Since I jumped on the “Obama is going to win the nomination” bandwagon two weeks ago, I’m not going to backtrack now and say that he won’t, but it’s worth looking at how the Wisconsin results misled me to declare the contest virtually over.  Obama had struggled with downscale voters and many regular Democratic constituencies, and in Wisconsin the resistance to his candidacy among these voters seemed to melt away.  There were a couple things at work that I neglected before that tell me that I overestimated the importance of this: Wisconsin was to Obama what New Jersey or New Hampshire was to Clinton (i.e., neighbouring states where the candidate really had to do well), and in the same way that Iowa exaggerated Obama’s strengths in the eyes of the media Wisconsin seemed to show that Obama had started winning Clinton’s core voters.  But once he moved farther away from Illinois, however, he could not win those voters away from her and the old Mondale-Hart dynamic reasserted itself.   

The last week has been something of a disaster for the Obama campaign, and it has not really experienced a combination of gaffes, losses and blunders (plus coping with the Rezko trial) in quite this way before.  How the campaign recovers and handles the next week or two will tell us a great deal about whether he can regain his footing and still get the nomination.  Since the superdelegates seem all but certain to decide this, this is the time when he and his campaign have to show resilience or face three months of increasing anxiety about his electability.

Foremost among them is that Obama has yet to win a major state other than his own (Illinois) because he’s still having trouble appealing to both Hispanics and working-class Democrats –those so-called Reagan Democrats. ~Steven Stark

As I suggestedsome weeks back, the profile of Obama’s wins and Romney’s was remarkably similar, and this pattern has continued through this week.  Stark has looked at the “scrambled map” idea and has found it wanting just as I have:

But a more accurate analysis is that while McCain would be competitive in many states — even California — once considered safely Democratic, it’s hard to see as many comparable states where Obama might do the same.

In addition to this Romney-like weakness in large states, he has Huckabee-like weaknesses with Catholic voters for what are probably obvious reasons on life and marriage.  Add to this his weak hold on Democratic voters, and you have the makings of an electoral collapse.

That SurveyUSA general election polling is interesting, and it may be significantly skewed in each state in different ways, but the results are still rather puzzling.  SUSA shows the same Obama weakness in New Jersey that the Rasmussen poll I discussed earlier this week already showed, so there really may be greater resistance to Obama in the state.  However, it also asks us to believe that the Democratic candidate who loses New Jersey and Pennsylvania wins New Mexico and Virginia.  In other words, safe Democratic states are switching sides, but traditional swing states are supposedly falling into the Dem column.  That doesn’t strike me as evidence of the map getting “scrambled” so much as it points to the potential for Democratic meltdown in their core states.  Compared to other New Mexico polling I have seen, Obama’s 50% is quite high.  

I disagree with SUSA’s overall method of assigning tied states to one column or the other, which exaggerates the strength of the candidates.  The oddness of the results in New Hampshire also stands out: we’re supposed to believe that Clinton, who actually won the Democratic primary there, will run eight points behind Obama and lose a state that has been trending dramatically Democratic, but that both win Ohio in a walk?  This polling doesn’t show McCain necessarily winning New Jersey, but it does show Obama’s limited appeal there as of right now.  This is an important point: McCain isn’t the one making New Jersey a battleground state in this match-up.  In any other cycle and with almost any other match-up that we could have had, New Jersey would have likely been solidly Democratic.  Obama does rather badly in his current polling in Massachusetts: he wins the state, but receives just 49%?  I guess being frequently likened to Devall Patrick really doesn’t help him. 

If we can rely on any of this, Obama’s total of 280 electoral votes is almost identical to Clinton’s 276, which suggests at the very least that talk of realignment or new trajectories was always the stuff of fantasy.  Whatever else it may tell us, it does tell us that the election will be very close and will still be decided in a relative handful of states, even if the particular states involved are different than they have been.  The “new era” has not yet dawned.

If you’ve been wondering where I’ve been the past couple of days, my home computer has suffered a hard drive crash, so I am limited to blogging from wherever I can find an open terminal.  Blogging will be infrequent over the next few days until the problem is fixed, but I will be commenting on things from time to time.  Until then, look at the online version of the new issue of the magazine and myposts on Jerry Muller’s ethnonationalism essay in Foreign Affairs.

Krugman has another anti-Obama column, in which he makes this rather odd claim:

Now, nobody would mistake Mr. Obama for a Republican — although contrary to claims by both supporters and opponents, his voting record places him, with Senator Clinton, more or less in the center of the Democratic Party, rather than in its progressive wing.

If progressives want to insist that Obama isn’t part of their party’s progressive wing, that’s their prerogative.  I have noted for some time some progressive activists’ dissatisfaction with Obama’s “unity” routine, but I think Krugman’s claim still fails some basic empirical tests.  Obama’s average ADA rating for the last three years is 90, which understates things.  Perhaps someone will argue that ADA ratings are unreliable or selective, or that they cannot capture the differences between a “centrist” such as Obama and real progressives, but by one of the standard measures of such things Obama rates as being pretty far to the left.  His 2007 rating of 75 was the result of a number of missed votes (undoubtedly missed because of his campaign schedule) and followed 2006 and 2005 ratings of 95 and 100 respectively.  If that is evidence of being at “the center” of the Democratic Party, I don’t know what you have to do to be progressive.

There are plenty of caveats to make about this new Rasmussen poll from New Jersey: this early in the year Clinton is almost certainly bound to run much better than Obama in a state that borders New York, especially when so many people in New Jersey are part of New York’s media market, and despite what feels like saturation coverage to those of us who follow the campaign closely Obama remains less well-known nationally.  Obama did not campaign heavily in New Jersey, acknowledging Clinton’s advantages there on February 5, so he will have made less of an impression even among the state’s Democratic primary electorate, and he will have made even less of an impression among other voters.  Even so, the difference is striking: Clinton leads 50-39 in New Jersey, as you might expect in a state that has voted Democratic in the presidential election for the last four cycles, but in an Obama v. McCain race McCain leads 45-43.  Relative to Clinton, Obama loses five points among men and nine points among women.  He loses seven points among Democrats, pulling in just 65%, and five points among liberals.  He draws only half as many Republicans (10%), he gets eight fewer points among conservatives (12%) and twelve fewer among moderates (43%).  Even among his core of independents he runs four points weaker, though he does still win independents against McCain.

Now, get ready for this: the poll shows that 18-29 year olds in New Jersey back McCain over Obama 61-29 (Clinton runs ten points better).  Unless there has been some massive error here, the kids in Jersey are not that excited about hope (or, arguably, they still have no idea who Obama is).  Preferences by income group are revealing: Clinton runs more competitively against McCain in all groups but one, while Obama trails among lower-income groups and leads among the higher-income earners.  Obama’s weakness in New Jersey is presumably closely related to his fairly high unfav rating (45%) in the state.  According to Rasmussen, he receives a 50% “very unfavorable” rating from 18-29 year olds, which is the highest very unfav rating from any demographic group in this poll (only those who chose national security as their top issue view him more unfavourably at 65%).  In total, Obama has a 61% unfav rating among 18-29 year olds in the state, which, as you can see, is exactly the same percentage that backed McCain.  This turns an important part of what a lot of us have assumed about Obama’s core supporters on its head, at least in this part of the country: young people in New Jersey apparently really dislike him.  Perhaps they endured one insipid dipdive video too many.  I feel their pain.     

Some of the numbers from this poll seem strange, and I want to follow up in the future when Rasmussen releases their next one to see if these patterns hold up, but as of right now it appears as if New Jersey could theoretically be in play if Obama is the nominee.  Given the fundamental strengths that the Democrats have in this election, that simply shouldn’t be happening in this cycle.  Something strange is going on.

Well, we were not involved in the world before 9/11, and look what happened. ~Karl Rove

Yes, if only it hadn’t been for the “isolationists”!  This is a perfect example of 1984-style inversion of the truth.  This is the sort of warped, twisted interpretation of reality that ought to reduce the Republicans to a 20% rump for half a century, but since such interpretations flourish thanks to ignorance and self-serving myths that will not happen. 

Of course, at FoxNews he gets away with such obvious lies.

Despite Clinton’s best efforts to imitate Fritz’s ’84 run with her slogans (“where’s the beef?”) and advertising (“the red phone”!), she is in the rather difficult position of banking on a late surge in the final months of the campaign that would allow her to make a Gary Hart-like argument for the nomination that she had won over most of the voters who had voted in the most recent contests.  So what she is reduced to saying is that she’s a lot like Mondale, except less successful.

So we can see from this morning’s This Week that David Axelrod is not a good television surrogate, and we are reminded again that Obama has failed over the course of the last year to hold any hearings with respect to NATO support for the war in Afghanistan in his capacity as Chairman of the Subcommittee on European Affairs.  Indeed, during his chairmanship the subcommittee has not held any policyhearings.  Obama supporters fans usually dismiss this as trivia, but it goes directly to his credibility as an advocate of greater U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, which he just reiterated this week, because it is through his subcommittee that the Foreign Relations Committee gathers important information about European governments and NATO.  These are obviously critical to the Afghanistan mission. 

As someone who has been in an official position, albeit only for a year, to draw attention to NATO’s limited support for the Afghanistan mission and to show some leadership in his role as Senator, he has not done so.  The response will be: “Well, okay, but he was running for President!  He can’t be in two places at the same time!”  Well, exactly.  In a three-year U.S. Senate career he has been part of the majority for just over one, and in that year he has done literally nothing about a policy whose importance he is supposed to rate very highly because he has been too busy working for a promotion that would allow him to wield far greater power.  Further, if Obama is running on his superior judgement, what does it say about his judgement that he considered campaigning throughout 2007 more pressing and important than doing the work his constituents elected him to do?   

As Conason’s December piece in Slate said:

Ritch points out that as subcommittee chair, Obama could have examined a wide variety of urgent matters, from the role of NATO in Afghanistan and Iraq to European energy policy and European responses to climate change — and of course, the undermining of the foundations of the Atlantic alliance by the Bush administration. There is, indeed, almost no issue of current global interest that would have fallen outside the subcommittee’s purview.      

Also, for someone whose subcommittee oversaw European affairs, it is remarkable that he has apparently not been to Europe very often and certainly not since taking over his chairmanship.  Obama and his backers like to talk about his biography as the source of a different perspective on foreign relations, but what can it say about his practical foreign policy experience that in the time he has been on the Foreign Relations Committee he has not actually visited the region whose relationship with the U.S. was his responsibility to oversee?  The neglect of Europe is not limited to Obama’s time in the Senate, but can also be seen in the absence of any statements on Europe, NATO or Russia in his formal campaign literature or in his foreign policy addresses, except insofar as it relates to his nonproliferation agenda.  It is particularly in light of his relative lack of interest in European affairs that makes his loose talk about “obligations” to Kosovo sound all the more disturbing.

This seems guaranteed to annoy a lot of the right people for the wrong reasons:

Obama is hoping to appoint cross-party figures to his cabinet such as Chuck Hagel, the Republican senator for Nebraska and an opponent of the Iraq war, and Richard Lugar, leader of the Republicans on the Senate foreign relations committee.

Senior advisers confirmed that Hagel, a highly decorated Vietnam war veteran and one of McCain’s closest friends in the Senate, was considered an ideal candidate for defence secretary.

If he did end up winning, putting Hagel in his Cabinet wouldn’t really put my mind at ease, but then I havebeenanunusuallyharshcritic of Sen. Hagel’s claim to being “an opponent of the Iraq war” and of his foreign policy views more generally, but I can see how it would reassure a lot of people that we would have someone reasonably competent at the Pentagon (plus Lugar at State?) under Obama.  While this may be consistent with his “unity” theme, I don’t see how it helps consolidate his support among the party regulars, and I expect a new round of complaints in the netroots to be coming soon.  It would certainly be something if a victorious Obama gave both Defense and State appointments to more or less “realist” Republicans–can you imagine the backlash from both parties?  So much for “change you can believe in”!  The funny thing is that a Hagel selection would inevitably draw more scorn from all those Republicans who decided that Hagel was persona non grata for expressing some skepticism about the war early last year.  It would still probably annoy a lot of partisans who wanted the post for one of their own, and instead of being a reassuring sign of bipartisan governance it would be received as confirmation in the eyes of his mainstream critics that Hagel is just a RINO and that Obama associates with “appeasers,” which is strangely how many Republicans see Hagel.  Update: On cue, Ledeen takes this line more or less exactly

For my part, I wouldn’t find it reassuring at all, since the last time we had a Defense Secretary from the other party in a Democratic administration we had the bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 (another war Hagel supported), and Hagel is almost as much of an interventionist as Obama.  One thing that should give everyone pause is that it’s entirely conceivable that Hagel could serve readily enough in a McCain administration, too.