Poll: Obama has slight lead over McCain in Florida By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Published: June 18, 2008 Filed at 6:03 a.m. ET THE RACE: The presidential race in Florida ^------ THE NUMBERS Barack Obama, 47 percent John McCain, 43 percent ^------ OF INTEREST: Obama wins Florida's youngest voters by a wide margin, while he and McCain split those age 35 and up. Nearly one in four say they are less likely to support McCain because of his age; if elected he would be 72 when sworn in as president. One in 20 says the same about Obama's being black. Whites back McCain, 50 percent to 40 percent, while virtually all blacks support Obama. Independents lean toward Obama by 10 percentage points, and more of them oppose Hillary Rodham Clinton being Obama's running mate than support it. ^------ The Quinnipiac University poll was conducted from June 9-16 and involved telephone interviews with 1,453 likely Florida voters. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.6 percentage points. ^------ http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/washington/AP-Poll-2008-Florida.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
Note how the articles about PA, FL & OH show that independents are less likely to vote for Obama if he chooses Hillary as his running mate.
Interesting article about VP picks - and really attacks the notion of picking a VP from a swing state to help win it. http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/can-vp-nominee-win-state.html Can a VP Nominee "Win" a State? As a prelude to some work Nate is doing on VP picks, one of the common conventional wisdom canards on presidential elections is that the presidential nominee can - and maybe should - pick a vice-presidential candidate who adds a particular state into the win column in the fall. For example, Monday afternoon on the MSNBC show assigned to David Gregory, an inane conversation took place about the notion that Rudy Giuliani could bring New Jersey into play if he were McCain's VP nominee. This highly questionable theory about just what electoral gain a VP can contribute deserves closer inspection. Consider the rationales offered for many potential choices even now: Ted Strickland for Obama or Rob Portman for McCain because they bring Ohio, one of the Virginia options for Obama because they bring Virginia, or Tim Pawlenty for McCain because he “puts Minnesota in play.” Further examples are numerous. Bill Richardson supposedly brings New Mexico and the Southwest in general; other candidates are considered to have a strike against them if they do not bring an obvious electoral benefit. The emphasis placed on such a strategic pick is born of two consecutive nailbiter elections, where the flip of one battleground state has determined the winner. Although it’s somewhat understandable that this conventional wisdom has emerged, the evidence demonstrates it’s hypothetically sketchy at best. In looking at the vice-presidential selections of the past five decades or so since television has expanded the regionality of presidential elections, it’s clear that, in reality, both major parties rarely have nominated VP candidates as a strategic electoral vote collector, and to the extent they have set about deliberately trying to add a state with a VP pick it has almost never worked. (there's a table on the site here that shows the history) Taking a look at the Republicans and working backward, Wyoming (Cheney) was always in the Republican column except for Johnson’s ’64 landslide; New York (Kemp) had been reliably blue since the 60s with the exception of the Nixon and Reagan landslide years; Indiana (Quayle) and Kansas (Dole) had been reliably red since FDR except for ’64. Even Spiro Agnew, when he was added to Nixon’s ticket in 1968, could not bring Maryland into the Republican column until 1972 as the incumbent in a national landslide. Republican VP picks in 1964 (Miller, New York) and 1960 (Cabot Lodge, Massachusetts) failed to bring those states into the fold, and it’s hard to think Republicans chose Cabot Lodge strategically in a year where the Democratic presidential nominee was from the same state. You could argue that selecting George Bush in 1980 was a strategic pick to gather Texas, a state that had voted Democratic essentially since the Civil War except for Eisenhower’s two terms and Nixon’s ’72 landslide. But given the larger macro forces at work in Texas, a state that voted Democratic for most of the previous 100 years and then hasn’t been competitive for Dems since 1976, it’s hard to chalk that shift up to the popularity of George Bush or appreciation to Republicans for putting him on the ticket. Put another way, it would be like Obama choosing Sebelius of Kansas and then Republicans not being competitive there for the next three decades and counting. For Republicans, one really has to go back to Richard Nixon of California where a state flipped from Democratic (5 straight elections) to Republican. Even then, the popularity of FDR and Eisenhower were far bigger macro forces than the drawing power of a young Richard Nixon. For Democrats, John Edwards obviously did not make a competitive state out of North Carolina, whose only post-Southern Strategy flip back into the Democratic column was Carter’s 1976 win. In 2000, Democrats won Connecticut for the third consecutive presidential year as part of a larger solidification of the northeast. Although Dems won Tennessee in 1992 and 1996 with native son Al Gore on the ticket, bringing the state back into the Democratic column for the first time since Carter’s lone post-Civil Rights Act 1976 win, the fact that as the headliner Al Gore couldn’t win his own state in 2000 indicates that Bill Clinton had more to do with winning Tennessee in the 90s than did the VP choice. Similarly, the choice of Estes Kefauver in 1956 did not win Tennessee for Dems at a time when 1952’s loss of the state was an anomaly from the previous couple decades. Lloyd Bentsen could not bring Texas back for the Democrats, the racist Geraldine Ferraro could not hold New York in the 1984 landslide, and Sargent Shriver in 1972 could not keep Maryland’s three previous Democratic preferences going strong. The best Democratic examples of a VP helping with a state are Walter Mondale in 1976 and 1980, Edmund Muskie in 1968 and Lyndon Johnson in 1960. Muskie is perhaps the best example, simply because with the exception of 1964’s landslide, Maine hadn’t strayed from the Republican column since Woodrow Wilson in 1912, and then promptly went back into the red column afterward. Lyndon Johnson undoubtedly helped the Catholic Kennedy in Texas, but Texas at that time was reliably Democratic anyway. And Walter Mondale certainly helped the Baptist Southerner Carter in 1976 and 1980, but Minnesota had been a reliably Democratic state since FDR, with the exception of Eisenhower’s two elections and the ’72 landslide. In order for a vice-presidential candidate’s home state to be a strategic addition, it would have to be true that but for the selection, that party’s ticket would not have carried the state. And you really have to think about how this would come about. Which voters would vote for one ticket who would ordinarily vote for the other ticket or stay home? This extra margin could be a function of extra in-state voter organization and/or extra enthusiasm that makes the difference in a razor-thin race. Such hypothetical voters have to be politically plugged in enough that they know they definitely like the VP nominee, but undecided enough about the two major presidential choices that it’s the VP who closes the deal. Not only does it seem a little far-fetched that such voters would be around in any meaningful numbers to tilt an important electoral battleground one direction or another, but it seems especially far-fetched in a macro contrast election year such as this one. My pet theory that spins off this VP-electoral vote argument, untested and probably untestable, is that such voters are more likely to exist in small, typically ignored states with 3-5 EVs. For example, the pride for North Dakotans of having one of their own in such a high profile role. Or Hawaiians. Even that might not be enough, but it’s more in alignment with intuition about history-making candidacies capturing the imagination of voters who might otherwise have stayed home or gone the other way. This theory certainly dovetails with the best example in the last 5 decades: Edmund Muskie of small-state Maine.
Sebelius double the trouble for GOP COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The governor plans another Ohio speech about the presidential election on Saturday. Gov. Kathleen Sebelius of Kansas, that is. Sebelius, an Ohio native frequently mentioned as a possible running mate for Democrat Barack Obama, is in the must-win state for the third time in four months. Is she really that homesick? Not exactly, said Sebelius spokeswoman Nicole Corcoran. For starters, her famous father — former Ohio Gov. John Gilligan — has been the subject of several honors and awards recently, and Sebelius wanted to be home for those. In Ohio, "Her schedule is driven by her father," Corcoran said. That said, Sebelius also makes time for political events when she's in town, both in Ohio and elsewhere. But not every place is Ohio, where no Republican and only two Democrats have been elected president without winning the state in more than a century. Moreover, not every place is Kansas, at least not this year. The Republican stronghold happens to be the home of Obama's mother and grandparents, which gives him a politically legitimate connection to the state, even though he was raised in Hawaii. As Kansas governor, Sebelius has star quality important to Obama, whether or not she becomes his No. 2. She's a moderate Democrat who has twice won election in enemy territory. Sebelius, 60, has relatively strong ties to Ohio: she grew up in Cincinnati, graduated from that city's Summit Country Day School in 1966 and still expresses fondness for hometown favorite Graeter's ice cream — "any flavor made with chocolate chips," Corcoran said. Her two-state connection makes her valuable to Obama as he pursues his 50-state strategy to put the entire country in play in November. On Saturday Sebelius is scheduled to attend a high-wattage Ohio Democratic Party dinner in the company of Gov. Ted Strickland, U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown and Columbus Mayor Michael Coleman. Dubbed a "family reunion," the event is a rally of all the top Ohio Democrats on behalf of Obama. It's less routine than you might think: Strickland backed Hillary Rodham Clinton until the end of her campaign, and Brown didn't endorse anyone during the primaries. As a result, a strong show of Ohio support for Obama — who was clobbered by Clinton in the March primary — may be needed to kick start his campaign here. Of course, Sebelius' influence in Ohio is debatable. She's not well known outside of political circles, and her father's term as governor ended in 1975, before a large crop of Ohio voters were even born. Sebelius "cannot repair the damage Barack Obama has incurred with the Ohio voters who soundly rejected his candidacy in March," said Blair Latoff, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. Obama spokeswoman Amy Brundage calls Sebelius "a valued member of our team." As a possible running mate, Sebelius can push what political analyst Gene Beaupre calls the issues of a breadbasket state. Obama "needs that dirt in your fingernails kind of candidate," said Beaupre, a political science professor at Xavier University in Cincinnati. "If you ask me what's more important to voters, foreign policy or a loaf of bread, I'd say it's about farmers and gas prices and the price of bread, at least for now," he said. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-06-18-sebelius_N.htm
An interesting read from The Economist about Jim Webb. Most of it is complimentary, but look for the slam at the end, with parsing worthy of some of the best parsers (is that a word?) here. The class warrior Jun 19th 2008 From The Economist print edition Jim Webb would make a poor running-mate for Barack Obama IN 1983 Jim Webb spent a while working as a journalist in Lebanon. “On any given day in Beirut, one never knew who was going to shoot at whom, or for what reason,” he recalls in his new book, “A Time to Fight”. During a typical skirmish he observed, Lebanese army soldiers started shooting at some Druze militiamen, who responded by firing on American marines (who were supposed to be keeping the peace). Then a Syrian unit let rip its heavy machineguns at both the marines and the Lebanese. Meanwhile, in the distance, Christian Phalangist militiamen “engaged in an artillery duel with another unit that we were unable to identify.” Mr Webb's experiences in Beirut (where 241 Americans were killed in a suicide attack that year) convinced him that America should never occupy territory in the Middle East. When the idea of invading Iraq was first mooted, he opposed it. He predicted America would get stuck there for 30-50 years, that Muslims everywhere would be outraged and that Chinese and Iranian influence in the region would increase at America's expense. In his prescience on this issue, Mr Webb, who is now a senator, has much in common with Barack Obama. The difference is that Mr Webb is a military man. He attended the Naval Academy (also John McCain's alma mater), was decorated four times and wounded twice in Vietnam, and served as Ronald Reagan's secretary of the navy. His father was in the air force; his son served in Iraq. No one, therefore, can accuse Mr Webb of being an effete peacenik. That lends weight to his views on Iraq, and leads many Democrats to conclude that Mr Obama should pick him as his running mate. In some ways, Mr Webb would be a shrewd choice. He is from Virginia, a battleground state with 13 juicy electoral votes. At 62, he is reassuringly older than Mr Obama, but he has been a politician for less than two years, which fits nicely with Mr Obama's message of freshness and change. Among party activists he is a hero, since his white-knuckle victory in 2006 handed control of the Senate to the Democrats. And he compensates for some of Mr Obama's weaknesses. Unlike his party's flag-bearer, Mr Webb understands America's warrior culture. He also has solid experience both of grappling with bureaucrats and of running something big: the entire navy and marine corps. Mr Obama is a scholarly and cosmopolitan chap who has so far struggled to connect with working-class whites. During the primaries, he lost in West Virginia to Hillary Clinton by a staggering 41 percentage points. Mr Webb, though also a successful writer, is a gruff warrior who glories in his humble southern roots. His mother grew up sleeping on a corn-shuck mattress and brushing her teeth with twigs. His uncle Tommy once took on three men together in a brawl. Other Democrats may talk about thumping Republicans; Mr Webb has punched Oliver North repeatedly in the face. (During a boxing match at the Naval Academy which, to be fair, Mr North won.) Mr Obama enjoys huge support among blacks and rich white liberals. That was enough to win him the Democratic nomination. But to win the general election, he needs Reagan Democrats—working-class whites who worry about national security, are somewhat culturally conservative and whom the Gipper was able to persuade to change political sides. These folks might well prefer a plain-spoken war hero like Mr McCain to the articulate and arugula-munching Mr Obama. But they would vote for Mr Obama if he ran with another plain-spoken warrior, especially if that warrior questions the ban on school prayer and has a union card, two Purple Hearts and three tattoos. That, at least, is what Mr Webb's boosters argue. No one but Mr Obama knows whom he will pick, but the buzz around Mr Webb is loud enough to make him the favourite on Intrade, a betting website. So it is worth examining his weaknesses, too. On the other hand Mr Webb is an indifferent campaigner. His speeches are awkward, he clearly dislikes all the flesh-pressing and he looks like an angry potato. He has infuriated some Democrats (but pleased others) by bucking party orthodoxy on matters of race and sex. He thinks it unfair to poor whites that racial preferences designed to atone for slavery and segregation should be extended to virtually every other minority group. And in 1979 he wrote an article opposing combat roles for women entitled, simply: “Women Can't Fight”. (He has since changed his mind.) The main worry about Mr Webb, however, is that he is a genuine fire-breathing economic populist. He appears actually to believe the sort of stuff that Mr Obama only says during Democratic primaries. Since vice-presidents sometimes become presidents, this matters. American workers, says Mr Webb, “are at the mercy of cut-throat executives who are vastly overpaid, partly as a consequence of giving [the workers'] jobs away to other people.” Illegal immigration and globalisation “threaten to dissipate” the American middle-class way of life. He predicts that, unless the government acts to restore “economic fairness”, America “may well go the way of ancient Greece [or] greed-ridden Rome”. America may be horribly unequal, but it is not, as Mr Webb imagines, apocalyptically so. And judging by his book, Mr Webb has only a shaky understanding of the economic system he decries. He thinks South Korea is more productive than America, and that “most” investors are among the wealthiest 1% of Americans. (In fact, about half of Americans own shares.) He is worryingly hazy about how he would make America fairer. But his instincts are plainly hostile to the free flow of goods, investment and people across borders. Mr Obama, who has recently started to sound less protectionist on the campaign trail and has appointed a team of impeccably centrist economic advisers, can surely do a bit better. http://www.economist.co.uk/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11580120 Heck, this was written as a slam, but I like Webb more after reading it! Impeach Bush.
It's not in the bag yet. Looks terrific and Barack is definitely getting a "clinched the nomination" bounce, but you can't relax. He took a huge step towards winning in November today by not taking public funding. He needs to ramp up his advertizing, which he's doing, keep playing it smart, and settle on a VP. As has been mentioned, while a plurality of Democrats still would like Clinton, independents are saying no. Because they've broken that way, Obama will be selecting someone else. He probably was, anyway, but that cinches it. Just don't take the election for granted! FIGHT UNTIL VICTORY!!! Impeach Bush.
I agree, but the "bag" reference is to a particularly idiotic post by TJ. Since being called on it, he has ignominiously disappeared from this thread.
One Cabinet position looks decided...if he can be persuaded to stay McCain and Obama camps are open to Gates Both campaigns are warming to the idea of keeping the Defense secretary in a new administration, at least on an interim basis. Gates calls the notion 'inconceivable.' WASHINGTON -- With two wars raging and an election approaching, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has sent senior civilians at the Pentagon a clear message: Be ready to stick around into a new administration to ensure a smooth hand-over in a time of war. But increasingly, the campaigns of Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain have considered sending a similar message to Gates. According to aides and allies close to both candidates, the idea of keeping Gates at the helm of the Pentagon under the next president has begun to gain support from national security advisors in both campaigns. "My personal position is Gates is a very good secretary of Defense and would be an even better one in an Obama administration," said Richard Danzig, a top Obama national security advisor and a former Navy secretary. .........more.............. http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-gates20-2008jun20,0,4427708.story
Very interesting, Dubious. I'll be surprised if he wants it. He wasn't leaping at the chance to take the job the first time around, I think, and would likely stay on out of a sense of duty, not because he "wants it." If he does stay, it'll probably be for a year or two, but all that's pure speculation. Impeach Bush.
Unlikely. But we have Gates campaigning for the job and since it would be presumptuous of Obama to name a cabinet before he's elected, he can let this dangle out there as evidence to independents and potential Repub crossovers that he is considering it. (I have no doubt he'll name a Repub to his cabinet... it just won't be an important Foreign Affairs position.)
Gates is campaigning for the job? I thought it was the opposite. I really don't think he wants it, regardless of who is elected. Of course, I could be wrong. Impeach Bush.
I think Hagel will be SecDef. What better way to de-politicize a war than having a Dem President and GOP SecDef working together to figure out the best way out? And a great way to diffuse opposition as well.
You could be right. I was thinking it might be Clark, but Hagel would make sense, as well. Impeach Bush.
