South of the Border

The only reason I can think of for visiting South Carolina is to worship at the glorious monument to tackiness that is South of the Border...

Let's cut to the chase: Obama's victory was predicted; the blowout margin was not. The turnout for the South Carolina Dem primary was off the charts. Party officials thought they were being excessively optimistic in predicting 350,000 voters; they got over 500,000. Whoops. Obama himself got more votes than were cast in the entire 2004 South Carolina Dem primary.

You can't poll for that, since the polls are based on a likely turnout model, and those models are getting blown out of the water. You can't even really campaign for that, since a lot of campaign strategy is based on the same thing. In any other year, Clinton's raw vote total would've been enough to win, and up through Friday there were signs that she might actually keep it pretty close.

Interesting times indeed.

In '04 I was managing a race for the state legislature. We honestly didn't expect to win, but based on all the numbers we had and all the work we'd done (and we'd done some serious work), we were reasonably sure we'd break 45%, setting us up for a rematch in '06.

We got 38%.

Turnout on our side was a little over what we'd expected (we'd done some pretty decent GOTV work), and actually, if the turnout for the other side had followed expectations, we might've actually squeaked out a victory. But turnout on the other side swamped ours to a degree that nobody had seen coming; nobody could've seen it coming, really, since in some precincts the turnout was literally unprecedented.

That's a small-scale example of what's happening here.

South Carolina points to the fact that Obama is running a very different kind of campaign than what anyone's used to, one that's focused on bringing in new voters in unlikely places. Word has it that his field operations are already impressive and getting better, and that his campaign has been prepared for the long haul all along.

Clinton beat him in New Hampshire with a better ground operation, period. But is Clinton going to be able to replicate that in every other state? In traditional Democratic strongholds and delegate-rich states, yes -- this is the traditional Democratic strategy and she's following it.

But Obama's been organizing heavily in some eyebrow-raising places ignored by Clinton (Alaska, Idaho, Utah), and is beating her on the ground (if not yet in the polls) in places like Colorado and Missouri -- he's trying to get every single delegate he can, and he has been from the very beginning. And in doing so, he's coming at traditional primary strategy from right angles.

February 5th, therefore, is unlikely to clarify anything in this race. Clinton and Obama are increasingly likely to stay close in the delegate count, meaning that Edwards might see a reason to stay in -- if it all comes down to the delegates at the convention, he'll have some cards to play.

In other words, settle in -- there won't be a clear nominee anytime soon.

Water is wet

The grass is green.

George Bush lied about Iraq.

The interesting thing here isn't so much that a think tank spent time, money and effort creating a database proving what has already been proven; it's watching the whirligig of wingnuttery spin out of control desperately trying to discredit known fact. Sadly, No has, as usual, a quick rundown. If you're intrepid enough to wade into those waters yourself, Michelle Malkin is a good start, as she insists, in a performance that qualifies as some sort of online performance art, that the facts are irrelevant due to their source. Damn pesky facts.

My favorite comment, from James Joyner over at OTB: "Being proven wrong is not lying." How true. In the case of something as enormous as the Iraq War, lying reeks of criminal corruption, while being wrong merely reeks of criminal incompetence.

And the sky is blue.

Sometimes I get long-winded

If I’ve been largely silent on the latest Clinton/Obama Wal-Mart/Slumlord slapfight, it’s for three reasons:

1) Whatever fireworks there are on the D side, the R side is such a complete fiasco that it’s automatically a lot funnier.

2) I don’t have a dog in the D hunt just yet; I’ve leaned various ways, but right now I’m back to being officially undecided.

3) A disappointing number of liberal blogs have become absolutely unreadable once a candidate position is announced; it’s just an endless litany of “Candidate X strangles kittens; fortunately, Candidate Y has miraculous healing powers.” The worst offender at the moment is Daily Kos which, with its massive readership and Scoop-based public commenting system, has turned into the Star Wars Cantina of liberal blogging.

Nevertheless, I’d like to point out that what you’re currently seeing in the Democratic primary/cage match are merely the knotty, gnarled trees in a tangled forest that puts Mirkwood to shame… Be forewarned that this will be one of those posts that makes you wonder if I’m getting paid by the word.

The current meltdown is interesting because it’s not breaking neatly along the lines people necessarily think it should be. It’s not completely black vs. other, woman vs. man, establishment vs. outsider, liberal vs. centrist, young vs. old. It sometimes lends itself to those interpretations – Clinton’s callously tossed away an alarming percentage of the African American vote, for example, while Obama increasingly abandons his previous post-identity-politics persona -- but the full picture gets a little more complicated, especially when you realize that in terms of ideology, there’s little if any difference between the two.

The largest difference between Clinton and Obama is a matter of strategy – not a question of where the nation should go, but a question of how it should get there.

Clinton came of age in national politics during her husband’s Presidency, the beginning of the “Third-Way Politics” era. The basic premise was that in the current American political climate, it was impossible to advance progressive policy goals in the traditional way; an appeal to the middle needed to me made, and the best way to do this was through a strategy of triangulation. In other words, when given a choice between Policy A and Policy B, aim for Policy C.

Sometimes this resulted in out-conserving the conservatives (particularly in fiscal policy); other times it resulted in policy mush that pleased no one and advanced nothing. In trying not to offend anyone, third-way politics also had the effect of not making anyone particularly happy.

Let’s take a couple of LGBT issues as examples: If there’s a choice between allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military and not allowing them to serve at all, the triangulated position is “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” If the choice is between passing ENDA and not passing it, the triangulated choice is to let it die in the Senate year after year. From an LGBT rights standpoint, the Clinton years were a wash; the executive branch was not overtly hostile (the atrocity of DOMA being an exception), but it was not particularly supportive. In an effort not to annoy the mythical "average American" voter, the Democrats tried to meet conservative Republicans halfway, leaving many cherished progressive goals in their wake.

This is emblematic of what happened to progressive political goals overall during the Clinton years; the Democratic Party strategists desperately tried to please those who would never be pleased while slighting those who were among its staunchest supporters. Insert your own bad relationship/ damaged childhood metaphors.

...and the fact that most of those triangulated dichotomies were false to begin with would bring on another thousand words. Best for me to stick with the basic plot...

All of this was a product of the electoral model that showed us a split electorate – roughly speaking, 40% Democrat, 40% Republican, and the middle up for grabs. To achieve and maintain political power, the Democrats only needed to keep the Republicans from gaining more than 9.9% of the middle -- 50.1% of the vote wins the election, after all.

With that kind of view, everything becomes defense. No gains need be made so long as we can prevent losses. And indeed, if we make too many gains, they might offend people and lead to losses.

Hence the adoption of an electoral strategy based not on winning but on not losing. This was the central strategy point of the Democratic Party up until 2006. It led to the wholesale abandonment of entire states -- entire regions -- in favor of ensuring victory in reliable electoral pockets and hoping that would be enough to carry the day.

Enter Howard Dean, who challenged this conventional wisdom and, as head of the DNC, has devoted considerable time, energy and money into turning it on its head. The Democrats made surprising electoral gains in the mountain west in 2006, including in such unlikely states as Colorado and Arizona. To oversimplify things a bit, Dean had very quickly put into place an infrastructure that was able to take advantage of the collapse of the Republicans. Dean’s outlook is based on the idea that in order to make progress on policy goals, popular support must be deep, broad-based and widespread; progressive goals will only be achieved with a deep political mandate, and a party can only achieve that mandate by playing offense -- not by bringing the Democratic Party to the political center, but by bringing the center to the Party.

This is a threat to the established order, a rebuke to the established way of doing things. And this is exactly the kind of broad-based movement and electoral mandate Obama has openly stated that he is trying to achieve. And this kind of strategy is the diametric opposite of what Clinton has been practicing for her entire political career.

The electoral map that gave birth to third-way politics has shifted so fundamentally as to be useless; at the risk of pointing out the obvious, it’s not 1992 anymore. And sixteen years of progressive political energy has been spent defending what most progressives feel should never have needed defending.

Rightly or wrongly, many of those frustrated progressives have latched onto Obama as their champion. He has, with amazing prescience, recognized the moment and is attempting to seize it. And Hillary Clinton is trying to sell the party on her ability to thread a needle that no longer exists.

That’s the forest. Now you can go back to ogling the trees.

It's early...

Very very early. Don't think for a minute this establishes a pattern...

Judging from the news these past few months, it seems to have become a Bush family tradition that whichever family member is President must not only invade Iraq but also wreck the economy. At this rate we can expect Junior to invade Somalia around December or so. And on the bright side, if Jeb ever runs we'll know exactly what to expect.

Seriously, though, I've been perusing any number of analysts trying to make some sense out of the current economic brouhaha, and I can only find two basic opinions:

Opinion 1: The Fed's rate cut slowed the bleeding, but curing what ails the economy will be relatively slow and fairly unpleasant.

Opinion 2: "Remain calm! All is well!"


Judging from the number of folks who insist on option #2, the only safe investment for the time being would be Thorazine futures.

Bits and Pieces

-Rumor has it that Clinton is largely abandoning South Carolina, leaving the state today to campaign elsewhere and not returning until the night before the primary. Hm.

-Giuliani's Florida firewall isn't, um, firewalling, confirming the notion that the more he campaigns the worse he does. The rest of the nation is apparently figuring out what NYC has known for years.

-The Packers lost last night, meaning that my local newspapers can abandon their wall-to-wall Packers coverage and get back to their usual wall-to-wall coverage of bowling scores, lottery numbers, and the weather.

-Elsewhere in the world, there's still blatant racism in Jena, a crumbling economy, civil unrest in Kenya and Iraq... Sigh...



There. Baby panda. I feel better.

Genius

Maybe it's because it's late/early, but this, frankly, says it all right now...

Beware the Huckster

Via Alternet and yet another Loyal Reader^TM comes a story that's basically fallen on deaf ears outside the blogosphere. Apparently, Huckabee told a crowd of Evangelicals in Michigan that we need to heavily amend the Constitution to bring it more in line with, to use his term, "God's standards".

As soon as you've reassembled the scattered bits of your exploded head (it took me about two days, personally), think about this: the quote itself is proof positive (not like we need any) that the Huckster is a grade-A loon. It is also proof that he's a scary-good politician.

The Loyal Reader^TM who pointed this li'l tidbit out to me (by the way, y'all can actually use the comment function - share your wisdom with the masses!) was properly aghast that the public at large didn't jump all over this. They should've. But they didn't. Because they weren't there to hear it.

Huckabee knows exactly what he can get away with saying, and when he can get away with saying it. On Leno or in a widely broadcast debate, he's Mr. Regular Guy, not wanting to cram his religion down the public's throat. In front of his base, it's another story. It's like that with most politicians, of course, but the Huckster seems to have a much more finely tuned sense than most of how his particular words in a particular setting will play with the wider public.

Witness his odd press conference in Iowa, where he swore off negative campaigning and then showed everyone the anti-Romney hit piece he'd just said he wasn't going to show. The press laughed, called it a gaffe and a major mistake, figured his candidacy was doomed. He went up several points in the polls instead.

I'm serious, the folksy, self-effacing demeanor scares the crap out of me. He's much, much better at this than most are giving him credit for.

But maybe that's what happens when you spend your college years eating squirrel.

Missing: National Soul. Last seen prior to Sept. 11, 2001

Well, I'm glad we've got this confusion all sorted out:

"The United States does not engage in torture. We do use enhanced interrogation techniques," McConnell said.

"Enhanced interrogation techniques." Thank heavens -- now I can rest easy, knowing America's moral authority is intact, and that we're not really doing anything nasty...

Waterboarding has been condemned internationally as a form of illegal torture, and McConnell was quoted in the current issue of The New Yorker magazine as saying he would consider the practice torture if it were applied to him.

One would think McConnell, being National Intelligence Director, would be in a position to know what's torture and what isn't. Which is why we don't engage in waterboarding, of course. Right? Right! We're above all of that...

In late 2005, the retiring CIA station chief in Bangkok sent a classified cable to his superiors in Langley asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a secret CIA prison in Thailand that in part portrayed intelligence officers using simulated drowning to extract information from suspected al-Qaeda members.

I'm sorry I'm not being snarkily amusing, or amusingly snarky. But it's hard to do when you're literally begging for the powers that be in your country to wake up from their collective testosterone-laden Jack Bauer delusions while simultaneously vomiting in disgust at the hideousness those delusions have wrought.

That much multitasking is beyond me at the moment.

Seriously, where do they find these people?

Now this is utterly charming:

Carrying a family Bible, a state representative-elect kicked a photographer who took a picture of him during a statehouse prayer — then was sworn into office.

Carrying a Bible and kicking some hapless guy in the knee -- irony is indeed not dead. Reminds me of the scene from Saved!, when Mandy Moore throws the Bible at Jena Malone while screaming "I am FILLED with Christ's love!"

But it turns out this guy thinks he's the exception to more than just that whole "turn the other cheek" thing:

Bruce, an anti-tax crusader, was chosen by El Paso County Republicans last month to fill an unexpired term. He delayed his swearing-in until Monday, when the House was not in session. That allowed him to take advantage of a loophole in state term limits that would allow him to serve eight more years instead of six.

And the reason Bruce had the swearing-in Monday instead of putting it off even longer?

He finally gave in after members of his own party threatened to start the process of replacing him if he didn't take the oath on Monday.

Something tells me ol' Bruce needn't have bothered worrying about those extra two years...

You must watch this!

My only regret is that I didn't catch it when it actually, um, mattered. But it's still awesome!



Thank you Michigan!!!

Yay Mittens!

Well, Mitt Romney won in Michigan tonight, thereby making the Republican nomination contest even more of a mess than it was before. That's a good thing -- frankly, the longer they tear each other to shreds the better.

It's even more interesting that it's already being interpreted as a win with an asterisk, since there's more-than-anecdotal evidence of Democrats voting in the R primary just to mess things up -- we have Kos to thank for this particular bit of electoral deliciousness.

And in the meantime, of course, Giuliani came in 6th, barely beating Uncommitted. Any minute now we'll have pundits telling us that yet another round of utter electoral failure is exactly what he planned and part of his genius strategy.

Giuliani's approach to the primaries does lead one to wonder when, if he were elected, he'd bother showing up to work.

I should've known better

So I was going to take the day off, really, I was. Then, like an idiot, I read the Washington Post...

First off, Dan Balz ignores policy in favor of trying to figure out whether John Edwards is a breezer, a mudder, or a rabbit. He does pause long enough from the horse-race handicapping, though, for this rather startling reflection:

Edwards has offended many Democrats with his candidacy. They question his authenticity and see his shift from optimism to anger as the sign of an opportunistic politician.

Yes, because only an opportunistic politician could possibly have shifted from optimism to anger during the Bush years.

Elsewhere in this future fish-wrap, Michael Kinsley tries to play up the virtues of Ron Paul's libertarianism, coming to the heavily-waterboarded conclusion that libertarians are good because they force us to reexamine our own beliefs. Maybe, but only in the same way that telling a paranoid schizophrenic that Disney does not, in fact, implant chips into people's brains makes one grateful for one's own sanity. Of course, there's no mention of Paul's decidedly un-libertarian racism, homophobia, and misogyny, because polite people do not mention such things in the pages of the Post...

But they do talk about religion in politics, as in Paul Marshall's li'l number on how we actually need more religion in the public discourse. To be fair, he does say that said religious debate should be serious and well thought out, but now that I'm done being fair, the central support for this piece of codswallop is as good an example of the post hoc logical fallacy as I've ever seen.

Apparently, Marshall read a study (Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!) that advances the theory that countries with limited religious freedom are also economically worse off. Therefore, the logic runs, religious freedom must be tied to economic prosperity.

While this might be good news to Joyce Meyer and Creflo Dollar, it can pretty safely be counterargued that in some of the countries listed, and let's just randomly pluck North Korea and Burma as examples, the problem is not a lack of religious freedom so much as the presence of leaders with an iron grip on power who do not grasp basic economics (or who simply don't care).

And what of Saudi Arabia, arguably the most religiously repressive regime on earth? Marshall thoughtfully provides an addendum to his no-religious-freedom-equals-no-money formulation: "unless they have oil."

Someone, please, for the love of God, remind me to never read the Post on a Saturday again...

Friday night's not all right for blogging

...so I'll just leave you with some linky goodness to tide you over...

1) Atrios found a great candid picture of Giuliani campaigning in Florida, as well as the perfect strategy for his electoral woes: stop campaigning.

2) Jonah Goldberg, the right's answer to a question nobody ever asked, is a favorite target of the folks over at Sadly, No!, even more so now that his "book" has been released. They've, um, done some interesting things to his book's tags over at Amazon. Such actions are, of course, juvenile, destructive, wasteful... in other words, absolutely hilarious. My personal favorite: "banged out by howler monkeys".

3) I could give you some deeply troubling economic news, but I'll just send you off into the weekend by letting the Clash say it for me:

As ye sow...

Loyal Reader Mike^TM sent this link to Rude Pundit's reaction to Ann Coulter's "Father Dearest" column. As always, it lives up to its billing... I read the RP piece and my first reaction was "ouch!" I mean, yeah, it's the always-fit-for-mockery Coultergeist he's writing about, but c'mon, the woman's father just died; has the Rude One no sympathy?

Then I read the Coulter piece (no link, sorry -- I already gave her all the traffic she's getting from me today).

Oh, man, she just can't lay off for a minute, can she? Even while writing what should've been a beautiful, moving tribute to a man she obviously loved, she still has to remind the world again and again that liberals are godless, evil, and filled with hate. I probably wouldn't go to RP's Freudian analytical lengths, but Coulter has spent her entire career spewing vicious invective, and now she's used her father's death as nothing more than an opportunity for same.

So I do have sympathy for her, as losing a loved one is never easy. Problem is, if she knew about or cared about my sympathy, she wouldn't want it and wouldn't have a clue what to do with it.

And instead of seeing RP's post as over the line, I see it as a fulfillment of Karmic law. She has produced nothing but venom. Should she be surprised when that's all she gets in return?

Whoops

The media narrative throughout primary season has been that Giuliani skipped the early states to focus on the later, delegate-rich states like Florida.

Only, um, it turns out he didn't:

But Giuliani's effort here has been Herculean. Romney held 176 events in New Hampshire through Tuesday, primary day, while Giuliani held 126. That's considerably more than McCain, who held 104, and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who held 93.

Moreover, Giuliani held more events in New Hampshire than either Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., or Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., who are favored to come in first and second (not necessarily in that order) on the Democrats' side.

He also spent $2.5 million on TV ads.

It's an interesting strategy -- downplay your efforts and try to fly under the radar, so that when you do really well you can claim a groundswell. "See? I barely even made an effort, and look how many votes I got!" And it's true that when it comes to seeing other people on the sly, none of the other candidates are a match for the Rudester.

Trouble is, it didn't work.

Editor For Hire

Right now you're probably thinking "Make fun of Alan Keyes? Why bother?" And yet I simply can't resist...

A friend of mine is on every political e-mail list you can possibly imagine, and stays on some of them for the sheer entertainment value; as such, he recently forwarded me a fundraising e-mail he received from Alan Keyes. As a believer in the accuracy of language, I thought it could use a little editing. Keep in mind that, as with all editorial work, these are merely suggestions:


Dear Friend and Fellow American:

First, let me wish you a very Blessed Christmastide, and a Happy New Year.

Intruding on this Holy Season is urgent and vital national business -- citizenship business -- about which I must speak to you. For the sake of our beloved America my ridiculously outsized ego, I am still running for President of the United States just like I have been for twelve wasted, futile years, and I need your prayerful counsel and committed help help in being committed.

This week, the USA Today/Gallup Poll showed me EVEN with Ron Paul and AHEAD of long-running conservatives Duncan Hunter and Tom Tancredo, even though I have only been actively in the race a few weeks being ahead of Tom Tancredo and Duncan Hunter is about as difficult as being more physically attractive than the Elephant Man.

If you know me and share my rock solid defense of true moral and fiscal conservatism Messiah complex, please SELECT HERE NOW to support my campaign delusions of grandeur.

To learn more about me and my campaign for America’s revival, and read about my uncompromising stands on key issues like halting the illegal border invasion ramping up xenophobia, protecting innocent life from conception to natural death birth, defending traditional marriage and the family by throwing my lesbian daughter out of the house, asserting the priority of U.S. national security, sovereignty and prosperity as being a couple spots lower on the list than tax cuts for gazillionaires, and above all putting shoving our Creator God back in secular America’s public square face, SELECT HERE to contribute tithe.

You see, I have decided to enter the presidential fray as THE conservative candidate who can awaken America to the crises we face and the hope we have to victoriously meet those crises indisputable fact that eloquent nutjobs like me are primarily responsible for them. I publicly pledge to lead our people in an American revival regression, supporting subverting and defending despoiling the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States -- the repositories of our God-given rights and liberty.

In these troubled times, America must elect a person of faith and unvarnished truth, who above all will honor God, and by so doing “Honor the Oath” of public office and lead America onto a better path! But until that person enters the race, you’ll just have to settle for me.

SELECT HERE NOW to support my campaign feed my growing mania.

To learn more about me and my campaign for America’s my speaking fee’s revival, and read about gape in open-mouthed disbelief at my uncompromising utterly lunatic stands on key issues SELECT HERE.

I cannot prevail without YOUR active pledge of support, in a “people single-loner-power” effort to bypass the mediocrity and leftism sanity and equanimity being foisted on us by the party bosses and the mainstream media majority of American voters. We MUST revive our nation and do all possible to prevent another American-debasing economy-reviving Clinton administration, or Carter-era malaise respect for human dignity, or worse -- and so I’m asking for YOUR prayers, YOUR best possible financial contribution, YOUR committed pledge to VOTE, AND YOUR best effort to sign up forcibly detain at least FIVE MORE voters lonely nutcases, as well.

Like many Republican voters, I have tried failed to patiently wait and watch coherently think, hoping and praying that a true champion of the Party of Lincoln Buchanan and Reagan Nixon would emerge. You, like I, have seen what has happened instead. These counterfeit “front-running” candidates, who will say anything to dupe the public into voting for them, and are not fit to lead this nation in these trying times, have been pushed relentlessly forward by the country’s “elites” as our only possible choices, while qualified, decent and capable men are discouraged from running and driven from the field, ignored and ridiculed. (I actually kind of agree with this last bit).

I need your financial support TODAY -- even with our late start, our campaign for America’s revival could still qualify for federal matching funds, but I can suckle at the Federal teat I so despise ONLY if you will join our citizen effort and give as generously toward the fully matchable $250 individual donation NOW as you possibly can!

I cannot, I will not sit idly by and listen to the lies take my tranquilizers, while America all interest in my unhinged rantings dies. Nor should you. If you love your nation a good laugh at my expense, please heed this call! American patriot conservatives CAN save America the Republic of Gilead, if only we will act together. Please SELECT HERE and learn what you can do TODAY.

Keeping Faith Losing It,

Alan Keyes

New Hampshire: Not all that surprising, really

Okay, I'll admit that I was pretty sure Obama was going to win the NH primary. But in retrospect, how much of a shock is this? The fact that anyone -- myself included -- was surprised by Clinton's win is due to a preference for percentages over raw numbers and for tea-leaf reading over letting people actually vote. It's also due to a misguided belief that the mini-narratives the media loves -- from Huckabee's negative ad "gaffe" in Iowa to Clinton's "moment of humanity" in New Hampshire -- mean a damn thing to anyone but the media.

Heading into NH, Obama had an average 8% lead in the polls. Let's take the RCP poll average through 1/7:

Obama - 38.3%
Clinton - 30.0%
Edwards - 18.3%
Richardson - 5.7%

That leaves about 7-8% undecided once you figure in the two or three people who are voting for Kucinich or Gravel.

So here's your equation: Decent # of undecideds + margin of polling error + inexact polling methodology + high turnout predictions + the fickle human mind = an 8-point lead that's not really a lead, especially when the organizational aspects of a campaign come into play.

Polls are meaningless if nobody shows up to vote. Listening to the talking heads, you'd think that all that happens in a campaign is that you put up some ads, give some speeches, and then just cross your fingers and hope people vote for you. In practice, it doesn't quite work that way.

If you're running a campaign, getting your own voters to the polls counts for everything, and it takes a lot of organization, a lot of professionalism, a lot of experience, and a lot of money. You succeed or fail based on how your organization runs its "ground game" -- and on how everyone else runs theirs.

What the numbers tell me is that Obama has an excellent organization in NH, but it wasn't able to capitalize on the "phenomenon" bit -- he got tons of new supporters in the past week but wasn't ready for them and couldn't convert them into actual votes. His campaign had to leave that last bit up to fate. Clinton's organization, in the meantime, turned out every last voter they possibly could -- her organization in NH is, by all accounts, incredible. The final results tell the story.

In other words, if you look at the polling numbers free of hype (hindsight always being 20/20), it was always a toss-up between Clinton and Obama. It's that "free of hype" bit, though, that's the problem. The Obama Wave made for a good story, and people -- the news media especially -- are suckers for a good story. You'll hear a lot about how Hillary's getting misty won it for her, or how she swung this group or that group, or how it was the Bradley Effect, or how those cranky-but-lovable New Hampshire voters wanted to send a message, but what it comes down to is that she did in NH what Obama did in Iowa -- she figured out exactly who her voters were and she made damn sure they got to the polls.

What we're seeing here is a struggle between two well-known candidates running well-funded, well-organized, highly professional campaigns. Now it gets interesting.

GfG!

I'm convinced that if Hell exists, it somehow involves spending all eternity being shackled to Joe Scarborough and Chris Matthews as they analyze election results. The only upside to this is that I would actually be interested in hearing how they spin being cast into the Lake of Fire as being good for Rudy Giuliani's campaign. Because, according to these two, everything is good for Giuliani's campaign. In fact, I've decided to save time by just using the acronym GfG - Good for Giuliani.

Coming in fourth in New Hampshire? GfG!
Keeping a low profile until Florida? GfG!
Hillary winning New Hampshire? GfG!
McCain winning New Hampshire? GfG!
Natural disasters spreading chaos throughout the land? GfG!
Godzilla rampaging through downtown Tokyo? GfG!
The voice of God booming "Rudy Giuliani is the AntiChrist"? GfG!

In sum, every single thing that happens on the face of the earth is, according to Scarborough and Matthews, beneficial to Giuliani's electoral fortunes. Everything. There is literally nothing they can't somehow spin into a benefit for the Rudester.

It's the kind of phenomenon that you initially think might make a fun drinking game - take a shot every time you hear the phrase "Good for Giuliani" - until you realize that everyone playing will wind up in the emergency room from alcohol poisoning after the first ten minutes.

I have some free time this afternoon and evening. Whether I do laundry or go to dinner with a friend or simply lie flat on the floor, sucking up oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide, I will bask in the warm glow that comes with knowing that whatever I do will be GfG.

Miracles of Modern Science

You learn something new every day. Via an admittedly circuitous route (World-O-Crap as linked to by Atrios) comes this LA Times article which is, um, well... Oh, hell, just read it:

Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman's issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement -- both political and deeply personal in nature -- contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

"We had abortions," said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. "I've had abortions."

Yes, you read that right: like a scenario from a Chuck Palahniuk novel, there is a burgeoning movement to serve the needs of "post-abortive men", asserting that the emotions involved are on a par with those experienced by women and therefore deserve equal attention. Put simply, it's an attempt to find a new angle to the anti-choice argument by focusing on men's emotional trauma.

How widespread is this trauma? Apparently, it doesn't matter:

But the activists leading the men's movement make clear they're not relying on statistics to make their case. They're counting on the power of men's tears.

Like Chuck Norris' tears? The ones that could cure cancer if he ever cried?

Before we start quibbling about whether this concept is infinitely offensive or merely deeply offensive, let me just say that I'm not trying to belittle anyone's emotional pain (well, okay, maybe just a bit); I'm trying to belittle what's being done with that pain while pointing out how potentially dangerous this is.

The "post-abortive men" movement as described by the Times instantly reminds me of Promise Keepers. For those not familiar, the surface premise of PK is to get men to live up to their "responsibilities" as men. Basically, that means taking abusive drunken assholes who ignore their families and turning them into abusive sober assholes who control and dominate their families. PK takes the self-absorption of sad-sack failures and, instead of replacing it with empathy, concern for their loved ones and a healthy outlook on the world, simply rechannels that self-absorption into a direction more politically acceptable to the forces behind PK (see "Dobson, James").

Similarly, the post-abortive men's movement takes what may well be legitimate emotional pain and channels it in a direction that'll support its own worldview. Thus the central question for members of the "movement" isn't "How do I get over myself?" so much as it is "How could I have let her do this to me?" Or, as liebniz puts it in Atrios' comments thread:

"I don't own a woman's uterus! Waaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

It's another attempt to shore up a rapidly crumbling patriarchy. It'd be laughable if it weren't so creepy.

Scott at the aforelinked W-o-C article tries to find some middle ground:

I will happily accept that we have abortions if, whenever a woman dies in childbirth, the father is immediately executed. It’d be easy. Just make sure that, along with the epidural, you have a lethal injection on hand, and you could do it right there in the delivery room.

And just to drive the point home further, let's leave this particular issue with a tale recounted in the Times article, in which they interview one Chris Aubert. This guy's a real prize; apparently, he once refused to take one of his pregnant girlfriends to the clinic because it conflicted with his weekly softball game (sorry, ladies, he's taken now). He reflects on his sordid, abortion-strewn past:

In the end, Aubert says his moral objection to abortion always wins. If he could go back in time, he would try to save the babies.

But would his long-ago girlfriends agree? Or might they also consider the abortions a choice that set them on a better path?

Aubert looks startled. "I never really thought about it for the woman," he says slowly.

'Nuf said.

Happy Monday, Everyone!

Just a few quick links tonight:

First, thanks to Friends y Amigos for pointing me towards this illuminating Frank Rich column on the larger trends behind the rise of Obama and Huckabee.

Second, as long as we're talking about the Huckster, this may be two months old but Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone is usually a pretty good read.

NH Primary tomorrow. Stay tuned...