Barack Obama's Unfamiliar Narrative

Things just keep grinding along in Democratic Party nomination politics.

We're now seeing the advocacy of what might be called "comparative radicalism" among various factions within the Democratic base.

Libby Spencer, for example, a known revolutionary socialist among the leftosphere, is cheering Hillary's radicalism as if she was a bona fide '60s-era bombthrower:

Hillary's associations are much more damning. Unlike Obama, who was just a kid when the big stuff went down, Hillary was there and an active participant.

Ms. Libby seems to be minimizing Obama's extremely close relationship to domestic terrorist William Ayers (although Hill's no closet right-winger, to be sure).

But check out Raina Kelley's new piece on Obama over at Newsweek, "An Unfamiliar Narrative
With Barack Obama, It's About Much More Than Just Race":

If Obama seems alien, it may not be simply because he's the African-American presidential front runner, but because he's an African-American politician who doesn't flaunt his scars. Instead, he seems improbably blessed with good fortune and holds himself up as an example of the American Dream as reality. As he says again and again in speeches, only in this country would his story be possible.

The story of an African-American who rose to great heights despite the color of his skin and the humility of his beginnings resonated with white, blue-collar voters facing tough times in Wisconsin and Iowa. But in Ohio and Pennsylvania, his message fell short. Even taking into account the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. uproar, which certainly fueled racial doubt among some whites, it seems unlikely that race alone explains the difference in states that are so similar in so many ways.

But other Obama missteps have helped to create the impression—fueled by the Clinton campaign and some in the press—that Obama is a fussy, stuffy elitist who speaks grandly about America but looks down on Americans from a higher, distant place. None was more ridiculous than the wholly manufactured flag-pin controversy. Yet why didn't Obama simply point out that neither Hillary, nor George Stephanopoulos, nor Charlie Gibson, nor most people in the Philadelphia debate audience was wearing pins, either? Did that mean their patriotism was in doubt? Other stumbles have proved harder to deal with. Michelle Obama's comments about only now finding pride in America and Obama's own "bitter" comments on guns and religion have allowed fellow millionaires Clinton and, more and more, McCain to paint him as out of touch with working folks.

Does John McCain really run out to Costco when there aren't a couple of dozen camera-toting reporters along for the ride? Does anyone really believe Hillary feels a deep kinship with deer hunters? Please. Yet it's working, in part because Obama does seem to lack that natural (or fakeable) humility that Americans require of successful presidential candidates (even George W. Bush summoned it, at least the first time around). Though hardly disdainful or haughty, Obama has a whiff of entitlement that can border on self-congratulation. He is the smartest kid in the class, and he knows it. This is a strange sight for those of us used to a black rhetoric that often falls back on slavery and segregation to ward off charges of pride. It was only last year, after all, that Al Sharpton huffed: "Ain't too many of us grew up in Hawaii and went to Harvard." Black voters are now united behind Obama, but many blue-collar white voters still don't quite seem to know what to make of him. When voters ask themselves the age-old polling-booth question "Is he like me?" they aren't necessarily wondering about his race.

See also, Jeff Jacoby's piece on Obama's radical ties, "Obama's 'Mainstream' Friends."

Education Still at Risk After Twenty-Five Years

As Chester Finn reports in his piece, "Twenty-Five Years Later, A Nation Still at Risk," yesterday marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the landmark education report, "A Nation at Risk."

How has American education fared in the interval?

Today marks the 25th anniversary of "A Nation at Risk," the influential Reagan-era report by a blue-ribbon panel that alerted Americans to the weak performance of our education system. The report warned of a "rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people." That dire forecast set off a quarter century of education reform that's yielded worthy changes – yet still not the achievement gains we need to turn back the tide of mediocrity.

After decades of furthering educational "equality," the 1983 commission admonished the country, it was time to attend to academic excellence and school results. Educators didn't want to hear this and a generation later many still don't. Our ponderous public-school system resists change. Teachers don't like criticism and are loath to be judged by pupil performance. In educator circles, one still encounters grumbling that "A Nation at Risk" lodged a bum rap.

Others heeded the alarm, though, and that report launched an era of forceful innovation and accountability guided by noneducators – elected officials, business leaders and philanthropists.

Such "civilian" leadership has brought about two profound shifts that the professionals, left to their own devices, would never have allowed. Today, instead of judging schools by their services, resources or fairness, we track their progress against preset academic standards – and hold them to account for those results.

We're also far more open to charter schools, vouchers, virtual schools, home schooling. And we no longer suppose kids must attend the campus nearest home. A majority of U.S. students now study either in bona fide "schools of choice," or in neighborhood schools their parents chose with a realtor's help.

Those are historic changes indeed – most of today's education debates deal with the complexities of carrying them out. Yet our school results haven't appreciably improved, whether one looks at test scores or graduation rates. Sure, there are up and down blips in the data, but no big and lasting changes in performance, even though we're also spending tons more money. (In constant dollars, per-pupil spending in 1983 was 56% of today's.)

And just as "A Nation at Risk" warned, other countries are beginning to eat our education lunch. While our outcomes remain flat, theirs rise. Half a dozen nations now surpass our high-school and college graduation rates. International tests find young Americans scoring in the middle of the pack.

What to do now? It's no time to ease the push for a major K-12 education make-over – or to settle (as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton apparently would) for reviving yesterday's faith in still more spending and greater trust in educators.

While I'm all for accountability, I'm also one of those teachers "loathe to be judged by pupil performance."

When we talk accountablity, are teachers to be responsible for a generalized student drop-out culture, especially among many of the most disadavantaged inner-city and minority communities, (see, for example, the Los Angeles Times' penetrating expose on drop-put patterns among at-risk high school students in Soutern California, "The Vanishing Class").?

Moreover, even among the upwardly-mobile demographic, the educational culture of today's college freshman privileges wealth and fame over knowledge, amid a "me-first" mentality which emerges from a Lake Wobegon environment where nearly everyone's in the "top of the class."

My own (non-statistically significant) experience finds tremendous student anti-intellectualism, and I would suggest that issues such as hostility to hard work and the culture of entitlement are some of the biggest impediments to educational excellence facing the nation.

Doonesbury captures some of what I see every day in the classroom:

Americans Pessimistic About Economy

Gallup reports a deep pessimism about the economy:

Eighty-six percent of Americans say the U.S. economy is getting worse, while 44% rate the current economy as "poor", and only 15% rate it as "excellent" or "good". These consumer sentiments represent a continuation of the strongly negative views of the economy measured by Gallup Poll Daily tracking over the last two months.

The economy's one of the major reasons this election year should be favorable to the Democrats.

But as the nomination battle drags on, the party still has no slam dunk in November.

Dick Polman, at the Philadelphia Inquirer, has more on this:

If the Democrats somehow contrive to blow this presidential election, they should be consigned to the dustbin of history - or to a display case at the Smithsonian, where perhaps they can share space with the Whigs.

Seriously, think about it. The economy is tanking, yet their autumn opponent, John McCain is on record saying, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should." The Iraq war continues to kill our kids and bleed us to the tune of $3 billion a week, yet McCain, who sometimes confuses the Sunnis with the Shiites, remains its unapologetic cheerleader. Meanwhile, nearly 80 percent of the American people think the country is on the wrong track - a legacy of the current Republican president, who now has the highest disapproval rating (69 percent) in the history of the Gallup poll.

Yet, McCain is deadlocked in the polls with his two Democratic rivals. He is traipsing around the nation on his "Time for Action Tour," blissfully unscathed and husbanding his septuagenarian strengths, while the Obama and Clinton armies burrow ever deeper into their respective trenches, emerging every so often to impale themselves on barbed wire, generally mimicking the bloody stalemate on the western front in World War I.

Given all the baggage bequeathed by George W. Bush, and the voters' traditional preference for a fresh start in bad times, one could not conjure a better Democratic environment, at least in theory. As Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics, put it the other day, "based on 220 years of precedent, a McCain win would be a striking repudiation of American history, since no presidential candidate of a two-term incumbent party has ever been elected under this set of severely adverse conditions."

The Democrats, so bedazzled by the choice between a black man and a woman, have been joyfully anticipating that they would write the history of 2008. But if they don't get their act together with all deliberate speed, and tame their latest impulse for self-destruction (last seen in 1968 and 1980), then it is McCain and the Republicans who will be making history this year.

It's almost strange that we're even considering a Democratic loss this year.

The economy, the war, and the recent political immobility on issues such as immigration reform should be creating a sure recipe for change.

But voters want competence in foreign policy, and the mainstream electorate will not warm to a radical Democratic Party agenda that embraces America-bashing and gives entree to 1960s-era domestic terrorists.

We hear a lot of criticisms of how long and drawn out are American presidential elections, and about the endless, deteriorating campaign negativity, but the great virtue of our politics is the crucial vetting the system provides, which helps to reveal the true nature of the candidates seeking to hold the most powerful leadership position in the world.

Clinton Has Edge in Popular Vote

I discussed the possibility of a brokered Democratic convention in my post last night, "Will Superdelegates Rubber-Stamp the Popular Vote?"

One important factor that makes a decisive convention more likely this summer is whether Hillary Clinton leads the nationwide popular vote at the end of the primaries in May.

It turns out that with her big win in Pennsylvania, Clinton may have edged ahead in the popular vote totals, according to Michael Barone:

One thing many people haven't noticed about Hillary Clinton's 55 percent to 45 percent victory over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary is that it put her ahead of Obama in the popular vote. Her 214,000-vote margin in the Keystone State means that she has won the votes, in primaries and caucuses, of 15,112,000 Americans, compared to 14,993,000 for Obama.

If you add in the votes, as estimated by the folks at realclearpolitics.com, in the Iowa, Nevada, Washington and Maine caucuses, where state Democratic parties did not count the number of caucus-attenders, Clinton still has a lead of 12,000 votes.

Moreover, she may be able to maintain that lead, despite an expected Obama victory in North Carolina on May 6, by rolling up big popular vote margins in West Virginia on May 13, Kentucky on May 20 and Puerto Rico on June 1. So it's likely that Clinton will be able to argue that undecided super-delegates should heed the will of the people.

Obama supporters can counter that claim with arguments of their own. Their candidate is ahead and will remain ahead in delegates chosen in caucuses and primaries. Michigan, where Obama was not on the ballot, and Florida have been disqualified by the Democratic National Committee for voting too early. Counting popular votes unduly discounts the results from caucuses, in which many fewer people participate than in primaries. And the Democratic Party can't afford to alienate the young and black voters who enthusiastically back Obama.

These arguments will probably prevail. Yet Clinton's popular vote lead is one piece of evidence that suggests that Obama will be a weak general election candidate. In national polls, neither Democrat seems stronger than the other: The realclearpolitics.com average of polls as this is written shows Obama leading John McCain 46 percent to 45 percent and Clinton and McCain tied at 46 percent apiece. But they don't run the same in different states.

SurveyUSA's 50-state polls released in March showed that electoral votes would go to different parties in 15 states depending on whether McCain was pitted against Clinton or Obama. And it is electoral votes that determine who will be president.

There are states where Obama runs stronger than Clinton. They include most of the West -- notably Colorado, a state Democrats lost in 2000 and 2004 but which has trended their way since. They include states in the Upper Midwest, like Minnesota, and New England states like Connecticut and New Hampshire, which Democrats won in 2004 but where Clinton seems weak.

But Clinton seems to run stronger than Obama in the industrial (or formerly industrial) belt, running west from New Jersey through Pennsylvania and Ohio to Michigan and Missouri. Obama's weakness among white working-class voters in the primaries here suggests he is poorly positioned to win votes he will need to carry these states in November. This is not a minor problem -- we're talking about 84 electoral votes.

Obama has also fared poorly among Latino and Jewish voters in every primary held so far. This is of consequence most notably in Florida, which has 27 electoral votes. In 2000, Al Gore won 67 percent of the vote in Broward County and 62 percent in Palm Beach County -- both have large Jewish populations. In this year's Florida primary, Obama lost those counties to Clinton by 57 percent to 33 percent and 61 percent to 27 percent. No Democrat can carry Florida without big margins in Broward and Palm Beach.

Obama's weakness among Latinos and Jews could conceivably put California's 55 electoral votes in play. Los Angeles County delivered an 831,000 vote plurality for John Kerry in 2004. Most of that plurality came from areas with large numbers of Latinos and Jews.

Barack Obama's 20-year association with his "spiritual mentor," the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his "friendly" relationship will unrepentant Weather Underground bomber William Ayers and his remark that "bitter" small-town Pennsylvanians "cling to guns and religion" do not help him with any of these key voting groups. And his discomfort, evident in the Pennsylvania debate, when he is greeted with anything but adulation does not augur well for his ability to stand firm and show a sense of command in the face of the stringent criticism he is bound to receive as the Democratic nominee.

Hillary Clinton's current and tenuous popular vote lead may not persuade Democratic super-delegates to reject the candidate who has, after all, won more delegates in primaries and caucuses. But it may prompt some to think hard about Electoral College arithmetic.

See also, "Clinton Says She Leads in Popular Vote."

Hillary is No Mainstream Moderate

One of my commenters, Tom the Redhunter, has suggested that if he had to choose, he'd take Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama:

If my only choices were Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama I'd choose and vote for Hillary hands down. Much as she's wrong on virtually every issue, she's much better than Obama, which tells you about what I think about him.

I agree with Tom, but in all of my reporting on Obama's fundamental radicalism, it's important not to forget that Hillary Clinton's still a far left-wing Democrat, and she'd take the country in a social democratic direction should she be elected.

Indeed, while I loved her Crown Royal and beer moment a couple of weeks back, I'm certain that if she somehow prevailed in November, the far left of the Democratic Party would be firmly in her camp (even the bulk of the current progressives for Obama who're now demonizing the New York Senator).

With these points in mind, take a look at this FrontPageMag piece on Hillary's history of radical ties on the far left:

Integral to Hillary Clinton's triumph in the Pennsylvania primary on Tuesday, Jacob Laksin observed in FrontPage Magazine, was convincing Keystone State voters that she “understood the curious ways of more humble folk.” The former feminist liberationist, who channeled dead spirits, belittled those who “stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” and labored to sue handgun manufacturers for daring to make the Second Amendment possible morphed herself into a gun-toting, whiskey-swilling church lady. Her reinvention as a redneck queen only went so far, though: she did tremendous damage by emphasizing Barack Obama’s ties to anti-American radicals Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. She has, in short, been lucky in her choice of opponents: a mature candidate would have thrown both under a bus at the first opportunity. Obama’s refusal to do so, likening one to his grandmother, has allowed Hillary to present herself as the voice of mainstream moderation.

She is no such thing.

Conservatives, amused at the once-invincible Obama finally facing tough questions, would be ill-served if they allow her to establish her new image as a plain vanilla moderate. From her crusading days in Wellsley College through her choice of minister during her eight years in the East Wing, Hillary has surrounded herself with a consortium of radicals that would make Obama blush (or rather, feel right at home).

See also, "The Democrats' Radical Pique."

Obama's Ties to Ayers and Dohrn Aren't Trifling

Jeff Jacoby weighs in on Barack Obama's ties to '60s-era radicals William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. These aren't "trifling" relationships":

Obama's ties to Ayers and Dohrn aren't nearly as trifling as he suggests, and their views - today, not 40 years ago - are about as "respectable" and "mainstream" as those of, say, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama's incendiary minister.

The key facts, reported by Ben Smith in Politico.com, are these: Barack Obama's political career was launched in Ayers's and Dohrn's home, when a group of "influential liberals" gathered in 1995 to meet the young organizer who was Illinois lawmaker Alice Palmer's chosen successor. In the years that followed, Obama and Ayers would serve together as (paid) board members of the Woods Fund, a leftist Chicago foundation, and appear jointly on academic panels, at least one of which was organized by Michelle Obama. Ayers would even donate money to one of Obama's political campaigns.

Arguably, none of this would matter if Ayers and Dohrn had long ago repudiated their violent extremism. But they have always refused to apologize for their monstrous behavior. "We weren't extreme enough in fighting against the war," Ayers told the Chicago Tribune in 2001. In a memoir published that year, he exulted: "Everything was absolutely ideal on the day I bombed the Pentagon." America, he said after Sept. 11, "is not a just and fair and decent place. . . . It makes me want to puke."

Is this Obama's idea of "respectable" and "mainstream" political thinking? If so, doesn't that tell us something about his judgment and standards?

In Chicago the other day, radio producer Guy Benson discovered video recordings of Ayers and Dohrn speaking at a reunion of antiwar radicals in November 2007. To live in the United States, Dohrn told the group, is to be "inside the heart of the monster" that is such a "purveyor of violence in the world." Ayers denounced America as an imperial warmonger steeped in "jingoistic patriotism, unprecedented and unapologetic military expansion, white supremacy . . . attacks on women and girls, violent attacks, growing surveillance in every sphere of our lives, on and on and on."

Even if Obama doesn't personally believe these things, is it really "tired tripe" to ask why he seems so comfortable in the company of people who do? Is it really "extremely stupid politics" to wonder whether such people might play a role in an Obama administration? Rather than slam the few journalists who raise such questions, might it not behoove others in the media to follow suit?

Also, Captain Ed quotes from Steve Chapman on the issue:

Would Obama be friendly with someone who actually bombed abortion clinics and defends that conduct? Not likely. But he is friendly with William Ayers, a leader of the radical Weather Underground, which in the 1970s carried out numerous bombings, including one inside the U.S. Capitol....

Obama minimized his relationship by acknowledging only that he knows Ayers. But they have quite a bit more of a connection than that. He’s appeared on panels with Ayers, served on a foundation board with him and held a 1995 campaign event at the home of Ayers and his wife, fellow former terrorist Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers even gave money to one of his campaigns.

It’s not as though Ayers and Dohrn have denied or repudiated their crimes. After emerging from years in hiding, they escaped federal prosecution because of government misconduct in gathering evidence, but they don’t pretend they were innocent. In 2001, Ayers said, “I don’t regret setting bombs. I feel we didn’t do enough.” ...

It’s hard to imagine he would be so indulgent if we learned that John McCain had a long association with a former Klansman who used to terrorize African-Americans. Obama’s conduct exposes a moral blind spot about these onetime terrorists, who get a pass because they a) fall on the left end of the spectrum and b) haven’t planted any bombs lately.

You can tell a lot about someone from his choice of friends. What this friendship reveals is that when it comes to practicing sound moral hygiene, Obama has work to do and no interest in doing it.

I'll have more information as I find it.

Will Superdelegates Rubber-Stamp the Popular Vote?

With a recent survey of Democratic Party superdelegates showing Hillary Clinton with a slim 16-person lead among 476 pledged superdelegates, and with over 300 individuals still uncommitted to either Clinton or Barack Obama, it's seems increasingly likely that the party's nomination will be decided at the national convention in late August.

Karen Tumulty's got an interesting analysis on the potential endgame in three scenarios for the Democrats: (1) Clinton drops out of the race after a loss in Indiana on May 6; (2) top party leaders bring a decisive end to the content in June; or (3) the battle goes all the way to Denver.

Tumulty's look at the second possibility, that party leaders end the race in June, is worth citing:

[Everything] could change after the last two states, South Dakota and Montana, vote on June 3. That's the time party chairman Howard Dean, Senate majority leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are expected to tell the superdelegates — about 300 of the roughly 800 delegates overall who have yet to commit — that it is time to make up their minds. Pelosi in particular is key, as more than 70 of those uncommitted superdelegates are House members. For many, holding back now is more a matter of principle than preference. "They don't want to be perceived as telling voters how to vote," says former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle, who is heading Obama's superdelegate effort.

Not since the nasty 1984 primary race between party-establishment favorite Walter Mondale and the insurgent Gary Hart has the nomination come down to the superdelegates, who also include governors, Senators and party officials. In that race, virtually all the elders got in line behind Mondale, the party's legatee. But Obama has been steadily chipping away at Clinton's once formidable lead among the superdelegates; the assumption, at least for now, is that most of those who remain would move to put Obama over the top if he emerges from the primary season with the most pledged delegates. To do otherwise would be to risk alienating the legions of new voters who, thanks largely to Obama, are participating in elections for the first time. Clinton's best hope for countering that argument would be to pull even or ahead in the popular vote.

The Clinton team also notes that the superdelegates were established in the 1980s, in the wake of successive electoral debacles, to assure that the party nominated its strongest general-election contender. If Clinton performs well in such upcoming primaries as West Virginia and Kentucky, her team argues, that will increase doubts about Obama's durability in the fall (though it has been 12 years since both states voted for a Democrat in a general election). They also hope Clinton will finish close enough to Obama to bring into the calculation the still disqualified votes of Florida and Michigan — two states that moved up their primary dates in violation of party rules and subsequently lost their delegates as a result. Should it reach a point at which the fate of those delegates would determine the outcome, that would pave the way for the scenario Democrats fear most [a brokered convention]...

People have been speculating on this possibility for nearly four months, since Clinton and Obama started trading victories in closely fought battles from New Hampshire to South Carolina to Texas.

But with the superdelegate count so close - and especially with Obama's failure to put away the nomination with key wins in middle American working class states - some decision on the nominee outside of the popular vote is all but certain.

Jason Bello and Robert Shapiro, at Political Science Quarterly, analyze some of the factors surrounding a final decision on the party nominee at the Democratic National Convention:

This election tells us that the rules are important and cannot be ignored. They matter in giving one candidate an edge over the other and also in determining the length of the primary and caucus campaigns. Another debate over the rules is brewing with respect to the Florida and Michigan delegates (313 in total), who are not being counted because the states scheduled their primaries too early. Hillary Clinton, who won handily in both states, wants them reinstated, but Barack Obama (whose name was not even on the Michigan ballot) maintains that doing so would be unfair. The Democratic Party has given each state the option of holding another contest, but this seems unlikely. For now, these two states’ delegates will not count; the Clinton camp has one final recourse, an appeal to the credentials committee, but that option is still months away. This situation is problematic for the Democratic Party, because it does not want the nominee choice to depend on a bureaucratic decision made at the convention. In a similar vein, many Democrats do not want the "super delegates"—the ostensibly uncommitted set of party leaders—to determine the outcome either, a possibility that emerges when the nomination race reaches the convention undecided. Super delegates were not intended to follow the popular vote; they were created to bring independent judgments to the process. However, we must remember that the principle reason that the elec-torally consequential convention became so rare over the past 30 years is that a push for popular democracy put the power in the hands of the voters, all of whom decide before the convention. This year presents an entirely new situation and will be the first time since the democratization of the primary that the super delegates will be asked to vote decisively. We expect that the same norms of popular democracy that drove these reforms will put enormous pressure on the Democratic delegates to vote in accordance with either the outcomes of their state contests or the winner of the final tally up to the convention. Although a number of Democratic uncommitted delegates have already endorsed either Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, we would be surprised if the super delegates on the whole do not support the leader in committed delegates and reverse the outcome. It therefore remains unclear whether arriving at the convention with the results undecided matters if the super delegates simply rubber-stamp the results of the primaries and caucuses. Should the parties get rid of the super delegates? The answer remains unclear. The purpose of the convention today has changed; it is less a deciding mechanism and more a chance to rally around the nominee and showcase upcoming stars. The presidential nomination process has never been a fully democratic process, though it has become more democratic over time. Eliminating the super delegates would be another step in this direction, but a more democratic process may not be what the parties are looking for.

Will the superdelegates "rubber-stamp" the popular vote from the party's primaries and caucuses?

Party leaders, activists, and voters had better hope so.

If not, 2008 is likely to see the most undemocratic Democratic nomination battle since 1968, amid potential unrest in the streets (a youth cohort venting its rage through unconventional participation), while disgruntled rank-and-file party members boycott the general election on November 4, handing the GOP a remarkable victory amid circumstances for the Republicans that appear less than auspicous.