It Would Have Been Fun, Anyway

Gingrich is out.

I Guess He Just Needed My Support

Now that Edwards has castrated himself in a potential general election by accepting federal matching funds (and the accompanying spending limits between now and the late August convention) it's no longer a question who I'm voting for. I still think that Obama is falling far short of my expectations for him (though it's still 13 weeks out from Iowa), but he's clearly the best viable choice. It does piss me off that the current reality of the our presidential election system has taken away my ability to make a choice based solely on Obama's and Edwards' respective merits, but that's another post for another day (unless I decide to write about it tonight).

Anyway, I'm perfectly happy to be an Obama guy and I'm excited to vote for a guy who comes closer to that amorphous real deal standard than anybody who's run for president for at least a generation. I'm even happier to report that since I've made up my mind, Obama is suddenly winning in Iowa, or at the very least, appears to have overtaken Edwards there. Coincidence...probably not.

American Research Group, whose polls have consistently inflated (or so it seems) Hillary's numbers, shows Obama catching Edwards in their end of August and end of September polls. That is significant in and of itself because (outside of Strategic Vision's polls) Obama beaten one of the other two candidates only once that I know of.

What I really want to talk about is the new Newsweek poll, which uses a pretty stringent (appropriately so, I think) screen.

The numbers for likely caucus goers:

Obama 28%
Clinton 24%
Edwards 22% (third place finishes have become a pattern for Edwards in Iowa polls in recent weeks)
Richardson 10%
Biden 5% (this is why I say Biden, unlike Dodd, has a glimmer of hope)
Dodd1%
Kucinich 1%
Gravel 0%

Romney 24%
Thompson 16%
Giuliani 13%
Huckabee 12% (unsurprisingly, Rudy's and Huck's numbers vary in an inverse relationship in IA polls)
McCain 9% (the one guy who can finish fifth here and not see the press kill him for it)
Paul 5%
Tancredo 3%
Brownback 2% (when was the last time as campaign was this disappointing?)
Hunter 1%
(Keyes/Gingrich not included)

I would be shocked to see Edwards do anything other than continue his slide into third place in Iowa. The voters who will go to the caucuses (and who report that to pollsters) understand the significance of Edwards' public funding decision better than any electorate, anywhere.

More Good Stuff Jacked from Marc Ambinder

I'm glad to see Nevada is going to skip past Michigan. It can only help the non-Hillarys of the world.

"Though New Hampshire Secretary of State William Gardner hasn't set his date yet and flux seems to be the state of the primary calendar, there is, among the leading Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, remarkable unanimity about its most likely shape.

The Iowa Caucuses will move to Saturday, January 5.

Gardner will schedule New Hampshire's primary for Tuesday the 8th.

The Democratic National Committee will permit Nevada to move its caucuses to the 12th; the Republicans will probably follow suit.

Michigan Republicans will vote in a primary on Jan. 15; Democrats will vote in a non-delegate beauty contest. (Michigan will lose half its allotted GOP delegates).

South Carolina's Democrats will, with the DNC's permission, move their primary to Jan. 19 to coincide with the Republican primary that day.

And then Florida Republicans will vote on Jan. 29; the Democrats will participate in another non-delegate beauty contest. (Florida will lose half its allotted GOP delegates, triggering a rules change to winner-takes-all, which will benefit, obviously, the winner).

To sum:

Jan. 5:   Iowa caucuses (both parties)
Jan. 8:   New Hampshire primary (both parties)
Jan. 12:  Nevada caucuses (both parties)
Jan. 15   Michigan GOP primary; Dem beauty contest
Jan. 19:  South Carolina primary (both parties)"
Jan. 29:  Florida GOP primary; Dem beauty contest

C-SPAN highlights

I recommend the following C-SPAN nerdage.

Senate Rules & Administration Committee Hearing on the Regional Primaries Bill

This has some really interesting discussion on presidential primaries as an institution and other fundamental issues relating to American elections.

Health Care Forums 2008: John Edwards

Sorry, this isn't really a link. Just copy the stuff below into your URL bar thing.

javascript:playClip('rtsp://video.c-span.org/archive/c08/c08_092407_edwards2.rm')

This is the first in a series of one hour forums featuring one Presidential candidate at a time. I learned a shit ton about health care.

Jacked from Marc Ambinder (I'll probably do that a lot)...

Joe Biden's Iowa Strategy

"On a wall in Sen. Joe Biden’s headquarters, a map of Iowa is obscured by dozens of small blue and red dots. Each dot represents a personal visit by Biden’s chief surrogate, sister Valerie Biden Owens, to a top-tier Iowa locale. Caucus math the way it is, smaller Democratic towns often get the most attention.

To win in Iowa, Biden will throw everything into it. His campaign advisers insist that they planned this approach all along. Iowa is, they say, the perfect state for him: the caucus goers are older, they’re receptive to a sophisticated message about the Iraq war, and they reward personal contact.

Biden polls at around five percent right now. But political prognosticators and many Iowa Democrats are buzzing about a coming Biden surge. They believe he is working his way to a stronger finish in Iowa than many of his rivals anticipate. He has nine legislative endorsements, an impressive feat for a field that includes two superstars (Clinton and Obama) and one adopted son (John Edwards). Two of them are very good gets: Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Speaker Pro Tempore Polly Butka.

“We’re setting the sail now and we expect the wind to start hitting in November and December,” says Danny O’Brien, Biden’s political director and new Iowa state director.

Trace Biden’s devotion to Iowa to March of 2006, when Iowa state representatives brief him on their plan to retake the state house in November’s election. That August, Biden spent 14 days in the state, attending more than 40 campaign events for legislatures. Not only would Biden help them raise money, he’d also give them advice – message advice – how to talk about the Iraq war and the Bush administration.

After he announced his presidential bid, Biden’s team drew up a five-point plan to win legislative endorsements. First, Biden would ask state legislators to let him host an event. No endorsement needed, just an event. Then he’d ask the legislators to judge for themselves how their constituents responded to Biden. Third, he’s stress his Iraq message – “a broader policy offering than they normally expected,” O’Brien says. Fourth, he’d stress electability, drawing an implicit contrast with other Democrats in the race. Iowa Democrats, Biden and his aides believes, are hair-trigger-sensitive to electability arguments. And fifth, he’d work as many rooms as he could, focusing on delegate-rich areas and exploiting resevoirs of support that exist from 1988 last sojourn as a presidential candidate.

These include blue collar cities like Davenport and Dubuque and a wide strip of towns along the Mississippi river.

Biden deliberately chooses not to pander to the party’s liberal base, which his staff believes is a lot smaller than their loud voices would indicate.

The operation is pretty lean; there’s very little excess fat. But Biden will have manage to visit all 99 counties by early November. He has nine field offices and 23 full-time staffers – more than some Democrats (and Rudy Giuliani) but fewer, by orders of magnitude, than Barack Obama, John Edwards and Hillary Clinton.

The final arrow in Biden’s quiver may be his persuasive ability. From the start, his campaign has targeted high-profile newspaper endorsements. Biden first met with editors at the Des Moines Register, the Quad Cities Times, the Dubuque Telegraph Herald and the Cedar Rapids Gazette early in 2006.

So far, Biden has run only one television ad in the state and is saving money to target key markets in December and early January. A figure of some celebrity, he will rely on his public image to keep him on television until then."

Maybe this is a stupid question, but...

I'm watching Edwards talk about how he would fund his health care plan on C-Span. Here's what I don't get: If we have a truly universal system, where everyone is covered at least by the government health program, doesn't that void out all spending for Medicaid?

I'm just wondering since I'm pretty sure that the current federal spending on Medicaid is greater than the projected expense for Edwards' plan, which is the most expensive of all of them. None of the big 3 even include the word "Medicaid" on their health care issue pages, but they all have detailed estimates of how much their new plans will cost over what we spend right now on health care.

Also, I don't get why candidates don't call for making Medicare an opt-out system so that a few wealthy, virtuous seniors can keep paying for their own health care. Sure, it'll only make a tiny dent in Medicare spending, but it will do a little bit and, more importantly, it's an opportunity for a presidential candidate to talk about civic virtue.

Defining Question(s) of the Democratic Presidential Race

How does Obama hit Hillary from the left and still maintain his message of hope and idealism? Is that even possible? Does he even need to do that, or can he count on Richardson (on Iraq, maybe on experience) and Edwards (on everything) to do that for him? If he can't, doesn't that give Edwards and/or Richardson an opportunity to eclipse him as the real alternative to Hillary? Or does it make him look even more like a front-runner and like a leader to let the second-tier do his bidding?

An unrelated, but equally important question: do Obama and Edwards share our burning desire for one of them to beat Hillary and would they drop out and endorse the other candidate the moment they become non-viable? Or will they miss the window and allow Hillary to pick up unstoppable mo'?

Finally: is New Hampshire really over? The pollster.com average shows her nearly 20 points up. In fact, the numbers in Iowa and South Carolina are the only numbers that are significantly different from the national polls (with the exception of Richardson's numbers in NH and NV, which are, of course, significantly higher than his national average of about 3%). I just assume that voters in all states other than Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire have not yet begun the process of choosing a candidate to support. That theory explains the rough similarity between the national numbers and almost all state polls. Still, operationalizing that theory, one would expect that each Iowa, South Carolina, and New Hampshire would show numbers that in some way reflect the reality of voters paying more serious attention. One explanation would be that the Iowa and South Carolina polls simply reflect lingering good will towards Edwards and the impact of a whole lot of black voters, respectively, and that no state polls are really meaningful at this point. Smaller, but similar deviations from the mean in Florida, New Jersey and other polls grant some credence to this theory. Another possibility is that the waters have just been muddied too much by the variance in polling screens, the level of likeliness to vote required to be included in a poll sample. At a glance, this seems doubtful, because at least the New Hampshire polls have been remarkably consistent as of late, regardless of the polling outfit.

So, whadd'ya think?