Delegate defections

I don't know why I didn't examine this until now, but the Green Papers has the record of all the state delegate votes cast at the Democratic National Convention, at least until Hillary Clinton proposed suspending the roll call and nominating Obama by acclamation. In the scatterplot below, I compare Clinton's share of the Obama + Clinton pledged delegates leading up to the convention with her share of actual floor votes cast by state. The diagonal line is the baseline for Clinton's delegate support. If a state is above the line, she got a larger percentage of the delegate vote than her share of pledged supporters in that state.
Alaska, in fact, was the only state in which Clinton got more than her expected share of supporters. Everywhere else, she lost supporters, although the degree to which her supporters defected varied substantially by state. Colorado's Clinton-pledged delegates largely stayed with her; 15 of the state's 19 Clinton-pledged delegates cast a vote for her. She lost all of her supporters in places like Arkansas, New Jersey, and American Samoa. I'm frankly curious as to why so many delegates would stick with her in places like Colorado, Connecticut, and Guam, when they'd abandon her elsewhere.

Sign o' the times

There's a cute family-run farm just north of Denver where you can go pick your own fruits and vegetables throughout the summer. After this year's harvest, they announced that they would make their dregs available for free to locals. They had to shut down the giveaway early when 40,000 people showed up.

Lincoln

I'm glad we're finally seeing some Doris Kearns Goodwin blowback. Not that I have any problem with her Team of Rivals book. Of course, like most pontificators, I haven't read it. It's like Robin Hood, the book that everyone knows but nobody has read. But the basic idea, that a cabinet filled with egotistical rivals who offer a president a wide range of perspectives is fundamentally good for the country, isn't a bad one. And maybe that's a good model for Obama to be following as he staffs up his own administration.

But one problem with this idea is that it soft-pedals some of the problems Lincoln faced by pursuing this strategy. As Matthew Pinsker points out:

Out of the four leading vote-getters for the 1860 Republican presidential nomination whom Lincoln placed on his original team, three left during his first term -- one in disgrace, one in defiance and one in disgust. [...]

Only Seward endured throughout the Civil War. He and Lincoln did become friends, and he provided some valuable political advice, but the significance of his contributions as Lincoln's secretary of State have been challenged by many historians, and his repeated fights with other party leaders were always distracting.

I also have a general issue with the constant comparisons between Obama and Lincoln. Now, we know Obama is an astute scholar of Lincoln and we can glean much about the president-elect's intellect from that. (I know Susan Schulten is working on an article on this topic and I look forward to reading it.) Also, Gary Wills' comparison of Obama's race speech and Lincoln's Cooper Union address was a really good one.

But I grow concerned when the comparison are less about the men and more about the times. The usual argument made is that both men were elected by a deeply divided nation, and hopefully Obama has the sort of skill necessary to bind up the nation's wounds.

Humbug. America today is divided in the sense that it's filled with liberal and conservatives who disagree deeply about the sorts of policies its government should enact. The differences are substantive and real, but they are neither violent nor insurmountable. There's a broad acceptance that elections are a fair way to settle these differences. Many people are upset about Obama's election, but they accept it as legitimate. They'll fight his proposals largely through legal and political means and will try to run candidates against him the next chance they get. This is not a crisis. This is democracy.

By comparison, imagine if a large group of armed South Carolinians, with the explicit support of their state government, were surrounding a U.S. Army base demanding that the American soldiers inside surrender to them. And imagine they rejected the legitimacy of the incoming president and vowed to destroy the nation because they believed the new president was hostile to their values and traditions. And ten other state governments seemed prepared to join them in this effort. Now that's a culture war, and that's what Lincoln faced in November of 1860. That's a lot different from sushi eaters and Tim LaHaye readers not understanding each other's lifestyles.

That's all I'm saying.

Thanksgiving recipes

Vivian was kind enough to post all of last year's Thanksgiving recipes on her blog. We'll likely repeat most of these receipes, although this year I plan to use Alton Brown's brining recipe for the turkey. Let me put in a special plug for the Martha Stewart chocolate pumpkin pie.

They only look dead

Nate Silver asks if talk radio has killed conservatism. It happens to be an interesting post, with a really nice discussion about the skills necessary to be a good talk radio host, so I encourage you to read it. But the general thrust of the argument is one I've heard from a lot of sources lately, that the GOP lost handily in this past election because of something they did wrong during the campaign. In this case, it's because they used talk radio to stimulate a base but not to convert moderates. Yet in 2004, people were arguing that this sort of approach was the reason the GOP was winning. It could reduce its arguments to simple catch phrases and convey those messages as marching orders to tens of millions of people every day.

Let me just suggest that the GOP's victories in 2000, 2002, and 2004, and the Democrats' victories in 2006 and 2008, had far less to do with salesmanship than with product. Yes, Obama ran an unusually brilliant and disciplined campaign, and McCain's was pretty weak by comparison, but the results of the election probably wouldn't have been dramatically different if the campaigns had been of equal quality and funding. You can explain an awful lot of these elections by looking at the fundamentals. People this year were, on balance, upset with the Republicans because of the economy and the Iraq War, so they figured they'd try something different.

The Republicans are trying to recalibrate their message and figure out what went wrong this year. Were they too moderate? Too conservative? Too old fashioned? Too exclusive? Self-assessment is good, but the simple fact is that even if they run the same kinds of campaigns in 2010 that they ran in 2006, they'll probably do a lot better than they have in recent elections. Unless Obama can dramatically turn around the economy in the next two years, voters will direct their anger toward him and his fellow Democrats, and Republicans will pick up seats. The president's party almost always loses seats in midterm elections, anyway.

A decade ago, E.J. Dionne wrote They Only Look Dead, which argued that liberals would eventually run the government again. And of course, he was right. He could pen the same book with the same title about the GOP today. They'll be back.

Obama's prospects

From what we know about Obama's cabinet, this looks to be an administration set on getting things accomplished. The choice of Tom Daschle for HHS secretary was, I think, particularly shrewd. As Ezra Klein points out, Bill Clinton anointed his wife and Ira Magaziner to spearhead the health care reform effort in 1993. Both were brilliant in terms of policy, but neither had any idea how to get something through Congress. Daschle knows how to do that.

Obama will also have some leeway with the Congress -- probably more than most presidents have. Yes, Bush had two houses of Congress of his party, as well, but the GOP didn't have nearly the majorities that the Democrats currently enjoy. Bill Clinton had about as many Democrats in the House in his first two years as Obama will have next year, but it was a very different Democratic Party back in 1993*. The party has largely purged its moderates (as have the Republicans).

Beyond that, aspects of this year's election may extend Obama's honeymoon period, as my fellow Klugie Greg Koger notes:

In “real change elections,” Koger observed, “a president can have continued success for two years or more.” Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson are clear examples of this, and the election of Barack Obama has all the marks of being another such change election. Despite the natural tensions that exist between a president and Congress, Obama has a special opportunity for success with Republicans in such disarray after two successive election setbacks. Koger added that a president “needs to choose an agenda that can be signed into law” and “minimize intra-party conflicts.” He can do this “by putting the onus on Congress to determine when and how to pass agenda items that have salience, net political benefits for the party.”

Obama will have an even easier time if the Democrats get to control 60 Senate seats. That, however, would require the Dems to take the Minnesota and Georgia races and for Lieberman to be a reliable vote. Any one of those things might be possible, but all three is a real stretch.


*Update: Some evidence. According to Keith Poole's numbers, the Democratic caucus has moved leftward since 1993. The median DW-NOMINATE ideal point for Democrats in the 103rd House (1993-94) was -.337. Last year, it was -.42. Plus, the standard deviation has shrunk in the same time period from .181 to .158. House Democrats are now more liberal and more ideologically similar to each other than they were 16 ago.

Use a cassette player lately?

I found a 30+ year old cassette in my house the other day and thought it would be a good idea to convert it into an electronic format using a digital recorder. Easy enough -- all I'd have to do is find a cassette player. That's actually really tricky. I have an old Sony tape deck, but it turns out I haven't actually played a tape on it in at least five years. I put the tape in and the spindles wouldn't turn. Then the eject button wouldn't work so I had to pry the tape out.

Next I tried my old alarm clock with the built-in tape deck. I pushed the eject button to open it, and the door flew off the machine and fell behind my night stand. The tape deck still worked, and I was able to make the conversion, but I hadn't realized how dead that medium was, at least around my house.

The pity is, I've got hundreds of these tapes in storage. Some of them actually have pretty good material on them, like a 1977 live recording I have of Peter Gabriel singing Marvin Gaye's "Ain't that Peculiar?". I have lots more good stuff on vinyl, but I worry less about that since those records will pretty much last forever. I can always dig up a turntable to play them or convert them to MP3 if necessary. But the cassettes are decaying. As are the players, apparently.

I might as well have a closet full of wax cylinders.