Mission Accomplished, Postdated ...
From CNN ...
At a Friday night town hall in Oregon, Senator Hillary Clinton criticized Senator John McCain for his speech predicting victory in Iraq by the end of his first term."It sounded a lot like 'Mission Accomplished,' only postponed into 2013," said Clinton, referring to President George Bush's declaration less than two months after the Iraq invasion that major combat was over. "From my perspective, it's just more of the same. It's a continuation of the Bush policies that have been failures."
I must say I had a similar feeling about this ad and speech. Your promises about what you're going to accomplish in four years are implicit, and often explicit, in every presidential campaign. But taking a victory lap over your list of accomplishments that you haven't even accomplished yet does come off a little silly.
Here's the ad; see what you think ...
--Josh Marshall
Opening a New Front
Tom Allen (D) is running against Sen. Susan Collins (R) in Maine. Until the Democrats took over the senate, Collins was the chair of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee -- the analog of the Waxman committee in the House, the body's main investigative committee. And now Allen is charging that Collins' failure to hold any oversight hearings on contracting fraud and abuse in Iraq led to massive waste and even the loss of lives.
Here's a story on it from the Portland Press Herald and a video segment on it from a local news station ...
--Josh Marshall
Sen. Kennedy Hospitalized
Sen. Teddy Kennedy (D-MA) rushed to hospital in Boston ... "symptoms of a stroke".
Breaking Update: Kennedy reportedly fell ill in Hyannisport and was first taken to a local hospital before being airlifted to Boston.
Further Update: More from the AP wire.
--Josh Marshall
Long Time Comin'
Duke Cunningham briber Tommy Kontogiannis sentence to 8 years and one month.
From the San Diego Union-Tribune ...
The contrition, tears and poor health of Thomas Kontogiannis were not enough to spare him a prison sentence of eight years and one month for his role laundering bribe money for former Rep. Randy "Duke" Cunningham.On Friday, U.S. District Judge Larry Burns also fined the wealthy Long Island financier $1,050,000 - twice the value of the bribe that Kontogiannis laundered through fraudulent mortgages that allowed Cunningham to buy a $2.4 million mansion in Rancho Santa Fe.
--Josh Marshall
Vote suppression guru Hans von Spakovsky withdraws his nomination to the FEC.
--Paul Kiel
Special Post (Please Read)
This is a special day for TPM, a bittersweet one, but also a happy one in as much as we're sending off someone who's contributed so much to what this network of sites has become over the last two and a half years.
Today is Paul Kiel's last day at TPM. He's been snatched away by the good folks at Pro Publica, a new news organization that's just starting up that employs yet another new model for producing vibrant and path-breaking journalism in an era in which the web and collapsing journalistic business models have the entire journalism world under threat.
For TPM regulars Paul doesn't need any introduction. Paul was TPM's second hire, one of two blogger-reporters I hired with the funds raised to start TPMmuckraker.com. In fact, Paul came on board a couple months before TPMmuckraker actually launched. He was later joined by Justin Rood as the site's original two reporters.
TPM got a great deal of attention and praise for our coverage of the US Attorney firing scandal last year. And as the face of TPM, a lot of those kind words have focused on me. But it was really more a collaboration between Paul and I. Justin Rood left in January of last year, just as the story was getting underway. And in part because Paul and I had our hands so full throwing everything we had at that story, we didn't get around to hiring a replacement muckraker until late spring when the bulk of the story -- at least the biggest headlines -- were already behind us. I really can't thank him enough for his work on that story.
It's sort of in the nature of a small, scrappy organization that you hire people and if you're lucky get to watch them come into their own on your team. It's one of the most satisfying aspects of running this operation. And I'm hoping that over the coming years we'll be able to find other great talent like Paul, have them contribute mightily to what we do here, shape what it is we do, and then when the time comes have them go off to other outfits hopefully taking some small bit of what they've learned working here with them.
In the next few days we'll be announcing new hires who will make up the new TPMmuckraker team. And I'm confident they'll take the site in exciting new directions applying our model to the copious amounts of new muck that's out there waiting to be raked. But like anything truly special, Paul can't really be replaced. And we will miss him.
Late Update: A reader-blogger at TPMCafe has set up a thread to send Paul best wishes and, I suppose, also reminisce about your favorite Paul Kiel moments or Kieliana.
--Josh Marshall
Former Senator Lincoln Chafee: The GOP abuses the environment at its own peril.
--Paul Kiel
Obama Responds
Update: To McCain, this was a "hysterical diatribe."
Another update: Obama says during a later Q&A that he'll debate McCain "anywhere, anytime" on foreign policy:
--Paul Kiel
Ruth Rosen remembers the beginning of the California gay marriage battle: San Francisco City Hall in 2004.
--Paul Kiel
Today's Must Read
The EPA's newest contribution to its dreadful legacy under Bush: more smog in national parks.
--Paul Kiel
Red-Handed (Faux Gathering Storm Edition)
President Bush and Sen. McCain have been tag-teaming Sen. Obama on his willingness to hold talks with Iran. Jamie Rubin pulls the tape of him calling for talks with Hamas a mere two years ago.
(ed.note: As Rubin makes clear in his OpEd, there's nothing unreasonable about McCain's position from two years ago. It's probably the right position. It just shows his campaign rhetoric today is dishonest posturing for political effect.)
Late Update: Here's video of McCain's 2006 statements:
--Josh Marshall
Too Hard a Ball
Right-Wing Radio yakker crashes and burns like the Hindenburg while trying to talk about appeasement ...
--Josh Marshall
Why Talk to Them When You Can Work for Them?
I hear McCain's top foreign lobbyist advisor Charlie Black (he's the one who now conducts his lobbying business from McCain's campaign bus) was just on the tube knocking Obama for his willingness to talk to international bad actors. Remember, this is the same Charlie Black who worked on behalf of Ahmad Chalabi (who unless I'm mistaken our government still believes spied on us on behalf of Iran) and then got the contract for creating phony news in Iraq ...
Special TPM Bonus Round: Send us any examples you can find of reporters asking Black about his work for regime-change bamboozler and accused Iranian spy Ahmad Chalabi and other rogue regimes.
Super Double Bonus for any TPM Reader who can get us a clip of Black being asked whether he is sure Chalabi was not passing US secrets to Iran while he had Black on his payroll.
--Josh Marshall
One TPM Reader goes rational on President Bush ...
When President Bush decries "the false comfort of appeasement," and John McCain raises the spectre of Neville Chamberlain, they're deliberately advancing a fallacious line of argument. Appeasement - the acceptance of conditions imposed by an aggressor in lieu of open conflict - is not the result of negotiation, but of capitulation. And the inverse proposition - the rejection of all negotiation even at the price of open conflict - is just as rigidly obtuse. We call it war-mongering.I don't particularly mind that our President has chosen to air a domestic dispute abroad - that's his perogative. And I've always been miffed by the notion that foreign policy is for the experts, and too delicate a matter to be subject to public debate or the people's will - what the establishment terms 'politicization.' But I'm incensed that the coverage has focused on whether or not Obama's support of negotiations constitutes appeasement, as if this were subject to dispute. It's not. He has never proposed giving in to our enemies. His support of negotiation constitutes, ipso facto, a rejection of appeasement.
There are not two valid sides to this dispute. For the media to accede to this kind of slander, just because it's what the GOP demands, well, it borders on appeasement.
As long as we're insisting on a non-nonsense discussion of foreign policy, let's note that Pres. Bush and Sen. McCain must be terribly illiterate of our history or extremely cowardly to compare the current president of Iran (who helps govern a country with a tanked economy and a third or fourth rate military) to Adolf Hilter who had regrouped and tossed the restraints from what was the greatest military, scientific and economic powerhouse in Europe.
--Josh Marshall
No Phony Backstories
As the general election begins to ramp up, it's worth marking off a number of Sen. McCain's claims that are demonstrably bogus, despite being accepted more or less at face value by national political press.
First, McCain a critic of President Bush's war policies?
Please.
Sen. McCain has consistently supported all of the president's war policies. His dissents have been atmospheric and marginal, at best.
Indeed, his embrace of the advisors, outside supporters and policies of President Bush's neoconservative foreign policy shows that it is President Bush's failed foreign policies that he is most intent on continuing and expanding. Whatever McCain might do on cutting upper-income taxes is clearly not something he's got his heart in. These are topics he doesn't have a great deal of interest in and he's espousing policies he denounced only four or five years ago. They are simply the necessary scaffolding of building a conservative coalition to support his war policies where are his real interest very evidently remains.
On foreign policy, McCain is 100% with President Bush's policies.
Given the president's abysmal public approval ratings, it's in the Democrats' obvious political interest to portray a McCain presidency as a continuation of President Bush's foreign policy. But this charge has the benefit of being true. Simply listen to what he says. On every particular, it's staying true to President Bush's course.
--Josh Marshall
McCain: Obama unfit to defend America (from second rate regional power, Iran).
--Josh Marshall
Complain or Attack?
TPM Reader JS reacts ...
I agree with you that Bush's remarks today at the Knesset were disgusting, not to mention historically inaccurate. For me, it brought to mind your bitch-slap theory of politics. It seemed like the Democratic response in this instance was fairly direct, quick and unanimous in condemning the President's speech. Thus, on one-level, they avoid being bitch-slapped. At the same time, I worry that simply complaining that the President's remarks were disgusting or "malarkey" or "absolutely outrageous" might just be another example of the Democrats playing into the bitch-slap theory once again -- wherein they look like complainers while the President looks like an attacker.Which is it? Do you think that today's response represents an effective new level of solidarity and backbone for the Democrats, or is there some better way to respond that plays less into the bitch-slap theory?
For me personally, the best response is one that makes it clear upfront that Bush's Iraq War has strengthened Iran and thus put Israel in greater danger. I've seen this argument buried in a few of today's repsonses, but I'm not sure that that is the message that is coming across to the public.
On balance I'd say that each time President Bush shames his office by transgressing the unwritten rules of the American polity, it's incumbent on everyone to rebuke him. As a political matter, though, it doesn't amount to that much. Every time the president does something like this, the Democratic nominee needs to point out again that President Bush bungled the country into a disastrous war that has damaged America, failed to find Osama bin Laden, funded it all but driving us further into debt to China and various Gulf sheikdoms. And McCain supports it all 100%.
Always stay on the offensive.
--Josh Marshall
Marriage in California
E.J. Graff with some context for today's California Supreme Court decision.
--Paul Kiel
Kerry on Bush's "Absolutely Shameless" Act
Sen. Kerry blasts President Bush's "shameless" act of launching a domestic political attack in front of a foreign parliament.
In case you hadn't heard yet, the president attacked Sen. Obama as a terrorist coddler on the order of the late 30s Nazi-appeasers in a speech before the Israeli Knesset.
As the president who's probably done more to damage this country than any in 150 years, I can't say I'm exactly surprised that he'd do this. But it really was disgusting, even for him.
--Josh Marshall
All's Well That Ends Well
We seem to have arrived at an equitable compromise: Sen. Clinton is staying in the nomination race while Sen. Obama drops out to move on to the general.
--Josh Marshall
TPMtv: Terrymania!
As I noted a couple days ago, in recent weeks, Terry McAuliffe has managed to turn projectile nonsense into something approaching the sublime. But with the primary battle now rapidly winding down, Terry's tear may be coming to an end. So before it's over, in today's episode of TPMtv we bring you some of Terry's greatest recent moments ...
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
--Josh Marshall
Today's Must Read
The U.S. cuts off contact with Ahmed Chalabi. This time for real. Really.
--Paul Kiel
Gravity. What a Concept ...
Atrios has a post riffing on today's Times article, which begins (the Times, that is): "The Republican defeat in a special Congressional contest in Mississippi sent waves of apprehension across an already troubled party Wednesday, with some senior Republicans urging Congressional candidates to distance themselves from President Bush to head off what could be heavy losses in the fall."
But, as Duncan asks, how can they really do that?
When you step back for a second, what's weird is that we even see the Mississippi special election result as a surprise. The Republican party is tightly defined around George W. Bush. And his job approval has not consistently gotten out of the low thirties (deep crisis numbers) for almost two years. And amazingly, over that period, the congressional party has made little attempt to get out of under his mantle.
I think what we're seeing here is the fall-out of the confidence game tactics that defined Bush's early presidency -- and has oddly persisted into the present. Whether it was the Iraq War or early tax cuts of various other policy moves, the idea was always to brashly push ahead even in the face of widespread public disapproval for particular policies. Such inexplicable confidence could goad adversaries into thinking the given policies were more popular and the president's position more powerful than it was. Later, as some of these policies went south, the president's message to congressional supporters was that if they maintained a united (you support me and I'll support you) that they'd pull through notwithstanding public opinion.
This confidence got a hard knock in the November 2006 elections. But the White House managed an odd after-the-fact success in putting this on the congressional party and removing the blame from the president. And now we're surprised that a party that has tightly defined itself around the most consistently unpopular president in modern political history is tanking at the polls?
Seriously, what's the mystery?
I agree with Duncan. I don't expect congressional Republicans to successfully separate themselves from President Bush. It's too ingrained at this point. And making the effort would be similar to what happens to an Army that breaks and buckles into a free-for-all retreat -- perhaps inevitable but still insuring an even worse result as the stragglers become easier to pick off one by one.
--Josh Marshall
Asking the Tough Questions
I had not seen this interesting OpEd on Myanmar by Robert Kaplan in today's Times. Kaplan approvingly sifts through the arguments for mounting an "humanitarian invasion" of Myanmar, but nevertheless says we must realize that our invasion and possible overthrow of the government could lead to unforeseen complications. "It seems like a simple moral decision: help the survivors of the cyclone," he writes. "But liberating Iraq from an Arab Stalin also seemed simple and moral. (And it might have been, had we planned for the aftermath.) Sending in marines and sailors is the easy part; but make no mistake, the very act of our invasion could land us with the responsibility for fixing Burma afterward."
It's hard not to have a lot of respect for Kaplan's willingness to play the devil's advocate's role and point out that our coming Burmese invasion may not be a bed of roses after all. More seriously, though, I'm surprised that it's so easy to publish this kind of hooey as if the last five years had never even happened. Here, meanwhile, Matt Yglesias answers those pushing for an invasion by noting two big potential pitfalls in the present international context -- legitimacy and sustainability, as Matt goes on to note.
But I have an even simpler idea. Why don't we not invade any more countries for a while?
I know that will strike some as too flippant or isolationist. But it's not meant as the former and I'm confident it is not the latter. Many of our foreign policy thinkers seem to be developing the kind of character damage suffered by children who can buy the best toy every time their parents go to the mall -- the inability to distinguish between necessities, simple wants and the mere desire for kicks which is born of pervasive moral boredom. Add to this the fact that we are now managing two foreign occupations -- one of which is going poorly and a second which can only be described as a national catastrophe of historic proportions -- and you see the true level of the disconnect.
It's not simply a matter of having our hands full. More than this, it's an obliviousness to the reality of the downsides of our proposing to invade or actually invading countries more or less for the hell of it -- both in the sense of creating a more dangerous global political environment and the squandering of material resources and global political capital in advance of actual threats to our security we will likely face in coming decades. In the 90s, when most of our global rivals were flat on their back, such thinking may simply have been arrogant and short-sighted. Now it's just nuts.
--Josh Marshall
Mission Critical
I'm reassured that we have time to spend on stuff like this ...
Hold on, NFL. Spygate isn't over. Not if the "incensed" Pittsburgh Steelers fan in Congress has anything to do with it. Sen. Arlen Specter on Wednesday called for an independent investigation of the New England Patriots' taping of opposing coaches' signals, possibly similar to the high-profile Mitchell Report on performance enhancing drugs in baseball."What is necessary is an objective investigation," Specter said at a news conference in the Capitol. "And this one has not been objective."
The Pennsylvania Republican was unforgiving of his criticism of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, saying that Goodell has made "ridiculous" assertions that wouldn't fly "in kindergarten." The Senator said Goodell was caught in an "apparent conflict of interest" because the NFL doesn't want the public to lose confidence in the league's integrity.
Late Update: Several TPM Reader confidently assert that Specter is an Eagles, not a Steelers fan. And since he comes out of Philly, that makes sense. On such a life and death issue for our nation, I would expect more accurate reporting from the AP.
--Josh Marshall
More on Obama's Appalachia Problem
Newhouse's Jonathan Tilove explains: It's not a white problem. Obama has an Appalachia problem.
--Josh Marshall
Maybe the Key is Repetition
It hasn't worked yet, but the NRCC signaled today that it will continue to try to tie down-ballot Dems to Obama.
--David Kurtz
Closing Time
Solicitor General Paul D. Clement submits his resignation, effective June 2.
--David Kurtz
Charlie Black Catapulting the Propaganda
I see that all the foreign lobbying work done by the various lobbyists running John McCain's presidential campaign is now becoming a big story. And after the two lobbyists for the Burmese dictatorship had to leave, attention has now focused on Charlie Black, McCain's top advisor.
Now Black's been an interest of ours at TPM for 
years. So when it comes to foreign lobbying, I'm most interested in the work Black and his firm have done for various parties in Iraq.
Remember, Black worked on behalf of none other than Ahmed Chalabi of the Iraqi National Congress, the arch-WMD and Iraq-al Qaeda bamboozler who now complacently says that whatever garbage he sold the Americans that was just the cost of doing business and he got us to get rid of Saddam so basically whatever it took, who cares?
But here's another chapter of Black's work on the Iraq bamboozlement front that I'm not sure has gotten that much attention.
You may remember that back in late 2005 news emerged that the Pentagon had contracted with an outfit called The Lincoln Group to pay off Iraqi journalists to 'write' articles about just how great things were going in their country despite all the negative reports being filed by the biased Western media. Not only was that problematic in terms of our democratizing Iraq but a lot of that 'good news' from Iraqi journalists ended up making its way back into the American media stream, often becoming fodder for right wing bloggers and columnists arguing that the American people weren't getting the real story about how good things were going.
Here's an article from December 1st, 2005 in the Times that gives the basic run-down of the story.
But as we noted at the time, The Lincoln Group appears to have turned around and subcontracted the Iraqi 'good news' psy-ops account to none other than Charlie Black's lobbying outfit.
The following update ran in the July 27th 2005 edition of the PR industry trade sheet, Jack O'Dwyer's Newsletter ...
Burson-Marsteller's BKSH & Assocs. has been hired by The Lincoln Group, one of three firms selected last month by the U.S. Special Operations Command, to wage psychological warfare on behalf of the Pentagon in Iraq and other hot spots.Chairman Charlie Black, the former Republican National Committee spokesperson and advisor to Presidents Reagan and Bush, heads the account with Gardner Peckham, senior policy advisor to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.
BKSH has experience on the Iraqi front earned from work for Ahmed Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress.
Col. James Treadwell, director of the Joint Psychological Operations Support Element, said TLG was selected to develop "cutting-edge types of media," including radio/TV ads, documentaries, text messages, Internet spots and podcasts for the U.S. military.
--Josh Marshall
TPMtv: GOP House of Cards
Last night the Democrats snatched up the open House seat in Mississippi's heavily Republican 1st district, their third pickup this year of an open seat previously held by a Republican. In each case, the national GOP threw everything they had at holding onto the seat. In today's episode we explore just how bad a sign this could be for the GOP's prospects come November ...
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
--Ben Craw
A Cry for Help
The House GOP's new slogan -- "the change you deserve" -- also happens to be the marketing slogan for an anti-depressant drug.
--David Kurtz
Today's Must Read
Forget good v. evil. In the Bush Administration, it's a comic book battle between incompetence and malfeasance. You can never be quite sure which will prevail.
In today's installment, the U.S. asylum process trips up Iraqis friendly to U.S. forces, including a leading anti-corruption crusader who embarrassed the chronically corrupt Maliki government.
--David Kurtz
Never Die!!
Even with Hillary's blow-out win in West Virginia and the amazing Democratic victory in Mississippi, for me tonight's going to be about Terry McAuliffe's tour de force moment when he turned projectile nonsense into something approaching the sublime ...
--Josh Marshall
Quaking
Not only is Childers, the Democrat, winning that Mississippi House seat. It's really not even that close. With 94% of the votes in, he's winning by a 6 point margin.
Late Update: Scratch that. With 99% in, it's an 8 point spread. Not even close.
--Josh Marshall
Childers On Track To Win It
I didn't think the Dems would pull this one off. The Republicans brought Cheney in late bout of campaigning -- maybe not such a bad idea. But it looks like Childers is going to win this thing. He's only narrowly ahead. But it's pretty much only his strong precincts that are still to report.
Late Update: AP's called it. Childers takes Mississippi's 1st district, an incredibly Republican district.
Later Update: To put this into some broader perspective, the Republicans have lost three straight Republican districts to the Democrats in by-elections this year. Hastert's district in Illinois, Louisiana 6th, and now Mississippi 1st. Each successively more Republican than the last. In Mississippi 1st, President Bush got 62% of the vote there in 2004.
Symbolic Number Update: On the symbolic level, this pulls the House GOP caucus down to 199 -- below 200.
--Josh Marshall
Results
West Virginia is the expected blow out. But look at the results in Mississippi (on our election scoreboard). It's starting to look like the Dems may bag a pick up in this race too.
With 70% of the results in, Childers, the Dem, has a 4 point lead. And the counties that are still out seem to favor Childers.
Our resident vote counter, Eric Kleefeld, says that Childers seems to either matching or out-performing the results he got in the open primary (which has the Dems and Republicans voting together and was basically a trial heat for this race).
--Josh Marshall
Swirling
This is fascinating. I spent most of the evening writing a sprawling post about the historical and demographic roots of Sen. Clinton's strength in Appalachia (which accounts for almost all of her purported strength with rural and working class white voters). But now I'm listening to the MSNBCoids discussing the finer points of objective fact versus epistemological relativism, or, in this specific case, whether Sen. Clinton simply has a different, equally valid, opinion on the closeness of the race or whether she's living in her own separate reality. So I'm not really sure there's any point.
Late Update: Now Terry McAullife is losing his mind and his voice live on TV.
--Josh Marshall
A Chris Matthews Moment
Hillary is "the Al Sharpton of white people"? So says Chris Matthews:
He actually returned to this notion a few minutes later with another guest.
--David Kurtz
Upcountry
If the exit polls (and the pre-election polls) are accurate, Hillary Clinton is set to win West Virginia by roughly a 2 to 1 margin over Barack Obama. Oregon, next Tuesday, favors Obama. But Kentucky, which votes the same day, seems likely to yield a similar margin for Sen. Clinton. So what is it about these two states that makes them so favorable to Hillary Clinton?
There's been a lot of talk in this campaign about Barack Obama's problem with working class white voters or rural voters. But these claims are both inaccurate because they are incomplete. You can look at states like Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania and other states and see the different numbers and they are all explained by one basic fact. Obama's problem isn't with white working class voters or rural voters. It's Appalachia. That explains why Obama had a difficult time in Ohio and Pennsylvania and why he's getting crushed in West Virginia and Kentucky.
If it were just a matter of rural voters or the white working class, the pattern would show up in other regions. But by and large it does not.
In so many words, Pennsylvania and Ohio have big chunks of Appalachia within their borders. But those regions are heavily offset by non-Appalachian sections that are cultural and demographically distinct. West Virginia is 100% Appalachian. If you look at southeastern Ohio or the middle chunk of Pennsylvania, Obama did about the same as he's doing tonight in West Virginia.
Below is a map of the Appalachian counties stretching from New York down into Mississippi. Below that is a map of counties that Hillary Clinton has won by more than 65%. As you can see match up quite closely -- the grey gaps are Kentucky and West Virginia which hadn't voted yet.
So what is it about this region?
Let me offer a series of overlapping explanations. First, some basic demographics. It's widely accepted that Hillary Clinton does better with older voters, less educated voters and white voters. These demographics perfectly match West Virginia -- and, more loosely, the entire Appalachian region. A few key points from tonight's exit polls demonstrate the point: 4 out of 10 voters were over 60 years of age. 7 out of 10 lacked a college degree -- the highest proportion of any electorate in the country. And 95% of the electorate was white.
Basically you have a state that is made up almost exclusively of Clinton's voters. But there's a deeper historical explanation that we have to apply as well -- one nicely illustrated by the origins of West Virginia itself.
During the 18th and 19th centuries, in the middle Atlantic and particularly in the Southern states, there was a long-standing cleavage between the coastal and 'piedmont' regions on the one hand and the upcountry areas to the west on the other. It's really the coastal lowlands and the Appalachian districts. On the other side of the Appalachian mountain range the pattern is flipped, with the Appalachians in the east and the lowlands in the west.
These regions were settled disproportionately by Scots-Irish immigrants who pushed into the hill country to the west in part because that's where the affordable land was but also because they wanted to get away from the more stratified and inegalitarian society of the east which was built by English settlers and their African slaves. Crucially, slavery never really took root in these areas. And this is why during the Civil War, Unionism (as in support for the federal union and opposition to the treason of secession) ran strong through the Appalachian upcountry, even into Deep South states like Alabama and Mississippi.
As I alluded to earlier, this was the origin of West Virginia, which was originally the westernmost part of Virginia. The anti-slavery, anti-slaveholding upcountry seceded from Virginia to remain in the Union after Virginia seceded from the Union. Each of these regions was fiercely anti-Slavery. And most ended up raising regiments that fought in the Union Army. But they were as anti-slave as they were anti-slavery, both of which they viewed as the linchpins of the aristocratic and inegalitarian society they loathed. It was a society that was both more violent and more self-reliant.
This is history. But it shapes the region. It's overwhelmingly white, economically underdeveloped (another legacy of the pre-civil war pattern) and arguably because of that underdevelopment has very low education rates and disproportionately old populations.
For all these reasons, if you're familiar with the history, it's really no surprise that Barack Obama would have a very hard time running in this region.
--Josh Marshall
Networks Call It for Hillary
Exit polls point to 2 to 1 victory for Clinton.
--Josh Marshall
Exits
Early exit poll demographic data highlights from the AP.
Here's one set of numbers that jumped out at me.
RACE, GENDER AS VOTING FACTORSOne in four Clinton voters and about one in 10 Obama voters said race was an important factor in their vote.
About one in five Clinton voters said gender was an important factor in their vote. Nearly as many Obama voters said that.
--Josh Marshall
Spring Chickens
The Hill has a piece out where it asks the 97 senators not running for President whether they would accept an offer to be Vice President.
Sharped-eyed reader RM makes a very good catch:
Don't you find it odd that three Republican Senators (Thad Cochran, 70; Pete Domenici, 76; Chuck Grassley, 74) all noted that they were too old to be Vice President. Kind of odd given the circumstances of the current Republican nominee...
--David Kurtz
Brilliant!
The DCCC dropped a last minute mailer in Mississippi's 1st District (where they're holding an election today) claiming that Republican Greg Davis had offered up his town of Southaven, where he's mayor, as the new home for a statue of Confederate general and founder of the Klu Klux Klan, Nathan Bedford Forrest. The NRCC flipped out and sent out a press release claiming that the claim was a lie -- that it was a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, not Forrest. And their response got picked up in a piece in Roll Call.
But now with the help of TPM Reader AV, we've found a contemporary news account which appears to confirm the DCCC mailer's account.
--Josh Marshall
Tune In
I can't say there's going to be a huge amount of suspense. But join us at 7:30 when we'll be bringing you live election results from the West Virginia primary (aka, Sen. Clinton's A West Virginia apotheosis). More suspensefully, starting at 8 PM we'll be bringing you live results from the special election in Mississippi's 1st district. This is the race to replace Rep. Roger Wicker (R-MS) and it's similar to the race Dems recently won in Louisiana -- a blood red district (even redder than the one Rep. Don Cazayoux (D-LA) won) where the Democrat, Travis Childers (D-MS) is running neck and neck with Republican Greg Davis (R-MS).
To give some perspective, George Bush won this district 62% to 37%. So the fact that the Democrat is even in the hunt is pretty astounding. Like I said, the polls close at 8 PM Eastern.
--Josh Marshall
Ugly, Ugly, Ugly
They're going all out in the Republican primary for the open seat of Democrat Darlene Hooley in Oregon. One of the GOP candidates says he had no choice but to publicize a two-year-old email accusing his opponent of paying for an abortion for a woman he impregnated.
I wouldn't want to be seated between those two at the next Lincoln Day event.
--David Kurtz
Soldiers of God
Following up on what I mentioned in the post below, now that McCain backer John Hagee is trying to walk back his attacks on the Catholic Church, I'm curious whether he's going to have any follow up on what he claims is God's embrace of Islamic terrorists creating a "bloodbath" in the United States. As Hagee explains, it's not Iran or al Qaeda behind the Jihadists plotting mass casualty terrorist attacks against the US. It's God himself.
As you can see in this video clip, Hagee says that God is using Islamic terrorists to create a "bloodbath" in the US in order to punish us for supporting the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
I'm dying to hear McCain's campaign get asked about this. But so far it hasn't happened.
--Josh Marshall
Hagee: Just Kidding!
I'll be very curious just he's going to be able to square this circle. But apparently John Hagee, John McCain endorser and radical preacher, is now apologizing to Catholics for giving them such a hard shake. When I saw the headline I was more than a little curious to see how he'd explain that since his brand of anti-Catholicism is deeply woven into the strain of Protestantism he embraces. Did he suddenly discover that he'd misinterpreted the Book of Revelation?
Apparently so. Who says modern events can't be brought to bear on biblical exegesis?
Writes Hagee ...
I better understand that reference to the Roman Catholic Church as the "apostate church" and the "great whore" described in the Book of Revelation is a rhetorical device long employed in anti-Catholic literature and commentary. I hope you recognize that I have repeatedly stated that my interpretation of Revelation leads me to conclude that the "apostate church" and the "great whore" appear only during the seven years of tribulation after all true believers - Catholic and Protestant - have been taken up to heaven. Therefore, neither of these phrases can be synonymous with the Catholic Church.
Can we now get him to explain the part about God using Muslim terrorists to create bloodbaths in our streets because the US supports a two-state solution in Israel-Palestine?
--Josh Marshall
Today's Must Read
Delays dashed White House hopes for Gitmo trials to highlight this election year, but charges against some of the alleged 9/11 plotters promise to keep Gitmo front and center during the pre-trial wrangling between now and November.
--David Kurtz
TPMtv: McCain's Lobbying Pals ... vol. 57
John McCain's got so much experience in dealing with rogue regimes that he's got the rogue regimes' lobbyists running his campaign ...
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
--Josh Marshall
Carville: "I still hear some dogs barking. I'm for Senator Clinton, but I think the great likelihood is that Obama will be the nominee. As soon as I determine when that is, I'll send him a check."
--Josh Marshall
High Barr
NRO interviews Bob Barr about his highly righteous spoiler campaign for prez.
Following up on last night's post, a knowledgable TPM Reader adds this ...
Regarding Congressman Barr's presidential run, I think that he undermines McCain without drawing votes to himself, and that's good enough for Obama.I think that your "does he get votes" calculus is understandably, but overly, shaped by Nader's impact in 2000.
I think the impact of Barr out there running is that you now have two voices, one ostensibly from the Right, criticizing War On Terrorism policies, including Iraq. That's going to make it harder for McCain to draw the usual "the Dems are weak, Republicans are strong" distinction. I think it's going to have an impact on independent voters, even if that impact isn't to draw them to Barr but to make it okay (you know what I mean) for them to vote for Obama.
You're right that Barr has tended to attract quite a bit of media attention to himself - since Safire's departure, he's been the go-to "right-wing civil liberties guy." Which is funny, because he was a huge "War on Drugs" guy (he now views medical marijuana as a states rights issue), and was an author of the Defense of Marriage Act.
"How many Republicans are there out there who just won't accept McCain's Iraq forever position but can't bring themselves to vote for a Democrat? And how many of them could Barr sop up?"
See, I think you're asking basically the right question there, but you're still framing it in terms of "how many votes does Barr get?" Not many, I'd guess. I don't think it matters much.
Then again, I suck at political prognostication.
I think this is right. But for the reasons noted last night, I think he could also pull a non-trivial number of votes.
--Josh Marshall
O'Reilly, or a larval early version of O'Reilly, goes nuts on the set of Inside Edition ...
--Josh Marshall
Scales Falling From My Eyes
From Michael Barone's glowing review of Doug Feith's war memoir ...
Unfortunately -- and here Feith is critical of his ultimate boss, George W. Bush -- the administration allowed its critics to frame the issue around the fact that stockpiles of weapons weren't found. Here we see at work the liberal fallacy, apparent in debates on gun control, that weapons are the problem rather than the people with the capability and will to use them to kill others. The fact that millions of law-abiding Americans have guns is not a problem; the problem is that criminals can get them and have the will to kill others. Similarly, the fact that France has WMDs is not a problem; the fact that Saddam Hussein had the capability to produce WMDs and the will to use them against us was.
--Josh Marshall
Barr
Bob Barr, who we first met as one of the nuttiest of the mid-1990s Republican Revolution nutbars, has over the last decade refashioned himself as a fairly consistent supporter of embattled civil liberties and opponent of unbridled executive power. And today he announced his bid to be the presidential nominee of the Libertarian party, which will choose its standard-bearer at its national convention starting on May 22nd. (Libertarian muckety-mucks consider Barr the frontrunner for the nod.)
Normally these third party candidacies don't amount to anything. And I don't expect this one to either. But on this one ... maybe.
Barr is enough of a media darling that if he runs he'll get a lot of free media. And there's enough weirdness going on in the Republican party right now that I could imagine a few scenarios where he'd draw non-trivial numbers away from McCain. As always in these cases the place to look isn't in aggregate national numbers but in particular states where a drawing off a few points in one direction could make a state competitive where it otherwise wouldn't be.
At first glance you might think Barr could hurt McCain in the South. Some people have this idea that by spurring massive rates of voter turnout among African-Americans Obama could put some Deep South states into play. But this has never made sense to me. States like Mississippi and Alabama have big African-American minorities. But short of heroic levels of voter turnout, there just aren't enough Democrats in these states to win one of them. Certainly there aren't enough African-Americans to do it on their own. But perhaps if Barr could pull some Republicans away from McCain, some of these states could be in play?
Not likely. The regional and ideological calculus doesn't add up. One of the GOP base's biggest complaints about McCain is his purportedly insufficient GOP hackdom. Barr doesn't really do any better than McCain on that score. In fact, he's probably less hackish than McCain. So that won't be a good contrast. And in the South the Republican party is really about cultural traditionalism, race and war. McCain's got war covered; and Barr's against the Iraq War. So that doesn't play. And his civil libertarianism probably doesn't play well with cultural revanchists. (Barr was a pretty big culture warrior in the 90s. But I get the feeling that that's been overshadowed by his civil libertarianism. And regardless he'd probably need to keep it under wraps to secure the Libertarian party nod.) So at the end of the day it's really pretty rough sailing for Barr down South -- notwithstanding that he made his political career in Georgia.
The anti-war, small-l libertarian stance is generally assumed to be more attractive in the West. And this raises some interesting possibilities since it's in the West that Obama's strength as a general election candidate has been most evident. As I explained earlier, if you draw a line from Michigan west to the southern tip of Nevada, it's in the states above that line where Obama is outperforming Hillary Clinton and putting some traditionally Republican states into play. And a lot of those states are also ones where libertarian politics, if not Libertarian party candidates, have traditionally faired well. So I wonder if Barr's candidacy could potentially have the net effect of adding to Obama's traction in those states.
Finally, there's the anti-war factor. Civil liberties is pretty abstract for most people. But the Iraq War isn't. So a lot of Barr's drawing power will be a test of just how much opposition to the Iraq War there is in the Republican party. How many Republicans are there out there who just won't accept McCain's Iraq forever position but can't bring themselves to vote for a Democrat? And how many of them could Barr sop up?
I'm curious to hear other people's views on this. Like I said, third party candidates seldom amount to anything significant in a presidential contest. But Barr's media celebrity and the state of the GOP leave some chance of this one breaking the mold. So let me know your thoughts.
--Josh Marshall
Numbers Crunched
A number of interesting details in the new WaPo/ABC news poll.
First, on the horse race, Obama beats McCain 51%-44% and Clinton beats him 49%-44%. Statistically speaking, those are basically the same margins. But I strongly suspect we will see Obama's numbers moving ahead of Clinton's in the coming days.
This is one factor that's been too little remarked on -- I've never plotted the numbers out on a graph but who does better against McCain has tracked consistently with who's getting the winner and loser headlines in the primary battle. So, consistent headlines that communicate Clinton's or Obama's power, effectiveness, winner-hood for lack of a better word, push up his or her numbers vis a vis McCain. That's not particularly surprising when you think about it