Although I'm currently putting my political energies into supporting my Presidential candidate of choice, probably the biggest reason I am doing so is that I want to influence the 2008 Congressional elections. Don't get me wrong; I have high hopes for Barack Obama. But then, I had high hopes for Elliot Spitzer too. We can't count on any one person to be a political messiah. Human beings are limited and flawed. So the best way to ensure change is to try to get a critical mass of progressives into both houses of Congress--along with a progressive President, of course. I am supporting Barack Obama, in part, because it is my instinct that he will have bigger coattails than Hillary and will carry more progressives into Congress with him.
Of course, evidence of a candidate's likely coattail effect is always anecdotal and, while we can sometimes see a correlation in these cases, it's almost impossible to prove causality. Nevertheless, there are signs that Barack Obama will have serious coattails that could help change the face of government. Take, for example, the special election in Illinois for Denny Hastert's old seat. Obama campaigned and cut a commercial for progressive Democratic candidate Bill Foster. Both Denny Hastert and John McCain campaigned for Republican candidate Jim Oberweis. This is a heavily Republican district in Obama's home state. The Huffington Post has argued (persuasively, in my opinion) that this was a reasonable proxy fight between Obama and McCain.
The Democrat won.
And guess what? The result has already changed the way our government works. The very same day that he was sworn in, Bill Foster cast the deciding vote that led to the passage of a very strong House ethics bill creating an independent panel to review alleged ethics violoations that was fought tooth and nail by the Republicans. (For example, Representative Todd Tiahrt (R-Kansas) implored his colleagues, "If you have a single ounce of self-preservation, you'll vote no.")
So I believe that Obama would likely transform our government even if he turns out to be a rather ordinary President by sweeping in a progressive Congress, far more so than Hillary could manage. Increasingly, it looks like Democratic politicians agree.
With all the talk about how well Obama did against Hillary in the so-called "Patomac Primaries", there's an interesting story being underreported on how soundly he beat McCain. According to Tim Dickinson at Rolling Stone, Obama got 25% as many Republican votes as McCain in the state of Virginia. And he got nearly four times as many independent votes as McCain in that same state. And while he was at it, he got 140,000 more total votes than all Republicans combined in that primary. Given that Virginia is increasingly being seen as a swing state, this is an enormous victory in a very good test case for how well Obama will run against McCain.
Meanwhile, just across the Patomac River, Chris Bowers has an interesting and related story about a primary victory of progressive Democratic Congressional candidate Donna Edwards against incumbent LieberCrat Albert Wynn. Obama voters, and particularly first-time voters who voted for Obama, broke heavily for Edwards. Netroots blogger Chris Bowers, who has hardly been a cheerleader for either Obama or Clinton, had this to say:
[T]he new primary voters who are coming out for Barack Obama are also going to result in the first progressive displacement of a centrist, corporate, congressional Democrat via a primary in years.
So, to sum up, Obama can trounce McCain on total votes, trounce him on Independent votes, and even compete with him on Republican votes, in an historically red state, while simultaneously helping to elect a progressive Democrat against a well-funded incumbent down-ticket.
If this trend continues, there will be no fight over superdelegates. No Democratic official in his or her right mind could possibly walk away from success like this.
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There has been a lot of talk about identity politics this election cycle. Is Barack Obama the black candidate? Is Hillary Clinton the female candidate? Will Latino voters go for Democrats or Republicans? Is the Democratic nomination about wine drinkers versus beer drinkers? Is (as David Brooks loves to say) demography destiny? Of course, although there is some value to asking these questions, the media obsession with it reduces the possibility that the election conversation will be about things that really matter such as...oh, I don't know...issues. Whether people are going to be able to keep their homes during the mortage crisis or their jobs during the recession. Whether we will be able to stop global warming before it becomes irreversable. Whether we will finally have a foreign policy that reduces the number of enemies rather than increasing them. Whether all Americans will finally get the affordable healthcare and quality education that they deserve. Stuff like that.
Identity politics are always symptoms of a pathology. They are signs that something is wrong with our political system, either because people feel so cut off from the posibility of progress through participation in the political process that they are forced into a defensive crouch or because they have become so emotionally overinvolved with a set of policy positions that those positions begin to define who they are in some fundamental ways.
The Republicans have an identity politics problem of the latter kind. A real serious problem. And nobody is talking about it.
I thought it would be apropos to start this blog explaining why I've decided to do this, why I've decided to volunteer and make phone calls for Barack Obama, and why I'm an Obama supporter in general. Let me start by saying that I am among the 70% of Democrats who believe that either one of our current candidates would make a good President. Heck, I thought Biden and Dodd would have been excellent as well, and I was an ardent Edwards supporter for a long time. But Obama closed the deal with me the night of the Iowa caucus, and he has managed to strengthen my support for him each step of the way since then. I believe strongly that, while we have had a number of fine candidates, he is the best candidate. This post is about why I believe that is so.
