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Horserace Watch
What is the story of the four Obama primary victories in Louisiana, Nebraska, Washington State and Maine? Why did Clinton lose? Tell me.
TPM says Obama may win all February primaries. The momentum then might be enough to let him win some big ones in March.
But then there is quite some gerrymandering in districts and a big victory in a state may not mean a big number of delegates for the winner. As Alex Cockburn points out Obama got 302,684 votes in Alabama and Clinton got 226,454. But somehow that resulted in the same number of delegates for each of them.
When one clicks through the states in the NYT election guide, the details of the delegate allocation seem to vary everywhere and are quite complicate. Just as an example – Nebraska:
Based on the results of precinct-level caucuses on Feb. 9, delegates are pledged to vote for candidates at county conventions in June where, in turn, state delegates are elected. On June 28, state delegates caucus at the state convention. Sixteen pledged delegates result from this process, and five at-large pledged delegates are chosen at the state convention. Additionally, three pledged delegates are selected from party leaders, for a total of 24 pledged delegates. Party leaders comprise six unpledged delegates, and an additional unpledged delegate is selected at the state convention.
Obama won with 68% against Clinton with 32%. But only 16 of 31 total delegates were chosen in that election. Obama got 11 and Clinton 5. The other 15 delegates still can go either way.
Am I the only one to find this system bizarre?
On the Republican side there seems to evolve a "anything but McCain" movement which gave Huckabee two wins. The Washington state party establishment pulled the emergency break and stopped counting votes when McCain was in danger to lose there too.
We have seen such before in Florida, but in a party primary?
While it strives to export ‘democracy’, the U.S. may first need to import that product to see how it is supposed to function.
http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/
More News About Democrats
by hilzoy
(1) As everyone already knows, Barack Obama won Maine in a landslide. By my calculations (based on these results), with 99% of precincts reporting, Obama has won 59.47% of the delegates to Clinton’s 39.93%. (OK, I like decimal points: so sue me.) In a state that a lot of people thought might go for Clinton, that’s huge. But this is almost as important:
“”Around the country we’ve seen high Democratic turnout and Maine has joined the chorus of other voices across the nation calling for change,” said Arden Manning, Executive Director of the Maine Democratic Party. “The numbers tell a story here. Earlier this month, 5,000 Republicans gathered around the state to caucus for their nominee. Today, close to 45,000 Mainers attended the Democratic caucus. The message is clear: Mainers have seen what 8 years of Republican control looks like and they are ready for a change.”
Sunday’s Democratic turnout exceeded the previous record, set in 2004, by almost 28,000 votes.”
To repeat what I said in comments: nine times as many Democrats as Republicans caucused, and they more than doubled the previous turnout record. That’s astonishing.
(2) As everyone probably also knows, Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, has been replaced. There are a couple of interesting things buried in the coverage of this. First, several stories about Doyle’s departure say things like this:
“The mother of two young children, Solis Doyle is like many in the campaign who had expected the nomination fight to have been wrapped up one way or another by Feb. 5, Super Tuesday, and are exhausted and somewhat demoralized to think this struggle might last weeks or even months longer.”
Likewise:
“As I write, Hillary is on a campaign crisis conference call to spell out what she’s going to do to stop Obama’s momentum. But the fact is the Clintons are making it up as they go along now – they never expected anything beyond Super Tuesday to matter.
The Obama campaign, by contrast, forsaw a war of attrition and invested heavily in states like red states Nebraska – where his big win last night netted him a lot of delegates.”
That the Clinton campaign wasn’t planning on having to go on past Super Tuesday is supported by their bizarre explanation of Obama’s victories last night:
“The Obama campaign has dramatically outspent our campaign in these three states, saturating the airwaves with 30 and 60 second ads. The Obama campaign has spent $300,000 more in Louisiana on television ads, $190,000 more in Nebraska and $175,000 more in Nebraska.”
If they hadn’t assumed the campaign would be over by the time they got to those states, why on earth didn’t they contest them more seriously? Now it’s conventional wisdom that Obama wins heartland caucus states, but this wasn’t at all obvious back when the campaigns should have been making decisions about building organizations, making ad buys, and so forth.
This is just bizarre. The Clinton campaign should never have assumed that the campaign would be over after Super Tuesday. It was obvious at the 2004 convention that Obama had extraordinary political talent, and simply assuming that someone like him would not catch on — assuming that in the way you’d have to do to base your strategy on that thought — is a big mistake. But it’s just incomprehensible if anyone in the Clinton campaign assumed that the primary campaign would be over on Super Tuesday after, say, mid-November, when it became clear that Obama was catching on. Mid-November was several months ago. The Clinton campaign has had time to adjust its strategy, and its staffers have had time to adjust their expectations. And yet none of the coverage sounds as though they have done so; nor can I see any obvious reason for them to be saying this if it isn’t true.
The Clinton campaign has always struck me as strangely overconfident. They were, of course, way ahead in the polls about three months ago. But it doesn’t take much political experience to learn that a lot can change in a few months, and that a lead that far out is nothing to count on. (Parenthetical note: this is why media coverage of the horserace months in advance is completely and utterly pointless, and stories about the supposed inevitability of any candidate written before a single vote has been cast are (to me) a sign that I do not have to pay attention to anything the person who writes them says in future.) They also had a candidate with strong negatives in significant chunks of the population, and one who (to my mind) has always lacked a credible story about why, exactly, she is running. There were, in addition, plenty of warning signs, like the Obama campaign’s success in fundraising.
Moreover, the Obama campaign arguably had more reason than the Clinton campaign to focus on the earliest contests and slight the later ones. Obama, after all, was coming from behind. He had to win some of the early contests. If he had lost every state through Super Tuesday, it would have been all over for him. He therefore had a pretty strong reason to put everything he had into those states, and hope that whatever momentum he got would carry him through in places like Maine and Nebraska. Clinton, by contrast, only had to anticipate that Obama might win enough states to keep going to know that she had to focus on the post-Super Tuesday states. She has a lot less excuse for making this misjudgment than Obama did. But she made it, and he did not. That tells me something.
I also found this account fascinating:
“Initially, Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, Maggie Williams, was brought in to run the campaign even though Solis Doyle was still there. The result was confusion and awkwardness for the staff, who weren’t sure who was really in charge.
But even more problematic was the campaign’s money crunch. Over the last seven years, Clinton had raised $175 million for her reelection and her presidential campaign. But Solis Doyle didn’t tell Clinton that there was next to no cash on hand until after the New Hampshire primary.
“We were lying about money,” a source said. “The cash on hand was nothing.”
In turn, Clinton didn’t tell Solis Doyle that she was lending her own money to keep the campaign afloat. Solis Doyle found out third-hand. And when she asked Clinton about it, the senator told her she couldn’t understand how the campaign had gotten to such a point.”
Did they actually burn through all that money? Without creating strong organizations in post-Super Tuesday states? And did they lie about it? How, and when? I’d love to see some more reporting on this.
I’m also struck by how dysfunctional the Clinton campaign sounds. When a campaign organization is set up well, a campaign manager does not discover that the candidate is making multi-million dollar loans to the campaign third hand, nor does that campaign manager fail to tell the candidate that they have serious money problems. You certainly don’t have staffers not being sure who’s in charge. And you probably don’t have what sounds like a whole lot of people on the inside talking off the record about the various strains and divisions that led up to the firing either.
All very interesting. Stay tuned.
Posted by: susan | Feb 12 2008 3:33 utc | 20
“Do you have an opinion on Obama’s potential governance vis-a-vis Clinton?”
Personally, I don’t know; however, this article may offer some insight. (It was published in Business Week).
Obama vs. Clinton: Leadership Styles
http://tinyurl.com/2tx4yn
His approach of visionary leadership is appealing but risky. Her health-care reform managerialism already has been proven ineffective
by James O’Toole
The virtual dead heat in the Super Tuesday Democratic primary is being attributed by the punditocracy to the absence of any significant policy differences separating candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The two nonetheless have drawn clear distinctions between the ways in which they each propose to govern the nation, and those differences sound a lot like a rehashing of past debates about opposing styles of corporate leadership.
Senator Clinton (D-N.Y.) argues that the role of the President is not only to provide visionary leadership outward from the Oval Office to the nation and the world but also to control and direct the federal bureaucracy downward to ensure that policies are carried out faithfully and effectively.
In sharp contrast, Senator Obama (D-Ill.) declares he will do the chief executive’s job by focusing completely on providing leadership vision, judgment, and inspiration. As for controlling the agencies that would report to him, he says he will delegate that responsibility. He pledges to stay above the managerial fray and, instead, hold agency heads fully accountable for the performance of the bureaucracies in their charge.
On one level, these visions seem to reflect a Carteresque tendency to micromanage (Clinton) and a Reaganesque organizational nonchalance (Obama). But each candidate is actually putting forth a well-reasoned philosophy of leadership, and their distinct approaches have implications for their respective abilities to deliver on the changes the majority of the nation seems to desire. From the vantage point of a business school professor, what is particularly striking is that the two candidates clearly articulate competing theories of leadership that have been the focus of much scholarly research over the last several decades; what I’ll refer to as the “managerial” and “transformational” approaches.
Textbook Exercise
As Clinton reminds us, she has actual experience in the practice of the former. As head of the health-care reform initiative during her husband’s first Administration, she conducted a near-textbook exercise in managerialism. She closeted for months in the White House with an impressive team of technocrats who thoroughly reviewed all the relevant data about the U.S. health-care system, analyzing various and opposing views about what should be done to improve its performance, and bringing forth a highly detailed national health-care plan. In assembling that complex plan, the technocrats included ideas from numerous, conflicting ideological and professional camps, assuming what they each would need to have in the plan in order to support it.
But instead of building a consensus for change, this exercise actually created deep dissatisfaction among all the relevant constituencies needed to enact the proposed legislation. By deciding what these players required without involving them in the process, the technocrats built resistance to the very changes they proposed. The result: gridlock and, subsequently, a dozen years of a worsening health-care crisis.
It is noteworthy that while claiming the mantle of experience, Clinton has not spelled out what lessons she learned from this lost opportunity. Based on the detailed policy positions the wonks on her campaign staff have put forward on every conceivable national issue, it would appear that she is still of the managerialist persuasion.
That’s not surprising. After all, managerialism was, until relatively recently, the dominant school of thought in the corporate world as well. Influenced heavily by the quantitative techniques developed by Robert McNamara’s Whiz Kids at the Pentagon and Ford Motor (F), it was promulgated at the nation’s leading B-schools and, in the 1970s and ’80s, led not only to the wide-scale practice of management science in business organizations but also to the creation of large, centralized planning staffs and the top-down leadership methods known collectively as “change management.”
Micromanagement Misfires
As attractive as it once may have seemed to put the best and brightest technocrats in the corporate driver’s seat, managerialist approaches seldom worked well in practice. In particular, top-down efforts to micromanage corporate change have proved almost totally ineffective. An impressive body of research and well-documented case studies of large corporations reveal few instances in which a CEO successfully transformed an organization by preparing detailed blueprints for change and then directing the implementation of those plans downward through the ranks.
Instead, when successful transformations have occurred, it has almost always been the result of leaders who offer inspiring visions and values, identify clear goals, and then provide the context and opportunity for those below them to participate in the design and implementation of the actual business of change. That’s why, in general, leaders of large corporations have moved away from top-down “planned change,” and, instead, adopted a values-based, decentralized approach to organizational transformation.
And that brings us to the kind of President that candidate Obama proposes to be. As a student of U.S. Constitutional history, the senator’s philosophy seems to have been influenced by some of the few words the founders ever wrote with specific regard to leadership. Significantly, they confined their remarks to the task of visionary leadership and were silent on the issue of management.
In The Federalist, James Madison wrote that the nation’s leaders need to listen intently to the expressed desires of the public, but should not be prisoners to the public’s literal demands. Instead, leaders in a democracy should “discern the true interests” and common needs of the people and then “refine the public view” in a way that transcends the surface noise of pettiness, contradiction, and self-interest.
Common Values
To appreciate what that means in practice, it is worth reading Theodore Roosevelt’s 1910 “New Nationalism” speech. Delivered in a Kansas cornfield, T.R. addressed the specific and legitimate interests and needs of industrialists, farmers, financiers, laborers, small business owners, and conservationists, showing equal respect for each of their competing values and claims.
But he didn’t stop there. Roosevelt then elevated the discussion by offering a transcendent vision of a good society that encompassed those conflicting values in a way that each group alone was unable to articulate from their narrower perspectives. He thus showed the nation the way forward by identifying the overarching values the disparate, warring special interests had in common, creating a compelling vision of a better future than one that could be achieved by continuing conflict.
What Roosevelt did not do is spell out the particulars of how that would be done. Instead, he outlined the basic conditions under which it could be done. He realized the key to implementation was the involvement and participation of all the relevant constituencies. This values-based approach to leadership is particularly appropriate when followers are deeply divided by ideology, religion, and ethnic backgrounds, as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Vaclav Havel each demonstrated in complex situations during troubled times in their respective homelands. Corporate leaders have also discovered that this approach is the most effective way to lead complex organizations in turbulent environments.
What kind of national leadership does the U.S. need in the next four years? That is what voters must ultimately decide in the remaining primaries and in the final test in November. On the one hand, Hillary Clinton has demonstrated that she has experience using the managerialist approach. On the other, it is uncertain whether Barack Obama is capable of transformational leadership because it is not something that can be practiced in a deliberative body like the Senate. And all history tells us is that occupants of the Oval Office either rise to the challenge or they don’t. It is never known in advance if an untested President will turn out to be a Roosevelt or a Harding.
Hence, betting on a candidate’s ability to provide transformational leadership entails an element of risk. Yet, judging from what we’ve seen in both the national and corporate arenas, there’s a relatively high degree of certainty that managerialist leadership is unlikely to achieve the deep changes for which the nation’s voters are calling.
James O’Toole is Distinguished Professor at the Daniels College of Business, University of Denver, and author of Leading Change and The Executive’s Compass. He was formerly executive director of the Leadership Institute at the University of Southern California, and executive vice-president of the Aspen Institute.
Posted by: susan | Feb 12 2008 5:01 utc | 24
You would go mad trying to understand the US political system, created solely to
prevent, at all costs, demos kratos. As Copeland pointed out, a deal is always cut.
M2c, Clinton was a foregone conclusion. She was gonna run…no…matter…what.
Clinton is the union bosses. Clinton is the aldermen. Clinton is the cosa nostra.
I can remember a time when your choices were grease their palms, or go wash cars.
Yes, the Democrats reward a few “workers” at the disadvantage of the many bosses.
It’s still power politics. It’s still retrograde. In today’s world, it’s suicide.
So Gingrich, as former Repug Speaker, came up with the brilliant strategy of saying
(when he claimed he was running, but really was just pimping his book) that the two
Democrats he’d most fear running against were Clinton, since she will, and Obama.
This, the “Brer Rabbit” strategy, from a Georgian folktale, how Brer Fox, trickster
in Cherokee legend (Newt), taunted Brer Rabbit (Hillary) into fighting the tar baby
(Obama), to which Brer Rabbit became helplessly stuck (those shameful debates).
Of course, the story has a happy ending. Brer Rabbit plays a trick of her own and
gets free, making nice to everyone, shedding crocodile tears, HRC’s whole schtick.
Briefly it appeared to work, she was way out ahead, and hard-wired in, especially
after Kerry, then Kennedy, gave Obama the East Coast Liberal swift kiss of death.
It was always supposed to be Clinton versus McCain, that’s clear beyond certainty.
Clinton because she’s gonna run anyway, and because she could be easily defeated.
No other human on the planet, outside of OBL running naked down Pennsylvania Ave,
could mobilize the entire Republican white male southern Pentacostal voter base.
Neo-Zi’s WANT Clinton to run! It completes the democracy cosmology. And if Obama
pushes her aside, though that’s far from certain with chicanery in the electoral
college, Obama will serve the same antiwar purpose Eugene McCarthy did in 1968.
All the disgruntled and dysfunctional voters hanging on Obama’s coattails would
get their little boost of freude, ‘viva la MLKJr’ and all that, ‘end the war now’,
‘hell no, we won’t go’, then at the polls in November, after the landslide loss
to McCain and the southern GOB’s, Democrat voters would get their schadenfreude
letdown, because of all things, America is, and was founded upon, guilt and shame.
Guilt that you backed the wrong champion, and shame you were played for a sucker.
Don’t believe me? What happened to the $10T Wall Street stole from US in dot.con?
Where are all those SEC and IRS investigation Y2K electronic backup archives now?
Nobody has gone to jail, no broker, no banker, except the most egregious corporate
perps. Everyone who lost their life savings is buying up gold now, sheepish, and
shamed, lining up to get clipped again, if real economists are right. Aww shucks.
BushCo steals $179B for “undisclosed purposes”, then lends US $168B from our SSTF.
Our own money, lent back to us. Guilt…and shame. Bad dog! Bad!! Aww shucks, dad.
It’s a survival trick, ‘aww shucks’, old Tennessee ‘fool me once, fool me twice’t,
but this time, the Neo-Zi’s are using it against US. Clinton because she will, and
Obama, because he cannot. The Republicans say McCain doesn’t represent their base,
but when Politburo elevates him in Minneapolis, party faithful will fall in line.
As Obama, or Hillary, stands on that platform, brother, the South shall rise again!
That Great White Father, casting down the Aboriginal and (unclean) Woman triptych.
January we’ll all feel a little bit sheepish, our hero looking like a bad date after
a blowout drunken debauche, and we’ll all howl mute, watching the Neo-Zi Wehrmacht
march in swastika pinwheels down Pennsylvania Ave, as McCain announces war on Iran.
After that, it won’t matter what in the Hell anybody thinks. We’ll have achieved It.
It-ness. Cowboys v. Indians. The…Golum…Run…Amok. http://tinyurl.com/3al49c
Posted by: Swift Creek | Feb 12 2008 7:22 utc | 25
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