Hillary Clinton (pictured wearing the hat of her "favorite" MLB team) is expected to announce on Saturday that she is giving up her Democratic presidential ambition and will support expected nominee Barack Obama. (Not a surprise she is waiting until Saturday, as today is the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.)

I would bet that she will NOT be Obama's choice to be his vice presidential running mate, as the Obamas don't want the baggage that comes with her (aka Bill), and she doesn't want to be vice president anyway. (Obama needs a running mate who appeals to the two most important groups he still needs to win over from John McCain: Independents and Conservative Democrats. That's not Hillary.) I would bet in the long run she's hoping that Obama loses in November so she could run again in 2012.

The headlines -- most of them, anyway -- are saying that Senator Clinton beat Senator Obama 51% to 45% in the Nevada caucus contest today. Except that some reports say Senator Obama "won," 13 delegates to 12. What's up? There's a debate going on over at Matt Yglesias's blog (and elsewhere, too, I venture to guess -- especially among the spinners).

Well, there are at least three different metrics by which today's contests could be evaluated.

As a very recent addition to the Fallon gang, I am returning to my home state of Iowa to do what Iowans do best, caucus.

Over the last few months, my family and I have braced ourselves against the onslaught of political ads, political rhetoric, people playing politics, political mud slinging, political polls, political reporting, and most of all, a seemingly never-ending stream of politicians. Exhausting? You begin to understand what it is to be an Iowan before the caucus.

I believe the political ad that packed the most punch in our neighborhood was the Huckabee ad that declared a cease-fire for the holidays. For those of you that missed it, this was the ad the mass media focused on due to the fact that there was a cross in the background… I didn’t hear many Iowans complaining. I am not sure if this type of gesture will move votes, but it does produce goodwill, even in my house, and lets just say, we’re NPR, not Fox News.

Hillary Clinton is evidently running for the Republican nomination for president. Monday, she met with Richard Mellon Scaife -- yes, the very architect and financier of the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy, the man behind the Whitewater hoax, the man who spent millions of dollars promoting the story that Hillary Rodham Clinton had Vince Foster murdered -- now the publisher of a commercially non-viable far right-wing vanity newspaper, and used the occasion to denounce Barack Obama for being a member of Jermiah Wright's church.

Today, I read this in the Washington Post: "[Like John McCain] Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he has taken in the past, such as calling for single-payer health care . . . ."

It's not very surprising that a recent poll finds that 28% of Clinton supporters would vote for John McCain if Obama is the nominee, since it has been the Clinton strategy for several weeks now to endorse John McCain over Obama.

I'm like, scratching my head. Barack Obama won the Democratic nomination for president, correct? The nomination will be awarded officially by delegates to the Democratic National Convention, the delegate selection process is over, and the majority of the delegate votes at the convention belong to people who will vote for Obama. Ergo, QED, therefore, ipso facto, a fortiori and you can take it to the bank, Senator Obama will be the nominee.

So Hillary Clinton takes the occasion to announce:

She is the candidate who will be the best president;
She is asking people to continue to donate to her campaign;
She will decide on the future of her campaign in the coming days, based on what the people who voted for her want her to do;
That the voters of South Dakota have had the last word in the primaries, even though the polls in Montana were still open at that very moment;
That more people voted for her than had ever voted for a candidate in a primary -- even though more people voted for Obama than for Hillary Clinton.

It appears that John McCain is the anointed (at least by the press) nominee of the Republican Party, not least becasue he carried a number of Northeastern states in which he basically stands no chance of winning in November and because he won 33% of the vote in Missouri and, apparently, 44% of the Republican vote in California. As to the former, the winner-take-all feature had been engineered to slingshot Rudy Giuliani into the lead. Obviously, things changed. (California is not winner-take-all for the Republicans.) Missouri is also a winner-take-all state, which means, by definition, that a candidate rejected by 67% of the relevant electorate can nonetheless "win" because of being first-past-the-post. Perhaps McCain might have won in a run-off or alternative transferrable vote, but there is certainly reason to doubt this in Missouri.

Over at the Washington Post, Eugene Robinson gets what is at stake in the 2008 election-- a reconstructive presidency:

Obama's candidacy not only threatens to obliterate the dream of a Clinton Restoration. It also fundamentally calls into question Bill Clinton's legacy by making it seem . . . not really such a big deal.

That, I believe, is the unforgivable insult. The Clintons picked up on this slight well before Obama made it explicit with his observation that Ronald Reagan had "changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not."

Almost assuredly not. In fact, neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama is likely to be even halfway to the required total of 2023 delegates by then, and the delegate difference between them on February 6th is likely to be quite small.

As the nation gears up to see what N.H. has in store for us, I couldn't help but try to pull some attention back to Iowa. Although I gave you a taste of what the caucus was like from my relatively juvenile point of view, I thought my parents would provide an interesting take on the caucus that often isn’t available in the blogosphere (my parents are decidedly not bloggers). Since they are semi-retired, I was able to rope them in. Their thoughts are below:

Thoughts from my dad:
"I’ve always been an independent—although most often voting Republican rather than Democrat—so spent a lot of time reading about and listening to the candidates from both parties. With growing concern about Iraq and Pakistan and many foreign/energy relations issues, I joined my wife and daughters in supporting the Democrats—making that decision in the last 1-2 weeks.

A Wall Street Journal columnist today suggests that “Obama’s ‘Identity’ Beat Hillary’s ‘Identity.’” His argument is that the Democratic party is dominated by identity politics, and Senator Clinton lost because the race card beat the sex card.

The columnist claims, furthermore, that Obama (influenced by legal theorists at Harvard) sees matters in terms of identity politics, regardless of his professed desire to move beyond it. The columnist writes:
After South Carolina, the campaigns accused each other of playing the race or gender card. Obama deflected this charge. "I don't want to deny the role of race and gender in our society," Obama said. "They're there, and they're powerful. But I don't think it's productive."

I'm not convinced. I think Barack Obama is more inclined to interpret American life in the formal categories of identity politics than is generally thought, or even than would older "conventional liberals" like Al Gore or John Kerry. Legal theorists have been a main source of its ideas; it's hard to imagine that Barack and Michelle Obama didn't hear a lot about "marginalized constituencies" at Harvard Law School. Sen. Obama may not be so conventional after all.

Unless Barack Obama wins both Texas and Ohio (and adds Pennsylvania a couple of weeks later for good measure), the race will go on, and the controversy about counting delegates from Florida and Michigan will become ever more heated. The Clinton position that the results of the primaries held there in January, in patent defiance of the Democratic National Committee, should be honored, is preposterous. The candidates had pledged to honor the ban by not campaigning there. Obama wasn't even on the ballot in one of those states and certainly didn't campaign. But if Clinton and Obama remain more-or-less tied after the next string of primaries, there will, I suspect, be great pressure to rehold the primaries in a context where both candidates can campaign. This appears fair on the surface, but there is a real paradox in adopting this solution.

If there is one thing that is clear about contemporary America, it is that "democracy" scarcely describes our approach to politics. No, I'm not going to do another attack on our Constitution. Instead, I continue to be interested in the widespread belief that the Democratic primary has gone on "too long" and that something needs to be done to wrap it all up (and, in fact, that it should have been wrapped up weeks ago). As a committed Obamaite, I've not been above such thoughts, but as a slightly more detached analyst, I wonder what exactly is wrong about the current imbroglio, at least if one believes in democracy.

Consider the following: Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama actually have had to visit states like Texas, Wyoming, and Mississippi, which they will certainly not do for the general election. They will also find themselves in North Carolina and South Dakota before too very long. This means, among other things, that they are actually forced to become familiar with issues that might matter to people in those states and address them as, gasp, the equal of Democrats in safe states or the fabled swing voters in the few "battleground states." I'm opposed, of course,

This article by Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe, which Marty discussed last week, describes the positions of many of the major presidential candidates.

According to a blog published by the New York Times, Hillary Clinton has told Iowa voters, “I believe in the Second Amendment, and I don’t see any contradiction between the Second Amendment and laws that keep guns out of the hands of criminals.” The irony in this statement is that her husband did a great service to the Republican takeover in 1994 by relentlessly pushing his symbolic "assaualt weapons ban." According to Stanford political scientist Morris Fiorina, it probably cost the Democrats at least six seats in the House (including Speaker Tom Foley from Eastern Washington and Jack Brooks, the long-time Texan head of the House Judiciary Committee), not to mention dooming the candidacy of Rep. Andrews in Maine, who was running against Olympia Snowe (I believe) for the Senate.

I am sure you have all seen the headlines – the big Democratic turn out, the big Obama win, the big Clinton loss, and the religious right’s single-handed miracle of a Huckabee win – but what happened in Iowa last night holds far more secrets about what is to come than those headlines.

I caucused with the Democrats so I will have to limit my comments to what I saw there, although from my understanding, the Republicans go, pledge, pray, vote, and go again -- home to watch the Orange Bowl (Kansas was playing after all). The Democratic caucus procedure is much more involved, but more on that later.

Yes, another political post. Tomorrow is the Super Tuesday to end all Super Tuesdays, so I don't feel too bad about it. For a political junkie, this has been the most fascinating 6 weeks I've ever seen. Results wildly out of line with the polls, huge lead changes, the death of "momentum" as a meaningful gauge of a candidate's chances, debates more wonkish than I've ever seen, and two candidates I'm super enthusiastic about...

And that's just on the Democratic side. With the Republicans we've got Giuliani's 50 million dollar delegate, Huckabee's shock win in Iowa and all-too-predictable collapse, Romney remembering too late that he had a far better case as a smart business guy than he ever did as the cultural warrior, and the resurgence of McCain (which I'm not enthusiastic about in a strategic sense, but which does make me feel smart for predicting that he would win the nomination way back in November when he looked DOA).

Anyways, I got an e-mail today from a friend in California leaning toward Hillary asking me to make the case for Obama. I ended up with a fairly lengthy response and figured it wouldn't hurt to post it here. Yesterday I made the emotional case. This is the strategic one:

Today's Washington Post has an article that discusses "The Downside of Obama Strategy," i.e., that he actually has the audacity to believe that every Democrat's (and, perhaps, every American's) vote should count equally. The article notes (accurately) that Clinton has done better in large, electoral-vote-rich states than has Obama, which has ostensibly provoked fears about the prospects of his winning in November. It doesn't matter that he has received more popular votes than Clinton in contested elections--which allows us to omit Michigan and Florida--and, of course, that he has won more delegates. All that matters, according to a number of quoted Clinton supporters, is the vote in large states. So what we have is an attempt to apply to the nominating process the Electoral College's effective disenfranchisement of those unlucky enough to live in states where they are the political minority and the insane emphasis on a relatively few "battleground" states . One gather that Clinton will lose to Obama in today's caucuses in Wyoming. But, hey, it doesn't matter what Wyoming Democrats think, because they live in a Republican state.

Last July, I published a piece in the Boston Globe, entitled "No Vice," arguing that we would be better off either without a Vice President at all--we got along without one for 45 of our first 180 years)--or, perhaps more plausibly, waiting until after the election and having the winner, a la the 25th Amendment, nominate a vice president, subject to congressional confirmation. I would, incidentally, also allow the President or Congress to fire the Vice President, but that's another matter for another thread.

I can't help but wonder if John McCain might not find some real merit in the suggestion. Consider his dilemma. It is clear that Mike Huckabee isn't going to be the nominee for president, but his followers might (legitimately?) feel dissed if he isn't chosen for Veep. At best, they might stay home; at worst, they might vote for Obama and actually put some of the Red States in play, especially if Obama chooses, say, James Webb or Wesley Clark as his Veep. On the other hand,

There was a story in the NYT today which repeated an argument Hillary Clinton has been making for awhile -- that only she and John McCain cross the "commander in chief threshold." This argument is meant to stress her experience and readiness for the presidency, but there is a shadow issue that few have noticed although it dogged the first Clinton presidency. That's the relationship between the officer corps and the Democratic party. So far I've noticed one story on this issue in the Washington Times which gave expression to the serious doubts the military has about both Democratic candidates. The conservative and Republican tendencies of the officer corps have been noted but I'm not advancing a Seven Days in May scenario and those tendencies are inherently no more worrisome that the liberal and Democratic tendencies of law professors. The issue is rather whether the gulf between most of the officer corps and Democrats has reached the point where alienation, lack of common ground, and mistrust would lead to unnecessary conflict, misunderstandings, and serious policy mistakes in a Clinton or Obama administration. Remember the opening months of the first Clinton administration -- gays in the military? That conflict featured the military brass drawing on their contacts in Congress to oppose an initiative featured in the presidential election.

For the past couple of weeks I've been blogging about how, regardless of how many states Senators Clinton and Obama each "win" tonight, the Democratic primary system is not like the electoral college -- winner does not take all -- and therefore neither one of them is likely to emerge from today as a prohibitive favorite in terms of actually securing a majority of delegates. Over at Open Left, Chris Bowers has now run some numbers, and he calculates that the largest possible delegate spread between the two candidates after this evening is likely to be no more than 75 delegates, and that as of tomorrow morning both candidates will need to win over 1000 more delegates for a majority -- probably more than 1100 -- with only 1428 pledged delegates remaining to be chosen in primaries and caucuses. Thus, in order to win the nomination without the aid of "superdelegates," either candidate would need to win more than three-quarters of the remaining pledged delegates, something that is virtually inconceivable.

Without endorsing either of the three Presidential candidates in the US, and without suggesting any underhanded shenanigans, let me propose a thought about USA '08.

It occurred to me last week while having drinks with a dozen or so industry peers - almost all democrats, mind you. The subject of the conversation somehow shifted to politics and the candidates... and I fully expected the group to be happy about Sen. Obama's advantage over Sen. Clinton. That, however, wasn't the case: No one at the table endorsed Obama.

Apologies to my hordes of disappointed readers for the lacuna. My Intertubes were blocked on Tuesday -- or, to put it in less technical terms, our ISP had an all-day, city-wide outage. I had the chance to post from elsewhere in the evening but I said to heck with it. Yesterday, the problem was in the wetware. I think I was just so depressed and disgusted by the completely idiotic and repulsive coverage of politics on TV that my neural circuits were sputtering fecklessly. The link is to Glenn Greenwald, writing coherently.

Anyhow, both the ISP and I have rebooted, so before I do a public health post later today, let me just put in my two cents on the presidential campaign. Nothing terribly original, just the same open letter to Hillary Clinton I know you would write as well.

Dear Senator Clinton: You have already made history as the first woman to run a truly credible campaign for the presidency. You have staked out substantive positions on many issues, and your campaign has simultaneously transcended gender and championed gender equality. Good for you. The next woman to run for president will find the way smoothed by your precedent. Chris Matthews has been chastened (to some extent) and it won't be a novelty, it will just be a presidential campaign.

All of the presidential candidates seem to be picking up Barack Obama's theme of change and portraying themselves as agents of change. If things keep going the way they have been, the 2008 election now looks to be as defining a moment as 1932, 1968 or 1980. (If things keep going, that is. A lot can happen in ten months).

If 2008 turns out to be a pivotal election, defining a new political era, it is important to give credit where credit is due. Two key reasons for the change will be the crackup of the coalition of the dominant party of the era, the Republicans, and the almost complete political failure of George W. Bush and his chief political adviser, Karl Rove. Let me begin with the second feature, and move to the first.

Needless to say, many pundits are now commenting on the rules of the Democratic Party re the selection of its presidential candidate. See, e.g., E.J. Dionne's column in today's Washington Post, where he writes that "Democrats have contrived a nominating contest that even Rube Goldberg would have considered too convoluted, too dysfunctional and too improbable to name as his own." Save for the certainly peculiar way by which Texas names its delegates--I had the pleasure of voting twice for Barack Obama, once in early voting (in a secret ballot) and then several days later at my local caucus (which is definitely not secret)--I don't share the hostility to a preference-sensitive proportional representation system that does not negate the votes of everyone who doesn't vote for "the winner" (who may, as with McCain in a number of states, get distinctly less than a majority of the vote). But I've already made such arguments, and I won't rehearse them again. My current grumpiness is about something else, though regular readings of Balkinization shouldn't be surprised by what I'm about to write.

I don't want to distract our readers from the very important story about the Administration's stonewalling of the 9/11 Commission -- read about the New York Times's essential story and the Zelikow Report here -- but this is very much worth your attention, too:

Continuing his invaluable work, Charlie Savage of the Boston Globe today publishes responses of nine presidential candidates to a series of questions he posed about the topics that have dominated this blog since 2004. I'll add some highlights here shortly -- in the meantime, go read the responses.

Ugh, I am so ready for primary season to be over. And yesterday's result was almost perfect to maximize the annoyance. If Hillary had won resoundingly, it could have actually signaled the return of a real contest. But instead, she won by enough to ensure that she'll continue running for (probably) months without really doing anything to improve her chances of winning.

The reality is that she has very little chance of winning. And if she does win, it will almost certainly come in a fashion that will incite serious (and justified) anger. Which makes me wish that she would simply state that fact, call on her supporters to unite behind Obama, and let us all focus on beating McCain.

A mantra of the Clintons' stump speeches is the desirability of "reforming our government." Thus she told the folks in Iowa on December 17 that "We need a new beginning when it comes to reforming our government." Bill returned to this last night in a Missouri speech trying to assuage Obama's rout of Hillary in South Carolina. And the Hllary web site includes a release on her endorsement last June by Illinois Rep. Jack Franks, who said, "When it comes to reforming our government to make it work for the people, Hillary Clinton is the best candidate to lead that change."

One would think from the recent excitement over the possibility of a bipartisan political movement that Hillary Clinton was running on a platform calling for confiscation of corporate property, reestablishment of the moderately progressive tax structure of the 1970s, the return of all American troops from abroad, the abolition of capital punishment, and (heaven forbid), gay marriage. With the exception of a stray remark by John Edwards, Democrats polling more than 10% continue to run to the right of Richard Nixon. Indeed, judging by their legislative activity this year, the Democrats as a whole have almost no ambition to push any program that is substantially to the left of center. The real issue ought to be why some journalists are so excited about the possibility of a third party that might take a middle position between the party clearly to right of the electorate and the party that on its best day sometimes lurches very slightly to the left.