Dave and Hillary debate freedom and equality

Letterman hosted Hillary Clinton last night. It was a good interview, pretty funny, mostly softball questions. Letterman seemed appalled by the cost of presidential campaigns (all the candidates will spend about half a billion, by Clinton's estimation) and drew her into a nice discussion about free speech versus equal access. But then Letterman made the suggestion that maybe we should use this money to feed the hungry instead of using it on campaigns. Here's the video:

That's just cheap. He should know better, and Hillary should have rebutted him better, although I certainly understand why she didn't. Money raised by campaigns goes almost exclusively to one purpose: educating voters about the upcoming election. And I think we can all agree that that's an important task. Maybe there are better ways of educating millions of adult voters in such a short period of time, but when you rule out forced re-education camps, there aren't that many other options.

So is educating the population more or less important than feeding the hungry? We can certainly debate that, but that's not really the issue here. The issue is, if we've decided we're going to feed the hungry, where does the money come from? With due respect to Letterman, there are plenty of better sources. You could cover that half-billion dollars by just cutting one B-2 bomber, and you'd still have plenty of change.

Late surge toward Romney in CA?

It's winner-take-all. McCain looks to have a good day across the nation, but if Romney takes California's delegates, this race is far from over.

Obama more electable?

In the latest head-to-head matchups, Obama does notably better against McCain than Clinton does. Both Democrats beat the snot out of Romney.

For the record, I'm not sure how reliable these polls are. Hillary, my colleagues keep reminding me, is pre-slimed. Everyone in the country knows her negatives, and they're not likely to get much higher. Obama, meanwhile, has enjoyed a very nice media ride over the past few months (hell, years). Should he become the nominee, his past (his years doing crack in a madrassa with Saddam Hussein, etc.) will come to the fore, and he won't look quite so pristine. Of course, the same lesson goes for that other media darling, John McCain.

The tracks of her tears

Wait, Hillary Clinton cried publicly again, on the eve of another big election day?

Once was okay, but fool me once... fool me... we won't get fooled again. Yeah, that's it.

McCain?

If polls are to be believed (and that's a big if this year), John McCain is poised to clean up on Super Tuesday. He can't clinch it that day, but he'll be most of the way to the Republican nomination.

Just for the record, no, that's not supposed to happen. A large chunk of the party despises McCain. They hate his maverick style, his unreliability, his betrayals on issues like campaign finance, etc. George Will recently criticized McCain thusly:

In ABC's debate, McCain said: "Why shouldn't we be able to reimport drugs from Canada?" A conservative's answer is:

That amounts to importing Canada's price controls, a large step toward a system in which some medicines would be inexpensive but many others -- new pain-relieving, life-extending pharmaceuticals -- would be unavailable. [...]

There are decent, intelligent people who believe that equity or efficiency or both are often served by government setting prices. In America, such people are called Democrats.

Traditionally, Republican insiders are able to prevent a candidate like McCain from winning. That's what they did in 2000. Why is McCain succeeding now? Because the GOP is in terrible disarray. For any number of reasons, they simply could not converge on a candidate. When a party can't control its nomination process, talented (if unreliable) politicians get through. That's what happened with Schwarzenegger -- he could only get into office as a Republican in the recall election, which had no primary.

The Republicans could actually win with McCain as their nominee, but they'll have to get used to disappointment.

The Harry Cake

I made this last night for my son's birthday. Pardon my auto-kvell, but I'm very proud of this one:

Super Tuesday polls

Pollster.com has provided some very helpful graphics for those of us wondering what will happen next Tuesday. Here's the Democratic one:(The red line is the median. Circles represent individual polls. The darker they are, the more recently they were conducted. The bigger they are, the more delegates are at stake. BTW: This is a really nice way to display a lot of variables in one chart.)

Note that Clinton is pretty heavily favored in most of the states, although the more recent polls almost all show movement towards Obama. It looks like California will be a wash, although Hillary will pick up the bulk of delegates in the delegate-rich states of NY and NJ, while Obama will clean up in IL.

The Republican one is more surprising:Can McCain really have such substantial leads in all these states? Most of them, I think, are winner-take-all, unlike on the Democratic side. So McCain seems poised for a really good night. Granted, Huckabee is still an X-factor out there, although I'm guessing he's pulling more from Romney than McCain at this point.

USA Today has an interesting little study showing that no candidate can clinch next Tuesday. The beat goes on...