Month: March 2008

Running Mate Isn’t Likely to Increase McCain Support in Florida

Trish

Florida Republicans have been flattering themselves since we got rid of Jeb with claims of how much everyone loves Gov. Charlie Crist. Everyone, they mean, including Democrats. Speaking for all Florida Democrats, which of course I can’t but that’s never stopped me, we aren’t feeling it.

McCain is widely viewed as needing to balance his ticket with someone younger. That shouldn’t be hard, since most people are younger than McCain.

Yes, we’re glad (giddy!) that Jeb is no longer in Tallahassee, trying to ram taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools down our throats; or privatizing state government by handing puffy, fluffy contracts to buddies, and in some cases, his brothers; or using standarized testing to remove the educational element from education. In fact, I pinch myself every now and then just to make sure I’m not dreaming.

And yes, we’re happy that Charlie says he cares about the environment, and how much we pay for homeowners insurance, and lots of other things that he has yet to do much about. He says the right words, and we like that.

But none of this means that if John McCain were to pick Charlie Crist as his running mate that we’d vote for them.

…a new Miami Herald poll shows that most Florida Democrats aren’t grabbing hold.

Eighty-one percent are unlikely to support the presumptive GOP nominee in November, according to the statewide survey of 600 Democrats.

An even larger majority — 87 percent — say their decision wouldn’t change even if McCain picked Republican Gov. Charlie Crist as his running mate.

McCain is widely viewed as needing to balance his ticket with someone younger. That shouldn’t be hard, since most people are younger than McCain.

“I know one thing about Gov. Crist and that is that he is a great governor and does a great job,” [McCain said.] I also know he committed to serve the state of Florida when he ran for governor of the state of Florida…He’s still a very young man.”

The shoddy treatment of Florida Democrats by the Howard Dean-led Democratic National Committee, not the choice of a running mate, is even more of a factor in this year’s election. Polls show that slightly more Florida Democrats are willing to vote for a Republican this time than they were in 2004, when Bush ran for re-election.

The 16 percent of Florida Democrats who say they might vote for McCain isn’t far off from the estimated 14 percent who supported Bush in 2004, when he won the state.

Obama: Wright Controversy Has ‘Shaken Me Up’

Jon Ponder

Barack Obama discussed the controversy over comments in sermons by his spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, with Anderson Cooper of CNN:

“In some ways this controversy has actually shaken me up a little bit and gotten me back into remembering that the odds of me getting elected have always been lower than some of the other conventional candidates”…

Obama declined to speculate on whether the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons may damage him politically, but said his campaign does best when it doesn’t follow the “textbook.”

“If I was just running the textbook campaign — doing the conventional thing — I probably wasn’t going to win because Sen. [Hillary] Clinton was going to be much more capable of doing that than I would be,” he said.

But then Obama said this:

“We had tremendous success, and I think we were starting to get a little comfortable and conventional right before Texas and Ohio.”

Apparently no one told Obama that no one is allowed to criticize Obama.

Poll: Clinton Moves Ahead in Gallup’s Nationwide Survey – McCain Beats Obama, Is Tied Statistically with Clinton

Jon Ponder

These new numbers from Gallup are from March 14 to 18, and so may reflect negative reactions among Democrats to the controversial sermons of Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but not positive reactions to Obama’s speech on race and racism on March 18:
McCain leads Obama 47 percent to 43 percent and is statistically tied with Clinton 48 percent to 45 percent.

The [poll] gave Clinton, a New York senator, a 49 percent to 42 percent edge over Obama, an Illinois senator. The poll has an error margin of 3 percentage points.

Gallup said it was the first statistically significant lead for Clinton since a tracking poll conducted February 7-9, just after the Super Tuesday primaries.

McCain still comes out ahead of both Democrats in the national head-to-head:

[McCain is] leading Obama 47 percent to 43 percent in … the general election. The general election survey has an error margin of 2 percentage points. The Arizona senator also edged Clinton 48 percent to 45 percent but Gallup said the lead was not statistically significant.

As my colleague Trish reported yesterday, Obama’s national lead over Clinton had a double-digit drop in a Reuters/Zogby nationwide poll taken March 13 and 14, at the height of the Wright controversy and well ahead of Obama’s March 18 speech.

Cheney on Two-Thirds of Americans’ Opposition to Iraq Occupation: ‘So?”

Jon Ponder

From an interview yesterday with Dick Cheney by Martha Raddatz of ABC News:

Q: Two-thirds of Americans say it’s not worth fighting, and they’re looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.

CHENEY (with smirk): So?

Q: So… You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No, I think you can’t be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

Update: Video available at Raw Story.

Study: Immigration Not Linked to Crime

Buck Banks

immigration.jpgWell shuck my grits! The primary argument of all the wall-building, border-enforcing, round-’em-up-and-ship-’em-home anti-immigration wingnuts is wrong — immigrants, especially those from Mexico, are less likely than your teenager to commit a crime in the United States. That’s according to a new study by a Harvard sociology prof (note: not Yale, which graduated George W.) who also found that immigrants are dis-incentivized toward crime by a desire to work, ambition and a fear of being deported.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Tom Tancredo.

[Robert] Sampson also studied data from police records, the U.S Census and surveyed more than 8,000 Chicago residents. The study showed there was significant immigration growth, including illegal aliens-in the mid-1990s, peaking at the end of the decade.

But during that time the national homicide rate plunged. Crime also dropped in immigration hot spots, such as Los Angeles, where it fell 45 percent overall, San Jose, Dallas and Phoenix.

Sampson argues that public perception drives a large part of the debate so its easy for politicians to blame illegal immigration for driving up the crime rate. Although it is difficult to point to any data to substantiate it, not many people question it.

“There is a pretty powerful underlying current of belief in society that is pretty resistant, stubborn if you will to the facts,” Sampson said.

So much for one of the less pressing but more insidious “issues” of the current presidential campaign.

Poll: Clinton Moves Up to Statistical Tie with Obama in N.C.

Jon Ponder

Public Policy Polling (PDF):

Hillary Clinton has cut Barack Obama’s lead in North Carolina to one point, according to the newest survey from Public Policy Polling.

Obama leads 44-43 in the state, after leading by four points in a similar poll conducted by PPP two weeks ago. Clinton has particularly made gains with female voters, with whom she now has a slight lead after trailing in the previous poll.

“Some folks in the national media have been treating North Carolina as if winning it is a given for Barack Obama,” said Dean Debnam, President of Public Policy Polling. “The reality is that the state is pretty close, and either candidate could emerge with a victory.”

Recent PPP polls in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida have shown Obama struggling in the wake of the recent controversy surrounding his pastor.

However, the North Carolina PPP poll cited here was conducted on March 17, the day before Obama addressed the controversy in a speech in Philadelphia.

Taegan Goddard says North Carolina’s primary rules may benefit Clinton: “Obama has done very well in states with open primaries because of his strong support from Republican and independent voters. But North Carolina has a closed primary with the exception of unaffiliated voters, who may choose which party’s ballot they want to cast. Right now they’re only making up 12 percent of the Democratic primary electorate.”

A poll from Rasmussen had Obama ahead by 17 percentage points in North Carolina just eight days ago. He has also lost 13 percentage points in a national poll from Reuters/Zogby.

Why America Can’t Get Beyond Race

Trish
The author, having her book signed by Archbishop Tutu

Obama’s speech on race made me think back to what I was doing five years ago. Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a visiting professor at the University of North Florida, and offered a class to non-students which I was lucky enough to attend.

It was the eve of war, and all his comments were filtered through that certainty. We had some slight hope that Bush would back down, that the U.N. might somehow stop him, but we knew what was most likely coming.

But that’s another subject. The class was on Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which helped South Africa end apartheid without massive spilling of white blood, an alternative most South African whites never thought possible. The Truth and Reconciliation process involved first confronting what took place, allowing victims to speak their truth and requiring oppressors to hear it, arriving at punishments that acknowledge no one is beyond God’s ability to redeem, and reparations that restore dignity and compensate for loss on the part of those who were mistreated.

Tutu: “I have come to the conclusion that you are not going to be able to have normal relationships until you come to terms with the legacy of slavery and what happened to Native Americans. There seems to be a pain that is sitting in the pit of the tummy of almost all African Americans and Native Americans.”

American blacks and whites, who filled the room, listened to this description and avoided eye contact with people in the next seat. They wondered why race is just under the surface of everything in this country, and how this continues to be the case when slavery and reconstruction are so long past.

Someone finally found the nerve to ask Tutu why things are different here.

“In South Africa, we knew they intended to clobber us, and you had to deal with that and find ways to defend yourself and to survive. Here, there seemed to be a kind of conspiracy. And I have come to the conclusion that it seems to me that you are not going to be able to have normal relationships until you come to terms with the legacy of slavery and what happened to Native Americans. There seems to be a pain that is sitting in the pit of the tummy of almost all African Americans and Native Americans,” Tutu said.

No, we haven’t come to terms with it. Like Obama said in his speech, white people today, who never personally owned another person, can’t understand why they should be held responsible for what was done in the past. And black people can’t understand why we don’t get their anger.

Obama’s speech, even with all the attention it got, is underestimated because what people really wanted to hear was whether he denounced his pastor enough. They regarded everything else as just a backdrop for his anticipated but not delivered “apology.” Instead, he gave us nothing less than the whole shooting match, folks.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through — a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.”

We need this guy. This country is stuck, and it’s going to stay that way until we do what Tutu and Obama urge. As long as we continue to say racism doesn’t exist, or that it only exists in the South, or only in that person or this one but never in us, we will remain mired in blame and anger. Let’s get beyond it. Let’s do the hard work. Let’s put Obama in the White House and see where it leads. I’m betting it’s somewhere much better than where we are now.

Baracklash is Working for Now

Trish

It looks like the relentless dissing from Clinton, coupled with the rightwing media’s endless loop on Obama’s pastor is having is having their shared desired effect.

Democrat Barack Obama’s big national lead over Hillary Clinton has all but evaporated in the U.S. presidential race, and both Democrats trail Republican John McCain, according a Reuters/Zogby poll released on Wednesday.

The poll showed Obama had only a statistically insignificant lead of 47 percent to 44 percent over Clinton, down sharply from a 14 point edge he held over her in February when he was riding the tide of 10 straight victories…

The poll showed Arizona Sen. McCain, who has clinched the Republican presidential nomination, is benefiting from the lengthy campaign battle between Obama and Clinton, who are now battling to win Pennsylvania on April 22.

McCain leads 46 percent to 40 percent in a hypothetical matchup against Obama in the November presidential election, according to the poll.

That is a sharp turnaround from the Reuters/Zogby poll from last month, which showed in a head-to-head matchup that Obama would beat McCain 47 percent to 40 percent.

“The last couple of weeks have taken a toll on Obama and in a general election match-up, on both Democrats,” said pollster John Zogby.

Matched up against Clinton, McCain leads 48 percent to 40 percent, narrower than his 50 to 38 percent advantage over her in February.

Maybe Clinton is hoping McCain will ask her to be his vice president. Maybe she is just so eaten up with cut-throat ambition that she doesn’t care who she takes down on the way to Obama, including the entire Democratic party.

The poll was released Wednesday but it was taken March 13 and 14. What effect Obama’s speech had on the Elephant in the Room (racism) is still not known.