Don't Panic

Dear Obama Nation,

Stop freaking out. It's not that bad. No, Hillary Clinton will not drop out of the nomination race tonight. Yes, John McCain has a head start on the general election. Yes, the entire United States of America is suffering from election fatigue.

BUT.

1) The Lingering Clintons: I wrote a couple of weeks back about why it's probably going to work out better for the party for Clinton to keep going now. One of the key points I made is how a shift in her rhetoric towards battling John McCain and leaving Obama alone could help pave the way for a party reconciliation in June after the voting has ended. Here's a report from last week suggesting that Clinton was doing just that. Here's a snippet from a Washington Post article this morning:

But while she presses forward, aides say she is determined neither to be pushed from the race prematurely nor to be seen as doing anything to damage Obama's prospects of winning in November if he emerges as the nominee. Her campaign team believes that is the best way to bring the party together as quickly as possible once the nomination contest is over.

Her advisers say that a major reason she does not want to be pressured out of the race is that she believes it will be easier to bring her supporters over to Obama once the primaries are over if they think she was able to finish the nomination battle on her own terms.

And then don't forget about her going out of her way to defend Obama from McCain on his charges regarding Hamas as well as from Bush on the appeasement remarks. And so on and so forth. We're getting closer and closer to a tag team campaign. Please stop panicking.


2) McCain's Head Start: John McCain is a ridiculously flawed candidate. It could easily be said that both parties are candidates based on the wrong issue: John McCain is the defense/war candidate, and Barack Obama is the against-the-war-from-the-start candidate. However, the top issue right now (and likely going into the election) is the economy. And John McCain can promise another fifty wars if he wants, but it won't change the fact that he knows jack about the economy (and admits it). However, he does know that a good conservateeve* candidate needs tax cuts, so right now they seem like a good idea.

More to the point John McCain isn't even a very good war candidate. First of all, it's slowly becoming apparent to the American public that the perpetual spending of billions of dollars that we're getting on loan from the People's Republic of China on a war that accomplishes nothing is actually a pretty serious drain on the economy. Furthermore, despite vocally denouncing waterboarding as torture and saying that the US shouldn't be doing it, he declined to vote for a bill that would have stopped us from doing it. Furthermore, he doesn't actually know who's running Iran, who he seems so eager to bomb the hell out of. Furthermore, despite being a veteran and decrying our current shoddy treatment of our veterans, he has declined to vote for the Webb-Hagel update to the GI Bill, which would finally address just one of the many problems we currently have with our services to veterans. Please stop panicking.

3) Election Fatigue: Barack Obama has run his campaign masterfully. He's campaigned well in all the right places, spent his money properly, kept his team unified and organized, put forth some revolutionary policy strategies, spoken with both distinguished articulation and personal affability. In almost every state that really counted where he was seriously trailing, he jumped by double-digits in the polls in the weeks before the vote.

John McCain's campaign, less than a year ago, was being trounced by some of the biggest twits and numbskulls in politics. In order to pull himself out of the gutter, he pledged himself to a public financing program which he designed, only to try to opt out of it when he found (much to his apparent bewilderment) that he was actually the nominee. McCain designed this public financing system, it's worth mentioning, to curb the influence of the lobbyists and special interest representatives who, after a year on staff, are resigning from the McCain organization now that people are actually paying attention. His campaign is being run by a team of twits and numbskulls that actually rival Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani in incompetence. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are duking it out over which candidate can best lead their party, while McCain is still on tours to introduce himself to voters and convince conservateeves that he's anything more than just a consolation prize. Even if voters ignore the race until mid-October, I really don't think Barack Obama will need five months to shore up his support amongst the Democratic base. And when moderate and swing voters finally do start paying attention to John McCain, it'll be pretty obvious why they don't want to vote for him.

Is there any indication from the way Barack Obama has run his campaign up until now that he won't be able to make this work?

So please. Stop panicking.



Yours as always,
Tim

*It drives me absolutely nuts that John McCain can't pronounce the word "conservative" properly. In order to acclimate myself to his version of the word, I'm going to start spelling it like he pronounces it whenever I'm talking about him.

Democracy in Action

For as much ragging on the government as I do, it bears saying that I think democracy is a brilliantly conceived idea, and here's a damn fine example of why.

Yesterday at 1:07 p.m. I received an email from my friend Gabe, who has produced and promoted some animation festivals here in the city of Chicago. He was warning all of his contacts of a proposal before the Chicago City Council which would be preposterously prohibitive to the music, theater, film, art, and literature community in the city. Last Wednesday, Jim DeRogatis at the Chicago Sun-Times posted a blog entry about the ordinance, and on Friday, a website was set up with the sole purpose as serving as a petition to the city council protesting the measure. Among the provisions of the proposed ordinance:

The definition of “event promoter” is so loosely defined it could apply to a band that books its own shows or a theater company that’s in town for a one-week run.

“Event Promoter” must be licensed and will pay $500 - $2000 depending on expected audience size.

To get the license, applicant must be over 21, get fingerprinted, submit to a background check, and jump over several other hurdles.

This ordinance seems targeted towards smaller venues, since those with 500+ permanent seats are exempt.

Police must be notified at least 7 days in advance of event.

Between Friday and Monday, there were 5,792 signatories on the petition, floods of calls and emails to the offices of the city aldermen. Today at 1:32 p.m., barely 24 hours after the first one, I received another email from Gabe, forwarding another email he got. It read as follows:

Please spread the word the Promoters Ordinance has been pulled

from City Council until further research. I guess a lot of musicians

an clubs etc. responded quickly.

BT

Bradford E. Thacker

Project Administrator

Department of Cultural Affairs

Chicago Cultural Center

So, let it not be said that the First Amendment does no good. This may seem like a fairly inconsequential thing, but it's more consequential if you like good music and it's yet more consequential if you're looking for a sign that people can organize quickly and efficiently to force elected officials to action.

I love this town.

Fake Journalism

You know those "human interest" stories that news services do? The ones that could very well be completely isolated cases, give you little to no context, offer no solutions or provide any applicable lessons, but exist entirely to pull the ol' heart strings? Yeah, I hate those. So I'm going to do one in the form of a photo essay.* Please forgive me, I just have to get this out of my system.

Today on my lunch hour, I started snapping photos. Please forgive the blurriness, my phone is not a real camera. Here's what inspired me to start the series:



What you can't see because of the camera and because I didn't want to stand in the middle of LaSalle Street to take the photo is that the sign says "Morrow's, Since 1866." What you can clearly see is that Morrow's is no longer in business. If you were to look very closely at a photo that I will not publish, Morrow's is being turned into a Subway. Meanwhile, on half the cabs and buses in town, Bank of America would like you to know something:



America may be the Land of Opportunity, but Chicago is a very special place. Not only is there opportunity, there is more opportunity. Bank of America's message is being taken to heart, though, and is doing its part to combat the decline in consumer confidence that's contributing to the recession. How do I know? Because of this homeless guy, who I'm not sure can talk, but gives me a toothless smile and exaggerated series of nods while offering me a little American flag on a toothpick every time I walk by.



I bet that guy's going to be even more patriotic when the IRS wires that economic stimulus into his bank account!

The End! Yay America!

*I suppose this wasn't much of an essay. More of a long-winded haiku with pictures.

Buzzards

In the last couple of hours, I've been contacted twice out of the blue with friends asking incredulously if I've heard about Hillary Clinton loaning her campaign $6.4 million. The answer is yes, and I don't give a damn.

The buzzards are circling over the Clinton campaign right now. My first reaction to the news was a nice little mixture of apathy and disgust. Watching the coverage of the results in North Carolina and Indiana was like watching a funeral. The fact that she sort of won Indiana (i.e. by the slimmest of margins) was irrelevant: she needed an ass-kicking and she failed. Everyone knew it, and everyone was saying it, and the question changed from "if" she'll drop out to "when." Even Obama's staff has come just short of saying that they're going to stop fighting primaries and start waging a general election campaign. Of course, those of us in the Obama camp have known that the race is over since she failed to win decisively on March 4, but at this point, with the entire yammering class crowning Obama the nominee, it would be as pointless as it would be embarrassing for her to continue. It would relegate her to Mike Huckabee status. I've gotten to the edge of outright loathing for Senator Clinton, and I still think a futile run would be far below her dignity and her stature. Whatever I may think of her campaign for the presidency, it doesn't diminish my belief that Hillary Clinton is someone I want in the Senate verbally bludgeoning all who dare stand in her way. She is a fighter, and I respect that. I'd just rather have her in the Senate than the White House.

However, after doing some reading, I'm actually becoming convinced that if done properly, prolonging Clinton's campaign will actually be good for the party. Marc Ambinder has a very compelling list of seven reasons why Clinton should stay in the race (and before you start yelling at me, an equally compelling list of seven reasons for her to quit), the most convincing of which is basically to give her voters their opportunity for a death rattle. Hard though it may be for someone like myself to believe it, Clinton does have her die-hard loyalists, and her defeat will be more palatable and believable to them if it comes the day after the primaries end than it will be if she backs out because Tim Russert called the time of death. If she didn't give up two months ago, there's no real reason to expect her to do so now. Imagine a baseball game where the home team is down by a run in the ninth inning with two men on and their clean-up man up to bat, and they're forced to call the game because of a rain-out. Those who still believe Clinton has a chance would be more bitter if they didn't feel like the game has run its course. This report indicates that the Clinton campaign has this in mind and intends to pull the plug in early June. If Hillary acknowledges that her viciousness on the campaign trail has ceased to do her any good, and both candidates start pushing party unity and ripping into John McCain as if each had already been declared the nominee, it will be easier to put both factions back onto the same team.

Taegan Goddard looks at the continuation of Clinton's campaign from a strictly cost-benefit angle: if she's going to spend what it takes to continue, she's got to expect some sort of benefit. The first and most immediately practical goal goes back to the original question here: the $6.4 million that Clinton loaned her campaign. Anyone who's on the mailing list of any candidate who has dropped out has gotten post-mortem fundraising emails asking them to help retire their debt. It was announced late last night that the Senator wouldn't be doing any appearances today, but would be holding a fundraiser late in the day: guess why. Her campaign is not only broke, they're in serious debt, and they need to be able to close their books when the campaign ends.

More to the point, this is how the Democratic party will achieve the coalition necessary to build an appealing platform and policy agenda. The real benefit Clinton expects is that Obama will be willing to bargain. In order to achieve the party unity he so desperately wants and needs, Clinton is going to have to be able to convince her people that she's on the inside, and that means A) a voice in choosing the VP and B) at least one major policy concession.

First things first. Personally, I think all this talk of a unity ticket is load of crap: Hillary Rodham Clinton will play second fiddle to no one, and I think it's more likely she'll want to put one of her people on the ticket and ask that Obama back her for Senate Majority Leader. Harry Reid is the congressional equivalent of the kid who got picked last at kickball, so as far as I'm concerned, it would be a welcome change. I've heard some people kick around Ed Rendell's name, but I don't buy that for a second, and while Wes Clark would have the advantage of his defense credentials, I'm not sure he has the chops to run the Senate. Evan Bayh has made a complete ass of himself defending her time and again in the last month, and he didn't really come through for her yesterday, so he's out. My money says Ohio Governor Ted Strickland is a far more likely choice.

As for policy, well, I think that's a "duh" statement. She wants her health care plan. All the analysis of the Obama and Clinton plans that I've read have come to the conclusion that Clinton's is actually the superior, regardless of Obama being the better candidate overall. Elizabeth Edwards has come out and said the same, leading me to believe that an acceptance of that health care plan would bring John into the fold as well. Clinton is free, of course, to introduce her own plan in the Senate, but it's oh so much more likely to succeed if she has a suave and popular President Obama throwing his full weight behind it.

All of this still leaves me at the question not of "if" Clinton will drop out, but "when and how." Obama and his people have a month until the end of voting to do the necessary negotiations so that he can move forward starting June 4, and Clinton has a month to start reconfiguring her rhetoric to put her in a place that will best serve her own ambitions. Which, of course, is her chief skill.