Yglesias:

Dana Goldstein explains why Barack Obama won’t be able to just “declare victory” after tomorrow’s primaries.  I think she’s right — by the math and on the merits, he’s entitled to do so, but the backlash against an explicit effort to force Clinton out before she’s prepared to concede would be too big.

The backlash would be particularly great if he didn’t win either of the primaries and then declared the race over.  Clinton’s lead in Kentucky is so gaudy and embarrassingly large that his supporters have been reduced to talking about Oregon “cancelling” out a Kentucky loss, even though they are comparably important states in delegate count (52 vs. 51) and she stands to win by 25+ points while he might win by ten if he’s having a good night.  It’s very, very unlikely that he would lose both, but if the margins are anything like the four or five-point margins that we have been seeing in the most recentpolls his Oregon victory will not appear to be that much of a victory.  It will definitely put his Portland mega-crowd into perspective, and in the very unlikely event of an Obama loss in Oregon the gigantic size of his Portland crowd will be rather grimly contrasted with his limited support throughout the rest of the state. 

Update: Okay, SUSA gives Obama a sizeable lead in Oregon, and his support outside of Portland is quite strong.

Second Update: Kaus notes late pro-Clinton movement.

The idea that antiwar voters who support Barr might have backed Obama seems plausible at first glance, until you actually pay attention to who Barr’s likely voters are.  They are, so far as I can tell, independent conservatives and libertarians who supported Paul, plus the regular Libertarians, who find McCain unacceptable on a wide range of issues that also prevents them from supporting Obama.  You can include me in that group.  Such is the strange nature of this election that this fairly consistent position strikes the Obama-supporting conservatives and libertarians as inexplicable and grounds for harsh criticism. 

It’s true that Paul voters were never going to go for McCain, and many of them seem to be supporting Obama, but they continue to support Obama even now despite the emergence of Barr’s candidacy.  (Strange exit poll fact of the day: McCain voters in the primaries were more likely to view Ron Paul favourably than the supporters of any other candidate besides, of course, Paul.)  Those who have chosen to go for Barr anyway, despite the existence of a “credible” major party antiwar candidacy, are as irreconcilably against Obama as they are against McCain, albeit perhaps for some different reasons.  The Paul voters who have turned to Obama do this on the assumption that they will achieve the same antiwar goals that Barr espouses but will never be able to implement (“barring” a rather unusual change in voting patterns).  These tend to be the Paul supporters who are also not interested in the other things that Barr emphasises, particularly with regard to immigration, and who were probably less likely to find McCain’s views on immigration very troubling.  Thus it doesn’t bother them that Obama is to the left of Clinton and McCain on immigration.

Obama’s biggest potential problem among his Republican supporters remains moderate Republicans, who are exactly the sort of “soft” or independent Republicans whom Obama should be able to peel away under normal circumstances, but whom McCain appeals to for reasons that continue to escape me.  Single-issue antiwar voters who back Obama will not be pulled away by Barr for two reasons: Barr is not running a purely antiwar campaign, but a comprehensive small government, conservative-libertarian campaign, and they believe that Obama can actually end the war, which is their top priority (that’s why they are single-issue voters).  As I have said before, though, this microscopic analysis of Obama’s Republican and right-wing supporters will probably matter very little to the final outcome, because McCain continues to pull away more Democrats from Obama than he loses among Republicans.

“Governor,” the film critic asks, “is there a favorite political movie of yours that you think gets at the intersection of things political and things artistic?”

Romney stalls, beaming a smile out from under a fresh coffee-brown tan. “Certain movies have had an influence. … The Manchurian Candidate …” ~Eve Fairbanks

Fairbanks’ earlier comparison to Pu Yi now makes more sense, since Romney volunteered the Manchurian connection himself.  But did Romney really mention The Manchurian Candidate while campaigning for McCain?  At least he didn’t mention Dr. Strangelove! 

In any case, Romney should know a thing or two about the intersection of film and politics, since he was pretty clearly reading from a script at all times.

A similar pattern has emerged in a handful of Rust Belt and border states. With the exception of 1972 and 1984, West Virginia also voted for the Democratic presidential nominee from 1932 to 1996, and it hasn’t elected a GOP senator for generations. Missouri, Kentucky, Arkansas and Ohio all went for Jimmy Carter in 1976 and for Bill Clinton twice. All but Ohio have been dominated by Democrats at the congressional and gubernatorial levels for decades. But all five went for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004.

The reason: Casey Democrats. “Democrats’ difficulties with this group surely have a great deal to do with these voters’ sense of cultural alienation from the national Democratic Party and its relatively cosmopolitan values around religion, family, guns and other social institutions/practices,” blogged Democratic strategist Ruy Teixeira after the 2004 election. Just two years earlier, in their book, “The Emerging Democratic Majority,” Teixeira and John Judis had predicted that the party’s economic liberalism would bear the Democratic nominee to victory in such states. ~Mark Stricherz

For obvious reasons, I was very interested to read this article, since it ties together several of the states I have been discussing in recent weeks where there seems to be particularly strong resistance to Obama, and where there also seems to be significantly less resistance to Clinton.  When a Democratic candidate wins these states, as they should by all rights given the strong Democratic local and state presence in all of them, he wins the White House.  Without them, he fails. 

Put simply, if all of the states (minus Pennsylvania) mentioned in this article go against Obama and Colorado and Virginia continue in their general post-1968 pattern of voting for the Republican, it would be extremely difficult for him to win the election.  If Pennsylvania were lost it would be nearly impossible.  If the GOP took all these “Casey Democrat” states, not including Pennsylvania, and also won New Mexico (while holding Colorado), the Democrats would still lose even if they won in Virginia.  Likewise, Colorado alone wouldn’t be enough.  Dem wins in Colorado and New Mexico wouldn’t be enough for an outright win, either, though in that latter scenario would result in a 269-269 tie and throw it to the House, resulting in a Dem win.  Bottom line: based on how these “Casey Democrat” states are leaning right now, some combination of two of those three states have to turn “blue” for Obama if he is going to win.  Of course, if you include Pennsylvania in the Republican column, Democrats could carry Colorado, New Mexico and Virginia and it still wouldn’t matter.  For Obama to win, it seems likely that at least one of these three states will have to vote in a way that it hasn’t voted in either 44 years (VA) or 16 years (CO), and possibly two of the three will have to do this.  For McCain to win, he needs Virginia and Colorado to vote as they have done for four decades, and then it doesn’t matter what happens in New Mexico.  If McCain continues to lead in places such as Wisconsin and Michigan, all of this won’t matter anyway, but the Democrats have chosen a good spot for their convention, since Colorado is going to become a more crucial and more hotly contested swing state than most.

Kentucky anxious, seen leaning Clinton’s way ~Chicago Tribune

Clinton leads 62% to 30% today [5/12], effectively unchanged from SurveyUSA polls released 4 weeks, 2 weeks and 1 week ago.

That’s quite a lean.  If it leaned much more, it would fall over into West Virginia.

P.S.  SurveyUSA had a nice phrase for what will happen on Tuesday: “ceremonial trouncing.”

It took a leader of the Decider’s uncommon gifts to kill the philosophy he worships. ~Eugene Robinson

Perhaps Mr. Robinson has been cribbing from Michael Gerson’s notes about the modern Republican Party, but the idea that Bush or any major Republican leader has acted as if “government is useless, if not inherently evil” is silly.  Ours has been the era of bleeding-heart conservatism, epitomised by Gerson’s weepy manifestoes of world revolution speeches, and Republican do-gooding, which, like pretty much all government do-gooding, has brought about very, very bad results.  Mr. Bush and his enablers (including Gerson!) have argued for the virtue of government activism more than any one of his predecessors since perhaps LBJ.  It is also silly to suggest that the last eight years have seen the apotheosis of anything that could reasonably be called free market policies.  Setting up collaboration with pharmaceutical corporations to create a new government entitlement has nothing to do with the “cruel genius of free markets,” nor does feeding military contractor companies with rich deals in the midst of one of the largest armed social engineering projects in our history.  It could be argued that a full-throated pro-market, small government, constitutionalist platform could not have won any of the presidential elections of the last forty years and that such a platform was rejected by a huge majority of the public 44 years ago, and you could make various arguments about what that might mean for a small government conservative politics, but to take the legacy of one of the most statist, government-expanding, government-trusting, government-ennobling administrations in recent history and make its failure into a story of how this discredited a philosophy to which it did not adhere is preposterous.  

Arguably, Mr. Bush pushed the contradictions between a fundamentally pro-corporate, government-expanding party and a rhetoric of small government to “absurd extremes,” such that the relatively few remaining supporters of the “paradigm” that allegedly dominated politics for my entire lifetime (and yet operationally never commanded more than minimal influence) grew disgusted with that party.  It might be that the legacy of Mr. Bush’s tenure has been to support the claim that “government is useless, if not inherently evil.”  However, conservatives have never claimed and do not believe that government is useless, though we might describe it as a necessary evil in some circumstances.  On the contrary, conservatives assume that government can be rightly ordered and limited so that it does not become abusive or destructive of the common good.  More likely, Mr. Bush’s legacy will be that he killed the electoral chances of the Republican Party for at least a decade and helped ensure that the rising generation will react to the GOP with contempt for the rest of their lives.

Since I’ve been talking about Obama’s problems in some eastern states, it’s only fair that I acknowledge that he is now polling considerably better in my home state.  There he leads 50-41, which marks a six-point improvement for him and a three-point drop for McCain since February.  Most of the movement in the last three months has come from uncommitted Democrats and a few McCain-supporting Democrats coming back to Obama.  McCain used to receive the backing of 25% of Democrats, and now has just 21%, and he has seen his advantage among married voters shrink from 10 points to a one-point deficit.  McCain has made some inroads with unmarried voters, but not enough to offset his other losses.  McCain can’t be counted out here, thanks to the large military and defense industry presence (I doubt there is much of a benefit to coming from Arizona) that tends to bolster Republican candidates, and Obama may lose a larger share of the Hispanic vote to McCain.  New Mexico is one of the essential swing states where Obama has to do well, and right now he is, probably aided by the general disarray of local Republicans and a strong Democratic Senate candidate in Tom Udall, who leads both his potential GOP opponents by embarrassingly wide margins.  These margins may narrow after the June 3 primary, but not enough to overcome Udall’s almost 20-point lead.  Barring some disaster, we can assume New Mexico is all but in the bag for the Democrats.  We could be looking at a Democratic sweep of the Congressional delegation.  Instead of coattails aiding Democrats in House and Senate races, Democratic strength in the Congressional races may be boosting the presidential ticket.

Here is the poll showing Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens trailing his challenger by two points, 47-45, and here is what I imagine would be Sen. Stevens’ response to that news.  The interesting thing is that just a little over two-thirds of McCain supporters said they would vote for Stevens.  That is a pattern I expect we will be seeing in many of the competitive races this year.

The state of the union is angry. Citizens are furious about gas prices and health-care costs, broken schools and property taxes. These are the leaky hydrants, the constant reminders that government hasn’t done much for them lately.  Their fury has bubbled as they’ve watched Washington obsess over itself –dealing out earmarks [bold mine-DL], paying off constituencies, launching probes into political enemies. Accomplishing zip. ~Kimberley Strassel

That’s odd.  I thought all this anger was the product of agitated bloggers and cranks.  Why, it’s almost as if there might be legitimate reasons to be angry with Washington’s misrule and the administration’s incompetence.  Naturally, even in diagnosing the national mood correctly Strassel still comes back to the old saw of complaining about earmarks and “paying off constituencies,” as if those were the things that really angered Americans.  Constituencies are made up of voters and those who employ them–paying off voters is usually popular, whether or not it is a good idea.  The few meager instances we have of the federal government serving its constituents can be found among those earmarks and pay-offs.  Earmarks may or may not be wasteful, and the things they are funding are almost always not the business of the federal government, but they are about as far from Washington obsessing over itself as you can get.  It may be bribing voters with their own money, but at the very least it is some small, pathetic sign that the government works for them.  It is the impressive failure of government on major policy after major policy that infuriates people, and more importantly it is the total lack of accountability at the top for repeated failures in judgement and leadership that angers them.

In the litany of Republican failures, Strassel offers a list that is almost as ridiculous as the Republican non-agenda she criticises:

Today’s GOP spends so much time fretting about how to relive the Reagan heyday, it has failed to do him credit by laying out its own plans for today’s unique challenges. It remains in hock to interest groups, running ads about sanctuary cities as Americans curse over gas prices. In a repeat of 2006, it spends more time trying to scare voters about Democrats than defining itself. It refuses to give up the earmarks that are a symbol of its worn-out reign [bold mine-DL].

Notice how she manages to make the open borders point in the midst of what seems to be a complaint about voter frustration, some significant part of which is frustration with the inability to enforce immigration laws and control the border?  Very deft.  If you are against sanctuary cities, you belong to an “interest group” (ooh, scary!).  Never mind that sanctuary cities might be something that the government could do something about, while Strassel and every other minimally educated person knows that it can do very little about gas prices.  That won’t stop Congress from boosting them with subsidies for the ethanol boondoggle that helps drive gas prices in the Midwest to their $4.00+/gal levels.  And yet again, there is the dreaded earmark. 

War in Iraq?  Possible recession?  Central bank-fueled bubbles that have collapsed?  New entitlements?  Deficit spending?  Effects of the weakening dollar?  No, no, it is the mighty earmark that explains the problem with the GOP! 

Granted, I don’t travel the country talking to voters, but I would bet you a sizeable amount of money that if you asked people what concerned them earmarks would never make the list.  Earmarks are the sort of thing that good government types and political junkies talk about, which leaves the other 95% of America talking about something else.  Republicans in Washington and their backers are so out of touchthat they seem to think quite seriously that earmarks and the failure to reform earmarks are among the chief complaints of the American voter.  

But Strassel seems to be absolutely fixated:

This redefinition should’ve come earlier. And it would mean more if House incumbents who swear they’ve learned a lesson would demonstrate it in office. Say, with an earmark ban [bold mine-DL].   

That might end up saving something on the order of $15-30 billion dollars in a $3 trillion dollar budget in any given year, while ensuring that the federal government does even less for its constituents than it already does.  People seem to focus on earmarks because they are such a small, irrelevant part of the overall budget process on the assumption that they can be handled easily, but there is no incentive for members of Congress to give up a tool that can be used to the advantage of them and their constituents.  Tackling the source of our long-term budget problems, entitlements, would require the kind of political risk and heavy lifting that no one in either party wants to do, and so you have the absurdity of a party pushing something as trivial as earmark reform, for which it will receive no credit anyway, and ignoring the sort of imaginative and necessary reform that might be part of an agenda worth mentioning.

Rod has a couple of posts related to pessimism, declinism and gloominess.  Commenting on my post on conservative Democrats, he asks rhetorically, “Who says Daniel Larison is a pessimist?”  He titled the post “The case for conservative optimism.”  I know what he means, but this is exactly what it isn’t.  Finding some good in an otherwise dark picture is what pessimists are more skilled at doing, because for the pessimist every picture in this world is dimmed by the recognition that all things end, everything is finite and our time is limited.  It is the people who tend to see the dark clouds who are also most keenly aware of the silver lining; those who skip about merrily in the fantastical world in which there is only sunshine become terribly disconsolate when a stom moves in, because they mistake normal changes for an approaching doom. 

Roger Kimball is right that disappointed utopians (i.e., optimists) tend to be very gloomy.  Everyone who believes in some myth of progress will become very gloomy when the myth is broken on the rocks of reality.  This is why conservatives should typically be philosophical pessimists, indeed normally will be philosophical pessimists, which has nothing to do with a mood or temperament (pessimists are not gloomy, just sober), but has to do with an acknowledgement of our mortality, finitude and (in a Christian pessimist view) our createdness and sinfulness.  Our nature has limits, and if we seek to go beyond them we invite a disastrous reckoning.  Optimism is the mental illness of the hubristic; pessimism is the beginning of humility.  The problem that many modern conservatives have had in recent years is that they have been taught to be optimistic, and so they have fallen into many of the old traps of optimists–trying to remake the world, force-feeding “progress” to other societies and always, always ignoring the likely consequences of their actions because they have learned the false lesson that things will always get better.  Pessimists know that things will tend to get worse insofar as they know that all things in this world eventually decline, fall apart and die.  To have framed the distinction between them in terms of “better” and “worse” is to bias us against pessimism already, as if there were something wrong with acknowledging the reality of entropy and the significance of death.  Christians have the least cause for optimism of the sort offered by modern ideologies, because they have the best and most sure hope of all.  Nothing is more misleading or confusing than to abuse the word hope by linking it to an optimistic mentality.

Declinism can be gloomy, but only if it becomes alarmist and excessive.  Usually, when it is done properly and wisely, it does not need to raise an alarm, because it takes the process of decline to be part of the way of things.  Think of it this way: the alarmist shouts, “We’re all going to die!!!” and the sober declinist says, “We are all going to die.”  They are saying the same thing, and yet they are obviously making two very different kinds of statements.  Sober declinism is descriptive, perhaps combined with a natural human lament for what is passing away, but it does not become hysterical.  Those who raise an alarm still share an optimistic expectation that things that are rooted in the structures of our nature are “problems” that can still be solved, when the pessimist assumes that there are no enduring solutions to the fundamental limitations of our existence.