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Politics : President Barack Obama -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (8971)	2/7/2008 8:32:31 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

Democrats Living Dangerously _______________________________________________________________ Early Voting Insanity And a GOP Gift By George F. Will Columnist The Washington Post Thursday, February 7, 2008 LOS ANGELES -- Forewarned, Democrats now are forearmed -- not that they will necessarily make sensible use of the gift. Tuesday's voting armed Democratic voters with the name of the candidate that their nominee will face in the fall. Will their purblind party now nominate the most polarizing person in contemporary politics, knowing that Republicans will nominate the person who tries to compensate for his weakness among conservatives with his strength among independent voters who are crucial to winning the White House? Perhaps. The Republican Party's not-so-secret weapon always is the Democratic Party, with its entertaining thirst for living dangerously. John McCain has become the presumptive nominee of the conservative party without winning majority support of conservatives. According to exit polls, he lost them Tuesday to Mitt Romney in his home state of Arizona, 43 to 40. He lost them in that day's biggest battleground, California, 43 to 35. The surest way to unify the Republican Party, however, is for Democrats to nominate Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama, the foundation of whose candidacy is his early opposition to the war in Iraq, would be a more interesting contrast to the candidate who is trying to become the oldest person ever elected to a first presidential term and who almost promises a war with Iran ("There is only one thing worse than military action, and that is a nuclear-armed Iran"). Obama's achievements on Tuesday would have been considered astonishing just two weeks ago, but they have been partially discounted because the strength of his ascendancy became so apparent in advance. And he would have taken an even larger stride toward the nomination were it not for a novelty that advanced thinkers have inflicted on the political process. Once upon a time, in an America consigned to the mists of memory, there was a quaint and, it is now said, oppressive custom called Election Day. This great national coming together of the public in public polling places, this rare communitarian moment in a nation of restless individualists, was an exhilarating episode in our civic liturgy. Then came, in the name of progress, the plague of early voting. In many states, voting extends over weeks, beginning before campaigns reach their informative crescendos. This plague has been encouraged by people, often Democrats, who insist, without much supporting evidence, that it increases voter turnout, especially among minorities and workers for whom the challenge of getting to polling places on a particular day is supposedly too burdensome. The plague made many Super Tuesday voters -- those who hurried to cast their ballots for John Edwards, Rudy Giuliani and other dear departeds -- feel like ninnies, which serves them right. On Tuesday, the Democratic Party paid a price for early voting, especially in California, where more than 2 million votes were cast in the 29 days before what is anachronistically called Election Day. The price was paid by the party's most potentially potent nominee, Obama, whose surge became apparent after many impatient voters had already rushed to judgment. Although Obama lost California to Clinton by almost 390,000 votes, he surely ran much closer in the votes cast on Tuesday, after her double-digit lead in polls had evaporated. Had he won the third of the three C's -- he won Connecticut, where a large portion of voters are in her New York City media market, and in Colorado, a red Western state rapidly turning purple -- he might now be unstoppable. Evangelical Christians, who in 2006 gave Republicans more votes than Democrats received from African Americans and union members combined, wanted to determine the GOP's nominee -- and perhaps they have done so. By giving so much support to an essentially regional candidate, Mike Huckabee, rather than to Mitt Romney, they have opened McCain's path to capturing the conservative party without capturing conservatives. McCain's Tuesday triumph was based in states (New York, New Jersey, Illinois, California) he will not carry in November. Although Obama is, to say no more, parsimonious with his deviations from liberal orthodoxy, he is said to exemplify "post-partisan" politics. The same is sometimes said of McCain. Five days before Super Tuesday, McCain received an endorsement from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, another supposed practitioner of post-partisanship, which often looks a lot like liberalism that would prefer not to speak its name. Three days before that endorsement, the emblem of Schwarzenegger's post-partisanship -- his extremely liberal (lots of mandates and taxes) and expensive ($14.9 billion, slightly more than the state's current budget deficit) plan for universal health care -- died in an 11-member state Senate committee, where it got just one vote. Perhaps we are seeing the future. It looks familiar.

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (8971)	2/7/2008 7:01:38 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 149317

Obama: The Shock of the Red egan.blogs.nytimes.com February 6, 2008, 8:51 pm Take a look at what happened on Tuesday in the nearly all-white counties of Idaho, a place where the Aryan Nations once placed a boot print of hate — “the international headquarters of the white race,” as they called it. The neo-Nazis are long gone. But in Kootenai County, where the extremists were holed up for several decades, a record number of Democrats trudged through heavy snow on Super Duper Tuesday to help pick the next president. Guess what: Senator Barack Obama took 81 percent of Kootenai County caucus voters, matching his landslide across the state. He won all but a single county. The runaway victory came after a visit by Obama last Saturday, when 14,169 people filled the Taco Bell Arena in Boise to hear him speak – the largest crowd ever to fill the space, for any event. It was the biggest political rally the state has seen in more than 50 years. “And they told me there were no Democrats in Idaho,” Obama said. Okay, so Idaho is the prime rib of Red America. Ditto Utah, where Obama beat Senator Hillary Clinton 56 percent to 39 percent on Tuesday, including a 2-1 win in arguably the most Republican community in America – Provo and suburbs, a holdout of Bush dead-enders. These states would never vote Democratic in a general election. But those numbers, and exit polling across the nation, make a case for Obama’s electability and the inroads he has made into places where Democrats are harder to find than a decent bagel. Yes, Hillary-hatred is part of it. But something much bigger is going on among independents and white males, something that can’t all be attributed to fear of a powerful woman in a pantsuit. Having gone through their Hope versus Experience argument, Democrats are moving on to the numbers phase, looking for advantages in the fall. If they want to parse the Geography of Hope, they can do no better than study what happened in red counties on Tuesday. Overall, Obama won some big, general election swing states: Colorado, Missouri, Minnesota, and a tie in New Mexico, where they may still be counting votes from the 2004 election. All will be crucial in deciding the next president. His victory in Colorado, by a 2-1 margin, defied most predictions. Four times as many Democrats turned out as were expected, typical of the passion level elsewhere. In Anchorage, Alaska, for example, traffic was backed for nearly a mile from people trying to get into a middle school to become part of an Obama avalanche. But back to Colorado. Obama won the liberal enclaves, as expected, but then he nearly ran the table in the western part of the state – ranch and mining country — and he did it with more than Ralph Lauren Democrats. In booming, energy-rich Garfield County, for instance, Obama beat Clinton 72 percent to 27 percent. “We won in places nobody thought we could win,” an exultant Federico Pena, the former Denver mayor, told a victory crowd on Tuesday night. Obama’s audience a few days earlier – more than 18,000 — was so big that thousands who couldn’t get in huddled on a frozen lacrosse field to hear him. Now broaden the picture and look at the vote among white males, traditionally the hardest sell for a Democrat. While losing California, Obama won white men in the Golden State, 55 to 35, according to exit polls, and white men in New Mexico, 59-38. Looking ahead to Saturday, when Washington State, Nebraska, and Louisiana hold contests, Obama should add another three states to the 13 he won on Tuesday. They’re all caucus states, each with distinct advantages for Obama. His problem – and it’s a big one – is among Latino voters, and older women. He got crushed by Hillary among Hispanics in California and New Mexico. To win the West, Latinos have to be in your camp. Only slothful thinkers still view Democrats in the West as Prius-driving latte-sippers along the Left Coast. The larger story is about home-grown identity. Eight of the 11 Western States have Democratic governors. The Democrats picked up two Senate seats in the West in the last two national elections, and are poised to pick up two more this year, in Colorado and New Mexico. Early on, Obama took a chance on the West, sending paid staffers to places like Boise, Idaho and Wenatchee, Washington. And the Alaska office for Obama – that was a knee-slapper at the time, but no one’s laughing now. He won the Last Frontier state by a 3-1 margin Tuesday. Obama has made cynics wilt, and stirred the heart of long-dead politicos in places where Democrats haven’t had a pulse in years. Cecil Andrus, the eagle-headed eminence of Idaho, a former governor and Democratic cabinet member, nearly lost his voice introducing Obama in Boise on Saturday. He recalled a time when he was a young lumberjack who drove down the Clearwater Valley to see Jack Kennedy speak in Lewiston, a day that changed his life. “I’m older now, some would suggest in the twilight of a mediocre political career,” Andrus said. “I, like you, can still be inspired. I can still hope.” This kicked off the second biggest political rally in Idaho history. And the first? That was when President Dwight Eisenhower came to visit. Last week his granddaughter, Susan Eisenhower, made a small bit of family history on her own. She said that if Obama is the nominee, “this lifelong Republican will work to get him elected.”