Updated to include July numbers.
This line chart reflects the Obama campaign's chances of closing the gap in Georgia based solely on registering and motivating AA voters to turnout in November. The solid orange line indicates the growing number of active registered AA voters in Georgia. The dashed orange line is the projected total of active registered AA voters for each month if 20,000 new AA voters are registered each month until the election (an exceedingly optimistic figure given the trend of the last three months). The red, green, and blue lines indicate the active registered voter thresholds the Obama campaign would have to reach given each of the three turnout scenarios described to the right of the chart. As you can see the dashed orange line falls short of the 90% turnout threshold-the wildly optimistic threshold for Obama.
Roughly 2000 new AA voters were registered in Georgia in the last month, a number far below the previous months' totals and further below what the campaign was targeting. What is becoming increasingly clear in Georgia is that Obama will need a lot more than registering and motivating the AA vote to close the Bush-Kerry '04 gap. Paging Bob Barr...
Further explanation of the numbers provided in the chart is here.
Spending a day learning html in order to produce charts that are web-compatible is encouraged under the Protocol.
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Obama and the African-American vote in GA
Saturday, August 2, 2008
Can't wait to hear Souter say "G-spot"
The Fifth Circuit has denied an en banc rehearing of its February decision striking down the Texas Obscene Device Law, which outlawed dildoes and vibrators in the Lone Star State. The original decision relied on the usual suspects--substantive due process under the 14th Amendment, private intimate conduct, Lawrence v. Texas--to hold that the law heavily burdened Texas citizens who wished to get freaky with the help of a $220 Chrome Juicer.
Eugene Volokh speculates that the Supreme Court will hear Texas's appeal, and guesses it will vote 6-3 in favor of the law's constitutionality. The idea is that some of the moderate justices, specifically Kennedy and Breyer, will conclude that the traditional state's interest in regulating morality (which, according to Texas, includes an interest in "discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex and the pursuit of sexual gratification unrelated to procreation”) should hold unless it implicates a right "important to most people's lives." Chrome Juicers and Fists of Adonis apparently don't make the cut.
Volokh's co-blogger Dale Carpenter lays out a more comprehensive set of possibilities, and tentatively suggests that the law could be struck down by a Kennedy-led 5-4 majority on either a 'fundamental right' or rational-basis analysis. I agree. Justice Kennedy will be certain to angle for a crucial role in the whatever decision the Court hands down, and I find Volokh's suggestion that Justice Breyer might join with a Scalia- or Roberts-led majority unlikely. And with Kennedy as the swing vote, I just can't see him joining an opinion that would undermine what I'm sure he sees as his legacy: the decision in Lawrence that finally got rid of the notion that a state could ban homosexual conduct between consenting adults. True, that opinion neatly dodged the crucial question of whether 'traditional' (read = sex-regulating) morality could ever suffice as a 'rational basis' for government interference with private sexual behavior. It is possible that once having cemented his spot as the key vote, Kennedy could parse some meaningless distinctions, do a lot of on-the-one-hand equivocating, and muddle his way toward allowing the law to stand.
But after all the grief he's taken from Scalia and the SocialCons for Lawrence, I just don't see him letting Texas come into his Court (and these days, he sure thinks it's his Court) and tell him that, Lawrence not withstanding, they can still tell people how and how not to fuck.
For readers who found the Chrome Juicer too tame, The October Protocol recommends The Marvelous Anchor.
Campaign Appearances: July Update
We first ran this piece last month and here is the line graph with the July totals included. At first glance the July numbers seem to fit with the earlier numbers - both candidates scaled back the number of domestic appearances this month. A closer inspection reveals that Sen. Obama is dominating Sen. McCain on the summer trail. Obama's excuse for the decline in his July appearance numbers was he was part of a hugely successful week-long CODEL trip to Europe and the Middle East. McCain's excuse was . . . well . . . hey, he's 71, it's summertime, you know what that means . . . GOLF CARTS MUTHAFUCKA!
Despite Obama playing Paris Hilton to hundreds of thousands of German "fans" he still managed to outcampaign McCain back in the states by a 29-18 campaign event margin in July. Must have been all of those Met-RX energy bars, or the Black Forest Berry Honest Tea, or maybe it's his freakishly skinny physique. McCain better be careful in August, he might get lapped by the hardest working man in show business.
The Protocol always travels fast, hard, and low to the ground.
Florida Front Pages
Yesterday was a big day for the Sunshine State. Both candidates were campaigning in Florida with Sen. Obama visiting the Bay Area and Sen. McCain in Orlando. Sen. Obama was heckled at his town hall meeting in St. Petersberg by members of the International People's Democratic Uhuru Movement, a pan-African Socialist group. (The Obama campaign responded by thanking the group and blasting undecided voters inboxes with a memo titled, "Jesse's not the only one: More lefty black folks that hate me.") Meanwhile, McCain yukked it up with National Urban League in an attempt to cut into Obama's base.
The visits also happened to coincide with a report that Florida is in a recession for the first time in 16 years.
Ambinder speculated about whether today's Florida headlines would focus on economics or race and that a move in one direction would indicate whether the "race card" attack was taking hold.
The Protocol looked at today's front pages of the top five Florida newspapers (by circulation) and is ready to deliver a verdict . . .
St. Petersburg Times circ. 422,410
The Times leads with "Obama open to drilling" with a large picture of him smiling among supporters. The picture of Obama dominates a smaller picture of McCain joking with National Urban League President Marc Morial. With economics front and center particularly Obama's move toward drilling, an issue that the McCain campaign wanted to wedge between the two candidates, this front page is favorable to the Democrat. Papers commonly give favorable coverage to any visiting candidate and that phenomenon is borne out by the contrasting front pages of the St. Pete Times and the Orlando Sentinel. Obama's visit focused on the Bay Area and McCain's centered on Orlando. ADVANTAGE OBAMA
Miami Herald circ. 390,171
The Herald provides equal visual coverage under the headline "Florida Showdown." In the article, however, the body starts with racial issues, hecklers included, and this after a lede that set up the economy before the racial issues ("...offering contrasting fixes for the economy while confronting racial issues"). That subtle mismatch smacks of an editor flipping the body paragraphs before going to press. Burying the economic news after the jump: ADVANTAGE MCCAIN
Orlando Sentinel circ. 341,025
The Sentinel headlines with "MCCAIN: OBAMA NOT BEST PICK FOR BLACKS," and a picture of Sen. McCain and National Urban League President Marc Morial having a good ole time onstage. If a picture is worth 1000 words, then this one is repeating "Playing the race card? Me? John McCain? How could I?" about a hundred times. Again, the soft coverage of McCain could be due to the fact that he was the candidate with a higher profile local visit. ADVANTAGE MCCAIN
South Florida Sun-Sentinel circ. 339,728
The Sun-Sentinel had nothing on the front page about the candidates save for a small photo of McCain at the bottom in the Daily Digest referring to reader mail about his rejected NYT editorial. Above the fold they ran a story on the aforementioned recession. They were the only paper on this list with that story on the front page and the only paper with no front-page story on the candidates. ADVANTAGE OBAMA
Tampa Tribune and Times circ. 309,916
The Tampa Tribune focuses on the battle and gives equal coverage to both candidates. There is no mention of race and the text highlights the main theme of each candidate's visit: Obama's economic stimulus plan and McCain's school vouchers strategy. While the issues and the economy trump race on this page the coverage seems even-handed. NO ADVANTAGE
Sooooo, that's two for Obama and two for McCain with one tie. Looks like both campaigns are getting their message out in equal measure. Keep an eye on those Sunday papers to see if there is any movement toward race or economics.
The Protocol always buries the lede below the fold.
NM Polls: SUSA and Rasmussen in 2008
All polls surveyed between 490-700 respondents. All Rasmussen polls and the SUSA 6/19 poll were of likely voters. All other SUSA polls were of registered voters. A recent Maricopa Co., AZ poll showed surprising strength for Obama in McCain's home county. If reliably Republican Arizona is showing signs of cracking, I like Obama's chances in purple New Mexico. Obama has a strong ally in Sen. Richardson, and runs well in Santa Fe and on the Reservation. New Mexico appears much safer for the Democrat than Ohio, Michigan, Colorado, and New Hampshire.
Rasmussen in NH
If there is any traditionally Republican state where McCain's latest attack strategy won't fly, it's New Hampshire. Keep an eye on the movement in the next set of polls from the Granite State.
Rasmussen in CO
Other polls show Colorado tightening with McCain taking the lead in the latest Quinnipiac poll.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Obama Pryor?
Also from the NYT article:
In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.
You can also hear his white-people voice when he says "dollar bills" in this now-suddenly-important clip from Springfield, MO on Wednesday.
It's not quite Richard Pryor or Dave Chappelle, but still . . . pretty good.
The October Protocol only speaks in a white-people voice.
Professor Obama
The NYT ran a long feature Wednesday about the twelve years Barack Obama spent teaching law at the University of Chicago. The paper’s framing of the story is that Obama kept himself aloof from the Chicago faculty, made his political ambitions known, and shrewdly kept his positions on policy questions such as affirmative action and government regulation close to the chest.
“He surfaced all the competing points of view on [controversial quota-queen Lani] Guinier’s proposals with total neutrality and equanimity,” says Prof. David Franklin, sounding a familiar theme about Obama that he excels at dispassionate analysis, with a gift for empathizing with both sides of hot button issues. The flipside to this gift, of course, is that it leaves people heavily invested in academic and intellectual camps wondering whose side he’s really on.
My take on the article's portrait of Obama as a professor, and the insights that can be gleaned from his Constitutional Law exams and answer keys, is that they confirm my view of him as a thoughtful and careful legal mind more interested at getting at the heart of policy disputes than in resolving them. His course materials emphasize the realities of racism, disenfranchisement, and poverty--and the distortions those realities have on a democratic political process--while at the same time acknowledging the failures of heavy-handed attempts to fix them from the top down. One question from a 1996 exam asked students to analyze two hypothetical proposals by a black mayor, in a heavily segregated city split 50-50 between blacks and whites with a significant history of institutional racism in the power structure, to ensure that the awarding of construction contracts and the hiring of firemen better reflect the city's racial composition. Both proposals are facially race-neutral, with the construction proposal skewing toward companies based in low-income neighborhoods and the fireman proposal doing away with a (possibly culturally-biased) written exam.
Obama's answer key to both questions isn't earth-shattering: he's looking for students to analyze the right cases (Aderand, Croson, Washington v. Davis, etc.) and put forth good arguments about the level of scrutiny such proposals would face in court and the likelihood of surviving. What strikes me though is his understanding that it's not enough to believe that the mayor is right, or that his proposals are a good idea--you have to convince a court that the proposals play by the rules the Supreme Court has set down regarding discriminatory intent, narrow tailoring to a compelling state interest, and so forth. He seems keenly aware that knowing your arguments are the right ones is not enough in a sprawling, diverse democracy: you need to take seriously the opposing views, pare the issues down to their cores, search for the common ground, and move from there.
Lawyers are trained to be advocates, to take a goal (my client's best interest) and pursue any and all threads that lead to that goal while ignoring, minimizing, or attacking those that don't. Obama's not an advocate. He's a balancer. He doesn't make a stand and then use whatever arguments happen to be convenient to defend that stand til the crack of doom--he weighs competing sides, acknowledges the impossibility of always being right, and looks for common ground. So when Richard Epstein complains that "he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings," he means Obama's never planted his flag in the sands of an idea and loaded his guns to defend it, right or wrong.
Which is exactly what voters sick of pig-headed, reflexive partisanship find so refreshing.
By way of reflexive balance, the October Protocol notes the extensive use of the words "I" and "me" in Obama's memos and communications to his law classes.
Thursday, July 31, 2008
Culture Wars Part III: The Turd Blossoms Again
Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, and Andrea Mitchell go toe to toe in this remarkable interview.
As Ambinder notes the action starts two and a half minutes in and continues right up till the end.
I wonder if this is the beginning of the end of the media's love affair with Sen. McCain. They've always appreciated his candor and his open-bus policy but this recent string of ads has shown that he, and Davis, are running Karl Rove's third presidential campaign.
The choice to align himself with Bush four years ago was McCain's critical mistake. Had he maintained his maverick persona, channeled the animosity he must have felt toward Bush/Rove and Co. after the South Carolina primary in 2000, he could have remained ever the straight talker, and run as a genuine alternative to the Bush White House. Instead he continues to follow the spirit of the hug by hiring a Rove lackey to run his day-to-day (Steve Schmidt) and allowing his campaign to continue to wage Rove's culture war.
The media has begun to realize that their proud maverick has become a puppet. John McCain might not lead the country like George W. Bush, but he is certainly campaigning like him. That would be a great plan, I mean, GW has won two in a row and if it ain't broke, . . . there must be nothing to fix, right?.
