iran's nuclear program, I suspect he'd win large public approval. Further, Obama would have to be very careful about criticizing an American military action against a hated regime, lest he be nailed as an unrepentant liberal in the McGovern tradition, which of course he is.
There are some analysts who are beginning to speculate that Bush will not leave office with the Iranian threat unresolved. He could leave with a bang...literally.
It would be worth it, just to read the hysterical New York Times editorial the next day.
May 8, 2008. Permalink
AIR FOLLIES
More on the real world: London's Telegraph reveals a major security problem at Britain's airports:
Despite warnings that terrorists would try to recruit people working "airside" in terminals – with direct access to aircraft and baggage – no attempt has been made to check whether foreign workers have committed any offences abroad.
The vetting process checks only for crimes committed in Britain. Foreign workers – arriving from inside or outside the European Union – are not checked in their country of origin.
This means that someone with a conviction for firearms or explosives offences committed abroad could, for example, take a job loading bags on to aircraft at Heathrow, Gatwick or any other airport, provided they had committed no crimes here.
The security lapse was called "absolutely astonishing" by David Davis, the shadow home secretary, who demanded "full and immediate checks."
I'd say so. The British government came out with an excuse that was outstanding for its bureaucratic artistry:
The Government said that it did not want to carry out foreign criminal record checks because it would take too long and involve complicated comparisons between legal systems in different countries.
Feeling safer? Want to take that next vacation in Britain? This should encourage you:
A spokesman for the Department for Transport said all airside workers were required to go through the same checks that passengers have to pass through.
In other words, a guy with a rap sheet in Egypt is treated exactly the way you are. Is that equality or what? Let's hear it for multicultural sensitivity. I said, let's hear it. I hear silence.
May 8, 2008. Permalink
MELT IN PEACE
Finally, Irvine Robbins has died. He and his brother-in-law, Burton Baskin, founded Baskin-Robbins.
For we who bear the calories of ice-cream addiction, this is a tragic day. I recall fondly, when my daughters were young, wheeling the stroller back from Baskin-Robbins with an ice-cream cake for their birthday parties. I always got one large enough to allow daddy to have fun for a week.
So goodbye, Irvine Robbins. We won't see your flavors again.
There's a Baskin-Robbins a few blocks from here. I'll go over and lay a memorial sundae in front of the hot-fudge maker, or whatever is proper. I'm sure they'll have grief counselors.
May 8, 2008. Permalink
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