IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
A fellow DC Twitterer and social media guru who works for National Public Radio (NPR) by the name of Andy Carvin took a new gigapan camera to Union Station here in Washington DC yesterday to test if out. NPR is thinking of using it for a story soon and they need to test it more in order to become familiar with it. He was erroneously hassled by the rent-a-cops while attempting this.
Yakety Sax Goodness
The media narrative isn't always right, but it's always fascinating to watch. Because political reporters tend to be pack animals, once a narrative gets out there, it's tough to change. Yesterday, there was only one narrative: the Democratic race is over.
The consensus was swift and brutal. The tabloids had their own way of 
saying it (like the NY Post, which led the front page with "Toast!"). TIME has a cover offering an Obama victory pic. Broadcast media had their list, as captured by Jim Rutenberg in the NY Times (Pundits Declare the Race Over).
The moment came shortly after midnight Eastern time, captured in a devastatingly declarative statement from Tim Russert of NBC News: "We now know who the Democratic nominee’s going to be, and no one’s going to dispute it," he said on MSNBC. "Those closest to her will give her a hard-headed analysis, and if they lay it all out, they’ll say: ‘What is the rationale? What do we say to the undeclared super delegates tomorrow? Why do we tell them you’re staying in the race?’ And tonight, there’s no good answer for that.
Yesterday afternoon, this AP story made its way onto the internet via the Houston Chronicle: Analysis: Democrats quietly send word to Clinton it's over. In the WaPo, Dan Balz did his own canvassing:
I sent a message to one of her most loyal supporters early Wednesday morning asking what are her realistic options? "She has only one option," he replied. "Gracefully exit and help unify the party to beat [John] McCain." How quickly, he was asked. "I would advise them to figure out how to do it as soon as this weekend," he replied.Another veteran Democrat who has backed Clinton was equally pessimistic in his private assessment. "It's hard to see a path toward the twin goals of Hillary winning and the party uniting," he wrote. "Her strategy cannot be to destroy the village in order to save it. The superdelegate dam is about to break. Hillary losing [George] McGovern is like LBJ losing [former CBS News anchor Walter] Cronkite."
"I, as you know, have great fondness and great respect for Sen. Clinton and I’m very loyal to her," [Dianne] Feinstein said. "Having said that, I’d like to talk with her and [get] her view on the rest of the race and what the strategy is.Clinton, who eked out a win in Indiana Tuesday night but lost big to front-runner Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) in North Carolina, has not responded to Feinstein’s phone call, the California senator said.
"I think the race is reaching the point now where there are negative dividends from it, in terms of strife within the party," Feinstein said.
"I think we need to prevent that as much as we can."
I'll leave it to others to talk about why the pundits suddenly realized what the blogs have been saying for weeks... Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee, and it's about damn time to put his opponent, 71 year old John McCain, under the microscope and hold him accountable for his positions, his gaffes and his embrace of the worst President in polling history. But given the current narrative, that time is coming very soon.
GOP strategists have been fearing an Obama nomination since Iowa. Not because of his strength as a Presidential candidate, but because his organization has long coat tails. The grassroots organization that vaulted him to the nomination has the energy and organization to put the 21 "Republican Leaning" house seats into play. And in so doing cause the RNC's monetary advantage over the DNC will be eliminated as they attempt to defend seats that they never thought they would have to put resources into.
How did she lose? See below.
Five Mistakes Hillary Clinton Made
For all her talk about "full speed on to the White House," there was an unmistakably elegiac tone to Hillary Clinton's primary-night speech in Indianapolis. And if one needed further confirmation that the undaunted, never-say-die Clintons realize their bid might be at an end, all it took was a look at the wistful faces of the husband and the daughter who stood behind the candidate as she talked of all the people she has met in a journey "that has been a blessing for me."It was also a journey she had begun with what appeared to be insurmountable advantages, which evaporated one by one as the campaign dragged on far longer than anyone could have anticipated. She made at least five big mistakes, each of which compounded the others:
1. She misjudged the mood
That was probably her biggest blunder. In a cycle that has been all about change, Clinton chose an incumbent's strategy, running on experience, preparedness, inevitability - and the power of the strongest brand name in Democratic politics. It made sense, given who she is and the additional doubts that some voters might have about making a woman Commander in Chief. But in putting her focus on positioning herself to win the general election in November, Clinton completely misread the mood of Democratic-primary voters, who were desperate to turn the page. "Being the consummate Washington insider is not where you want to be in a year when people want change," says Barack Obama's chief strategist, David Axelrod. Clinton's "initial strategic positioning was wrong and kind of played into our hands." But other miscalculations made it worse:2. She didn't master the rules
Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game. That became abundantly clear in a strategy session last year, according to two people who were there. As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified - and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vauntedchief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?" And yet the strategy remained the same, with the campaign making its bet on big-state victories. Even now, it can seem as if they don't get it. Both Bill and Hillary have noted plaintively that if Democrats had the same winner-take-all rules as Republicans, she'd be the nominee. Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign now acknowledges privately:3. She underestimated the caucus states
While Clinton based her strategy on the big contests, she seemed to virtually overlook states like Minnesota, Nebraska and Kansas, which choose their delegates through caucuses. She had a reason: the Clintons decided, says an adviser, that "caucus states were not really their thing." Her core supporters - women, the elderly, those with blue-collar jobs - were less likely to be able to commit an evening of the week, as the process requires. But it was a little like unilateral disarmament in states worth 12% of the pledged delegates. Indeed, it was in the caucus states that Obama piled up his lead among pledged delegates. "For all the talent and the money they had over there," says Axelrod, "they - bewilderingly - seemed to have little understanding for the caucuses and how important they would become."By the time Clinton's lieutenants realized the grave nature of their error, they lacked the resources to do anything about it - in part because:
4. She relied on old money
For a decade or more, the Clintons set the standard for political fund-raising in the Democratic Party, and nearly all Bill's old donors had re-upped for Hillary's bid. Her 2006 Senate campaign had raised an astonishing $51.6 million against token opposition, in what everyone assumed was merely a dry run for a far bigger contest. But something had happened to fund-raising that Team Clinton didn't fully grasp: the Internet. Though Clinton's totals from working the shrimp-cocktail circuit remained impressive by every historic measure, her donors were typically big-check writers. And once they had ponied up the $2,300 allowed by law, they were forbidden to give more. The once bottomless Clinton well was drying up.Obama relied instead on a different model: the 800,000-plus people who had signed up on his website and could continue sending money his way $5, $10 and $50 at a time. (The campaign has raised more than $100 million online, better than half its total.) Meanwhile, the Clintons were forced to tap the $100 million - plus fortune they had acquired since he left the White House - first for $5 million in January to make it to Super Tuesday and then $6.4 million to get her through Indiana and North Carolina. And that reflects one final mistake:
5. She never counted on a long haul
Clinton's strategy had been premised on delivering a knockout blow early. If she could win Iowa, she believed, the race would be over. Clinton spent lavishly there yet finished a disappointing third. What surprised the Obama forces was how long it took her campaign to retool. She fought him to a tie in the Feb. 5 Super Tuesday contests but didn't have any troops in place for the states that followed. Obama, on the other hand, was a train running hard on two or three tracks. Whatever the Chicago headquarters was unveiling to win immediate contests, it always had a separate operation setting up organizations in the states that were next. As far back as Feb. 21, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe was spotted in Raleigh, N.C. He told the News & Observer that the state's primary, then more than 10 weeks away, "could end up being very important in the nomination fight." At the time, the idea seemed laughable.
Now, of course, the question seems not whether Clinton will exit the race but when. She continues to load her schedule with campaign stops, even as calls for her to concede grow louder. But the voice she is listening to now is the one inside her head, explains a longtime aide. Clinton's calculation is as much about history as it is about politics. As the first woman to have come this far, Clinton has told those close to her, she wants people who invested their hopes in her to see that she has given it her best. And then? As she said in Indianapolis, "No matter what happens, I will work for the nominee of the Democratic Party because we must win in November." When the task at hand is healing divisions in the Democratic Party, the loser can have as much influence as the winner.
I was shocked—Penn was speaking admirably of “lefties,” not trying to recast them as moderates, not trying to write them out of the party? ...I read on. Penn was talking about actual lefties—people who are born left-handed. Increasingly grim, I absorbed the first hard blows of Penn’s interpretative technique: “More lefties,” he enthuses, “could mean more military innovation: Famous military leaders from Charlemagne to Alexander the Great to Julius Caesar to Napoleon—as well as Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf—were left-handed.” He uses the same thunderingly awful logic to argue that we’ll see more art and music greats, more famous criminals, more great comedians, more “executive greatness,” and better tennis and basketball players.
This is what statisticians—or anyone who has taken a statistics class—call a “correlation/causation error.” It is not enough to cherrypick a couple famed military leaders, notice that they’re lefties and assume that something intrinsic to their handedness caused their tactical genius. It is not enough to say that past cultures discouraged left-handedness and use that as a stand-in for discouraging creativity of all sorts. To say that Bill Gates is right-handed does not suggest that a greater proportion of right-handed people would mean more Bill Gateses. For a professional pollster to imply that correlation equals causation is like a firefighter trying to put out flames by tossing a toaster into the blaze—it bespeaks a complete unfamiliarity with the relevant techniques.
Screwup #1: Tell people to bet on an underdog horse in the Kentucky Derby that not only loses to a horse named "Big Brown," but breaks both of its legs and has to be put down in front of everybody.
Hillary, God is trying to tell you something!
Screwup #2: Send out negative mailers in Indiana, one of which attacks Obama on guns by using the image of a gun that doesn't exist! Trying to connect with rural Hoosiers, Clinton's folk used the model of a $2,200 German gun that was often used as... A SNIPER RIFLE. You can't write comedy this good people.
Screwup #3: Claim you don't listen to economists and refer to facts as "elite" in trying to defend your flamboyantly stupid gas tax holiday idea. It's a stupid idea proposed by a person who assumes all Americans are stupid. It's not only pandering but condescending and dangerous.
From Robert Reich
When asked this morning by ABC News' George Stephanopoulos if she could name a single economist who backs her call for a gas tax holiday this summer, HRC said "I'm not going to put my lot in with economists.”I know several of the economists who have been advising Senator Clinton, so I phoned them right after I heard this. I reached two of them. One hadn’t heard her remark and said he couldn’t believe she’d say it. The other had heard it and shrugged it off as “politics as usual.”
The gas tax holiday is small potatoes relative to everything else. But it’s so economically stupid (it would increase demand for gas and cause prices to rise, eliminating any benefit to consumers while costing the Treasury more than $9 billion, and generate more pollution) and silly (even if she won, HRC won’t be president this summer) as to be worrisome. That HRC now says she doesn’t care that what economists think is even more troubling.
Not satisfied to dis every single economist, Hillary went a step further... (from TPM)
Could she name a single economist who agrees with her support for the gas tax holiday?Hillary sidestepped the question, and tried to use the complete dearth of expert support for the idea to her advantage, pointing to it as proof that she's on the side of ordinary folks against "elite opinion" -- a phrase she used twice.
"I think we've been for the last seven years seeing a tremendous amount of government power and elite opinion behind policies that haven't worked well for hard working Americans," she said.
A bit later she added: "It's really odd to me that arguing to give relief to a vast majority of Americans creates this incredible pushback...Elite opinion is always on the side of doing things that don't benefit" the vast majority of the American people.
From the NY Times Blog
Senator Barack Obama has derided the gas-tax suspension as a gimmick that would save consumers little and cost thousands of jobs. Kara Glennon, a member of the audience at a town-hall-style meeting, seemed to agree. Gas prices are “not academic” for her, she told Mrs. Clinton, because she makes less than $25,000 a year — and then she accused Mrs. Clinton of pandering. “Call me crazy, but I listen to economists because I think I know what they studied,” she said.However, in an interview afterward, Mark Moorman, another audience member and a firefighter, said he shared Mrs. Clinton’s mistrust of experts. Political candidates cite economists but they “never say anybody’s name, or where the study came from,” Mr. Moorman said. “So as far as me, it doesn’t have no relevance.”
I’m not saying HRC is George Bush. And I'm not suggesting economists have all the answers. But when economists tell a president or a presidential candidate that his or her idea is dumb – and when all respectable economists around America agree that it’s a dumb idea – it’s probably wise for the president or presidential candidate to listen. When the president or candidate doesn’t, and proudly defends the policy by saying she's "not going to put my lot in with economists,” we’ve got a problem, folks.
Even though the summer gas tax holiday is pure hokum, it polls well, which is why HRC and John McCain are pushing it. That Barack Obama is not in favor of it despite its positive polling numbers speaks volumes about the kind of president he’ll be – and the kind of president we’d otherwise get from McCain and HRC.
Haven’t we had enough of politicians who reject facts in favor of short-term poll-driven politics?
This is such dangerous ground. Hillary is playing to people's ignorance and stupidity. By labeling sound facts and evidence as "elite," she's making it acceptable and desirable to be stupid. More than her irresponsible threats against Iran, this strategy makes it clear that Hillary would continue the third term of the Bush administration.
She's doing exactly what Bush did: obscure your multimillionaire lifestyle by falsely identifying with an idealized version of "regular folk" and deriding "fancy" things like facts and education by labeling them as "elite."
For seven years, we've suffered under the reign of a man who governed from his "gut" and dismissed the advice of scientists, teachers, military experts and more. That hasn't worked out so well. Democratic voters and superdelegates need to put this horse down.
Despite the occasional claim by the Bush administration that the US has a broadband policy, the truth is that the US only has a broadband policy if you consider "doing nothing" to be a policy. When you're convinced that any form of government regulation, policy-setting, or program only mucks up the market, this makes sense; if you look at other countries and find that nations without a plan "will fare worse than if they had smart broadband policies," the continued refusal to do anything meaningful looks willfully ignorant.
A major new report on broadband policy from the nonpartisan Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) suggests that government action alone won't produce a broadband panacea, but that leadership from the top and a carefully-targeted set of policies can do plenty of good. After doing detailed case studies of nine countries, the report concluded that "those that make broadband a priority, coordinate across agencies, put real resources behind the strategy, and promote both supply and demand" do better than those which do nothing.
Critics of the current US approach to spurring broadband deployment and adoption point out that the country has been falling on most broadband metrics throughout the decade. One of the most reliable, that issued by the OECD, shows the US falling from 4th place in 2001 to 15th place in 2007. While this ranking in particular has come under criticism from staunchly pro-market groups, the ITIF's analysis shows that these numbers are the most accurate we have. According to an ITIF analysis of various OECD surveys, the US is in 15th place worldwide and it lags numerous other countries in price, speed, and availability—a trifecta of lost opportunities.
With an average broadband speed of 4.9Mbps, the US is being Chariots of Fire-d by South Korea (49.5Mbps), Japan (63.6Mbps), Finland (21.7Mbps), Sweden (16.8Mbps), and France (17.6Mbps), among others. Not only that, but the price paid per megabyte in the US ($2.83) is substantially higher than those countries, all of which come in at less than $0.50 per megabyte.
The ITIF warns against simply implementing the policies that have worked for other countries, however, and it notes that a good percentage of the difference can be chalked up to non-policy factors like density. For instance, more than half of all South Koreans lived in apartment buildings that are much easier to wire with fiber connections than are the sprawling American suburbs. The report calls for going beyond the "either-or" shouting matches between the "market fundamentalists" and the "digital populists" to embrace a set of pragmatic principles that should help the US improve its ranking.
These include more favorable tax policies that encourage broadband investment; making more spectrum available for broadband, including the white spaces; extending the Universal Service Fund program to cover not just rural telephone service but rural broadband) supporting state-level broadband initiatives like Connect Kentucky; and keeping broadband usage free from all taxes.
Several of these initiatives have been proven in countries like Sweden, which has pumped $800 million into subsidies for broadband deployment; for a country the size of the US, that would come to some $30 billion. Needless to say, no such major infrastructure investment has been forthcoming from the federal government. But Sweden has also targeted the demand side of the equation, subsidizing personal computers that businesses purchase for employees' home use. This kind of a program is also important in the US, where broadband availability runs ahead of actual broadband usage.
And for those who wonder exactly how other countries have implemented their policies, the report concludes with detailed case studies of the countries in question. While lengthy, the entire thing makes good reading for anyone interested in broadband policy questions. A choice to make no changes to the current setup is a choice to leave billions of dollars on the table.
Last November, the Clinton campaign issued this following release:
The Clinton Campaign today announced the endorsement of former Democratic National Committee Chair Joe Andrew [...]
Andrew became the youngest DNC chair in party history when he took the reins in 1999, after five years as Indiana Democratic Party Chair. Under Andrew, the DNC rose out of debt, implemented new technologies and grassroots mobilization efforts, and raised more than $225 million.
Andrew is the co-founder and Chairman of the Board of The Blue Fund, a mutual fund which invests in companies meeting standards of social responsibility, environmental sustainability, community participation and respect for human rights.
He is currently a partner with the law firm Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal LLP in Washington, DC in the Corporate and Securities, Venture Capital and Public Law & Policy Strategies practice groups.
"Joe was a strong leader who put the Democratic Party on the right path,” Clinton said. "I'm honored to have his support."
Andrew is not a household name, but as a former DNC chair carries great cachet inside the party establishment. As such, he's just become Clinton's biggest nightmare.
A leader of the Democratic Party under Bill Clinton has switched his allegiance to Barack Obama and is encouraging fellow Democrats to "heal the rift in our party" and unite behind the Illinois senator.
Joe Andrew, who was Democratic National Committee chairman from 1999-2001, planned a news conference Thursday in his hometown of Indianapolis to urge other Hoosiers to support Obama in Tuesday's primary, perhaps the most important contest left in the White House race. He also has written a lengthy letter explaining his decision that he plans to send to other superdelegates.
"I am convinced that the primary process has devolved to the point that it's now bad for the Democratic Party," Andrew said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
Bill Clinton appointed Andrew chairman of the DNC near the end of his presidency, and Andrew endorsed the former first lady last year on the day she declared her candidacy for the White House.
Andrew said in his letter that he is switching his support because "a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote to continue this process, and a vote to continue this process is a vote that assists (Republican) John McCain."
His defection to the Obama camp is a disaster for Clinton:
Some people will also stress that Andrew is a Hoosier and can help Obama in his state's primary next Tuesday. You guys know my theory -- that only machine politicians actually deliver any tangible benefits at the ballot box (and that's mostly mayors, though some governors like Ed Rendell also qualify). So I would put this endorsement in the category of Bob Casey or Mike Easley -- they can't hurt, but don't expect many (if any) votes out of it.
But at this point, this is no longer a race about regular votes. Obama will win the pledged delegate, popular vote, and states won counts. The only race left is the one for the supers, and Andrew's defection is probably a fatal blow to Clinton's chances on that front.
Update: And Obama will officially pick up three more supers in Illinois next week.
Update II: And another super, this one in Texas, endorses Obama.