According to exit polls, Obama has trounced Clinton by a very impressive margin.  He received about a quarter of the white vote, and won four out of every five black votes.  He won almost every age group, and he did win every education and income group.  Obama has a good chance of winning this by at least 20 25 points.

The polls are closing in South Carolina in about twenty minutes, so we’ll begin to see just how large a margin of victory Obama has racked up.  There has been talk of a possible Edwards surge into second, which I suppose might keep him slightly viable for another week.  More important will be the effect of an Edwards second-place finish on Clinton, who has clearly written off S.C., but probably wouldn’t be expecting to lose to Edwards.  Failing that, the margin of victory will be important for Obama, since there is already an expectation that he is going to carry an overwhelming percentage of the black vote, so he will need a gaudy Romney-in-Nevada-like result to put to rest the concern that he is becoming the 2008 Jesse Jackson in terms of his base of support.  Like Romney with the large Mormon turnout, Obama needs to be able to show that he would have been competitive had he carried a much smaller percentage of the black vote.  If not, he becomes the Democratic equivalent of Huckabee in one sense only: he starts to be seen as the candidate of one constituency.  Just as Huckabee’s Iowa victory has been discounted because of the large number of evangelicals who participated, Obama’s South Carolina victory, as many other observers have already said this week, will win him a good number of delegates but give him only a very small boost.

I was reading this Andrew Ferguson article on Fred Thompson’s campaign, and it occurred to me that Thompson suffered from a deficiency of the thing that Obama has in excess, and this excess will eventually bring down the latter as surely as the deficiency has the former.  Thompson and Obama do not have exactly the same problem, obviously, but their problems are related.  Thompson was the candidate who hated process and did not like to be constrained by the rules of the process in this cycle.  It was a telling moment for Thompson that one of his best moments in the entire campaign was his refusal to raise his hand in a debate, the perfect example of a rebellion against a genuinely stupid part of the process that nonetheless reflected a deeper antipathy to the role of the media in campaigns.  Huckabee and McCain, by contrast, are virtually always available to journalists and talk shows (how many times has Huckabee been on Scarborough’s show? at least 32 times), while the loathing for the ultra-scripted Romney among many journalists is palpable.  Accessibility and personaibility lead to more and more positive coverage.   

On the other side, Obama is obsessed with process and with transforming process.  To that end, Obama subjects himself to the rigours of campaigning more readily than Thompson was ever willing to do (it helps that he is also twenty years younger), but also gives the impression that he finds much of it as distasteful as Thompson does.  (In fairness, I think any reasonably well-adjusted, intelligent human being would have to have distaste for what these people are called upon to do–put it down as another mark against mass democracy.)  It is in his desire to “change” the process and “change” politics in the capital that Obama wins the endless positive coverage from the press, while he feeds their cynical hearts with the ambrosia of his “uplifting” rhetoric.  Thompson was hoping to change the electoral process by ignoring the rules, while Obama wants transformation of politics as such by going along with them, albeit somewhat reluctantly.  The chant that has now become an inescapable part of the Obama campaign, “Fired up! Ready to go!” was, as many of you will already know, the product of Obama’s own listlessness one early morning on the campaign trail when his supporters had to spur him on. 

Michael Crowley described the scene last fall:

Tired and cranky, he steps out into a downpour, and his umbrella blows inside out. On the interminable drive, “my staff’s not talking to me because they know I’m in a bad mood.” Obama arrives at a small building to find a mere 20 supporters. “And they don’t look too happy to be there, either.” The mood shifts, however, when an elderly woman in the back strikes up a call-and-response cheer. “Fire it up!” she shouts. “Ready to go!” answers the group. Obama describes being baffled at first. But then, he says, “I’m startin’ to feel fired up! I’m feeling ready to go!” At big rallies, the recitation of the anecdote culminates with Obama himself leading a spirited call and response with his crowd. “Fire it up!” “Ready to go!” “Fire it up!” “Ready to go!”

It’s an uplifting story. But it’s also, notably, one about a cranky candidate who needs firing up in the first place.    

Both candidacies emerged in a similar way, as the result of glowing media coverage and an initially enthusiastic response to the personality of the candidate, but their fortunes diverged sharply as Thompson embraced a largely adversarial relationship with all media, both mainstream and conservative, and Obama cultivated his media image and his campaign remained fairly open to journalists.  Both are celebrity candidates, but an important difference in their fortunes is that Thompson made the mistake of shunning the trappings of being a celebrity and sought instead to become the Serious Policy Candidate.  The policies he proposed were often quite good by conservative standards, but evidently he thought that he had been drafted into the race because he was smart and informed, and not because he had a deep baritone and made jokes about sending Michael Moore to mental asylum.  Obama, meanwhile, has done best when he keeps substance to a minimum and can talk about being a hopemonger.  The hopemonger who nourishes the media with high-flown, empty talk naturally fares much better than the candidate who takes a certain pride in his contempt for mass media (a notable if not entirely surprising attitude for an actor to take).  In the end, however, even the hopemonger must provide more than fluff and soaring phrases.  When he has tried to provide this, as he has done in the debates, the “magic” of his speeches is gone and he reverts to the one-term Senator with slightly uneven delivery, a lack of discipline in fending off attacks and too little, well, “fire in the belly” for throwing punches at his rivals.

Most of the candidates ignored Wyoming and focused on the New Hampshire primary, except Rudy Giuliani, who’s following a shrewd strategy, originally developed by the Miami Dolphins, of not entering the race until he has been mathematically eliminated. ~Dave Barry

This latest Tennessee poll was timed just perfectly to be almost completely useless for the Republican race, as it included Fred Thompson in the polling and was then released on the day he dropped out.  The interesting thing about it was that Thompson was just barely ahead of Huckabee in his home state, 25-24, and the competition was very weak with McCain at 12, Romney at 7 and Giuliani and Paul at 2 apiece.  (26% said they still didn’t know, but I have to say that it doesn’t look good for the single-digit candidates.)  Assuming the Thompson vote splits more or less evenly three ways, or even possibly goes more to McCain and Huckabee, Huckabee’s position in Tennessee appears to be much better than his current standing in Alabama and Missouri, where he is only tied for first.  The main post-Florida question seems to be: will Super Tuesday be entirely a McCain blowout or will Huckabee manage to steal a few states to keep things interesting?  Romney trails badly in non-Mass. Northeastern states, he trails in Illinois, and McCain understandably leads him in California and Arizona.  I don’t see where Romney breaks out in the space of a week. 

What can our menin Tennessee tell us about what’s going on down there?

While immigration hurts black and white low-wage workers, the authors note, the effect is three times as large on blacks because immigrants are more likely to compete directly with them for jobs. ~Steve Malanga, City Journal

TAC had an article that was related to this same topic in its 12/19/05 issue, and, of course, Chronicleshas been emphasising the effects of mass immigration on American labour for decades.

Looking at it in terms of the election, this issue was the reason why Tancredo was the lone Republican at the NAACP gathering last year.  It’s also notable that the only candidates who mentioned the Newark killings mentioned in Malanga’s article were Republicans.  The strong opposition between the two groups is also one of the causes of the resistance to Obama’s candidacy among Hispanic voters, even though he has adopted the same pro-immigration line that every other black Democratic politician takes.

This is meaningless, but I am glad to find that my favourite novel, Crime and Punishment, is towards the high end of this list.  It doesn’t surprise me that it ranks higher than Anna Karenina, but then I have had an instinctive aversion to Tolstoy’s novels for some time.  Offhand, I would guess that there are more references in a typical Dostoevsky work to Fourier and to problems of theodicy, which might make them more interesting to a certain set than a story about a woman’s love affair.

Via Yglesias

The strange whisper at Thursday night’s debate when Romney was being asked about Social Security continues to puzzle all of us who bother to worry about strange whispers at presidential primary debates.  The easy shot would be to say that Romney needs constant reminders of what his positions are and are not, since he has changed so many of them.  My more cynical guess is that there was some malfunction of whatever device was being used to feed Romney his answers or to clue him in to how he should respond to Russert’s “gotcha” question.  That would give new meaning to the “empty suit” criticism, if he needs to be prompted on his debate answers by campaign staff.  There seems to have been a second incident of this that many have missed.

Ross says:

I know conservatives weren’t great admirers of Bill Clinton’s AG choices either, but the prospect of Attorney General John Edwards is exactly the sort of thing that ought to make right-wing Obamaphiles think twice.

One would hope that “right-wing Obamaphiles” would do a lot more than that, but I think we should put this Edwards-as-AG talk in perspective.  This is the sort of thing Obama’s campaign would have to say to bolster its support among union members as well as among downscale Democratic voters who have tended to vote for Clinton in larger numbers.  Whether or not this represents the beginnings of an Obama-Edwards pact, it reveals the present limitations of Obama’s appeal.  That Obama and his campaign feel compelled to start spreading information of this kind is a sign of Obama’s electoral weakness within the Democratic Party, to say nothing of his electoral liabilities with the broader electorate, so we would all be getting ahead of ourselves if we are worrying about Obama’s supposed Reagan-like potential and the damage that could be done by his first Cabinet appointments.  As I’ve noted before, conservative fear of Obama’s candidacy, much less his Presidency, seems to be driven by false assumptions. 

As implausible as it seems to me, let’s speculate on Obama’s chances.  If 2008 really is an election that will focus on competence, is that an election Obama can win?  It is doubtful.  Behind the gauzy talk of hope, Obama is actually quite ideological.  After two terms of a highly ideological administration, will a majority support someone almost as ideological as the current President?  Even if Obama somehow won because of the deep unpopularity of the other party, he would find himself in the odd position of having constantly to prove himself to progressives who think that he is all together too accommodating while not allowing himself to be isolated and portrayed as a “radical.”  Any early overreaching could leave him hobbled after the first midterm elections, and if there is one thing that proponents of grandiose visions of “change” are most susceptible to it is going too far too quickly.  In one sense, he would be like Reagan, in that he has declared himself an enemy of the status quo–and not just the Bushian status quo–and would find Washington to be very hostile.

When the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis went crashing into the Mississippi River, everyone was suddenly paying a great deal of attention to our old, overburdened infrastructure, which is still, as it was last summer when this happened, old and overburdened.  Now, as it turned out, that particular collapse did not result from a lack of maintenance but from a structural flaw, but this hardly makes the overburdening of the rest of our highways and bridges any less real.  When Huckabee talked about doubling I-95 along its entire length, a frequent reaction on debate night was to laugh or make cracks about Huckabee’s Keynesian economics, but there were some who saw something of value there.  One of the common themes that can be found among a number of differentadvocates for a genuinely middle-class-oriented conservatism is a recognition of the incredible amount of time and energy put into commuting, as well as the huge opportunity cost of this commuting. 

Though all of the advocates in question might not agree with this entirely, mass commuting over long distances is a function of the unsettled and highly dependent nature of American life that creates the vast spaces between home and work and obliges people to rely increasingly on automobiles to go anywhere or do anything.  While the “whirlwind of creative destruction” makes mobility from city to city commonplace, sprawl daily compels frequent long-distance mobility.  In such an arrangement, people are settled neither in place nor really even in state of mind.    

The trouble with Huckabee’s proposal is that it seems to be a kind of ad hoc alternative to even more dubious “stimulus” packages on offer and does seem to reflect the logic of government work programs, but it also shows him as someone who appears to understand the strains commuting–and the traffic jams those commutes create–puts on families, on energy resources and on the environment, to say nothing of the additional transportation costs that are passed on to consumers.  Ross spoke about addressing the length of commutes in his bloggingheads appearance with Ruy Texeira here.  The larger problem with Huckabee’s proposal is that it is really almost nothing more than a Band-Aid, the sort of temporary fix to structural problems of our (sub)urban life and zoning regulations, and it is ultimately no different from paving over more rural and suburban landscape to provide larger roads for ever-growing settlements, except that this proposes to do the same on a semi-national scale.  As people live farther and farther away from their places of work, highway expansions are either going to become increasingly necessary to accommodate the increasing numbers of cars driving ever-longer routes or the divisions among residential, commercial and industrial zones will have to be reduced or eliminated.  Ideally, the less dependent on the highway system communities could become the better, and the less need for mass commuting the better.  Until then, highway expansions are probably the best make-shift solution. 

The objection to Huckabee’s I-95 proposal reminds me a lot of the complaints against Huckabee’s fiscal record in Arkansas.  Some significant part of the tax hikes for which he is now being demonised went to rebuilding Arkansas’ main highways.  This is what the Huckabee campaign says, but it also happens to be true.  Anyone who drove through Arkansas on I-40 during the very beginning of his tenure and then drove on it a few years later (as I did for four years going to and from college four times a year) knows how much Arkansas’ main highways improved in just a few years.  While I can think of some traditional arguments against internal improvements that would make highway spending undesirable, I don’t believe for a second that most of Huckabee’s critics think that highway maintenance is not an acceptable function of government.  Infrastructure is costly to build and maintain, and it is reasonable that it is a public expenditure that pays for it, since these roads serve a public purpose and, at least in theory, benefit the entire commonwealth.