NY Times: Barack Obama won the Idaho Democratic Caucus with just shy of 80% of the vote.
Category Archives: politics
Caucused tonight
Just got back from the Latah County Democratic presidential caucus – it was packed with people despite impending snow. Lots of college students, lots of everyone – a line out the door just before the cutoff time of 7:00pm. I left early because my candidate, Barack Obama, was leading strongly – upwards of 70% – which meant I didn’t have to worry about making a second choice. Hillary Clinton was flirting with the “non-viability” limit of 15%; a few stubborn souls also showed up for John Edwards. According to NPR, Latah County is a good microcosm of the state as a whole – Obama 75%, Clinton 24%.
Caucusing tonight
Tonight, I’m spending my evening at my first-ever presidential caucus, for the Idaho Democratic Party. It’s open regardless of party affiliation, which is cool. Between Moscow’s generally weedy liberalism and his heavy advantage with lefty U of I students (including yours truly), Barack Obama probably has Latah County wrapped up, but I really have no idea who’ll win the state as a whole. Democrats in southern Idaho tend to be more blue collar (mining and manufacturing-associated union folks), which is supposed to favor Hillary Clinton. But she’s never even visited the state – whereas the big O stopped in at Boise State U over the weekend.
The science ticket
Via the essential beatfinger: Wired Science summarizes Science’s assessment of how the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates stand on science issues. These include support for science funding in general, support for embryonic stem cell research, acceptance of evolution, plans for improving science education, and willingness to address global warming. Barack Obama comes out on top of the Democrats, but the differences between him and Hillary Clinton or John Edwards seem mainly related to emphasis. Among the Republicans, the list-makers seem to have had difficulty coming up with anything nice to say: Rudy Giuliani gets credit just for being pro-choice!
Electronic matchmaking for voters
Glassbooth lets you take positions on a variety of political issues, then compares them with the positions taken by every Democratic and Republican presidential candidate. I think it was Time magazine that set up something like this in 2004. My results: I’m best-matched to Dennis Kucinich (91% similarity), followed by Mike Gravel (85%) and John Edwards (75%). Barack Obama, who is actually my (current) preferred candidate, only scores 69%.
Via Wired.
Will Huckabee kill the Christian Left?
The results from yesterday’s Iowa caucus: Barack Obama and Mike Huckabee are the winners in their respective parties, by solid margins. It’s an interesting pairing, because the Democratic victor represents a response to a kind of conservative politics that the Republican victor has abandoned.
Obama is a good representative of the Christian Left – explicit about his religion, but understanding the Gospel to be about economic and social justice, not condemning abortion and homosexuals (neither of which is discussed by Jesus himself). The most public exponents of this position are Jim Wallis and his organization Sojourners.
The political strategy of the Christian Left has been to combat the Christian Right by attacking its wholehearted embrace of mainstream conservative stances on economics and the role of government as un-Christlike. Wallis’s favorite image is of a Bible with every reference to the poor cut from it: basically, a pile of shredded paper. This critique is valid and important, but it also allows the Christian Left to leave more divisive doctrinal positions of liberal Christianity, like acceptance of homosexuals and acknowledgment of the fact of evolution, in the background. Focusing on economics lets Sojourners be bipartisan, because while the Republicans have actively made life worse for poor Americans, the Democrats haven’t exactly made it better.
Huckabee poses a problem for this strategy – he rejects the post-Reagan ties between conservative Christianity and big business interests in favor of a distinctly liberal-flavored populism. But theologically, and on social issues, he’s very conservative: anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-science. And there’s the problem – on the issues the Christian Left has emphasized, Huckabee looks to have conceded the point. For Jim Wallis and Co. to oppose him without getting nit-picky about specific policy (though Huck’s “fair tax” looks ripe for nit-picking), they either have to start talking about more than economics, or they have to endorse (or at least not oppose) Huckabee.
So what will the Christian Left do? As of now, Sojourners’ “God’s Politics” blog has two responses to the Iowa result: one, by Diana Butler Bass, that identifies the Obama/Huckabee contrast; and one, by Wallis, that cheers the bipartisan victory of economic populism. Neither takes a position for one candidate over the other – which they don’t really need to this early in the campaign, admittedly. The question is, how long can they wait to choose?
Thank God for Dodd
Just up on Wired: A Bush Administration bill that would have given retroactive immunity to big telecoms that helped the administration conduct warrantless surveillance on domestic communications is now dead in the Senate till next year. It looked likely to pass until Senator Christopher Dodd threatened to filibuster if the immunity provision wasn’t removed; Senate leadership pulled the bill so they could get other work done before the Christmas recess.
Immunity for the telecoms would cut off the only available avenue to legally challenge warrantless wiretapping. It’s based on a ridiculous premise: that the telecoms should be excused for doing something illegal and unconstitutional because the government told them to do it! The essence of democracy is that citizens are responsible to know and obey the law on their own accord – not just do whatever government orders them to. What are we coming to?
Video of Dodd’s closing remarks (via O’Reilly Radar):
More thorough (but not so up-to-date) coverage by the NY Times.
“Hacking” Campaign Finance Law
On Wired.com: Ron Paul Supporters Hack Campaign Finance Law to Send Blimp Aloft
Would this “end run” around campaign finance law be “hacking” (which implies good-hearted mischief) if the Swift Boaters did it? I don’t think so. Regardless of what I think of Ron Paul (and he does seem like the sanest man in the Republican primary), this is kinda dodgy.
See also coverage from this week’s On the Media.
Get government out of the marrying business
History professor Stephanie Coontz proposes, in an op-ed piece in today’s NT Times, that the U.S. government should give up the business of officially sanctioning marriages:
Perhaps it’s time to revert to a much older marital tradition. Let churches decide which marriages they deem “licit.” But let couples — gay or straight — decide if they want the legal protections and obligations of a committed relationship [emphasis added].
This strikes me as a logical continuation of the principle established by the reformation-era Anabaptist movement. Used to be that the state (via state-sponsored churches) had a hand in baptisms, because they were a handy time to register newly born citizens for taxation and the draft. Then the Anabaptists came along and opposed infant baptism – and five hundred years later no one thinks it at all odd that baptism is a purely religious rite.
Hillary’s laugh: better that W’s
The New Yorker’s Hendrik Hertzberg takes on the nonsense about Hillary Clinton’s laugh, and makes a remarkably sensible point that even the Daily Show has missed:
Hillary’s laugh is unusually uninhibited for a politician—especially, perhaps, for a female politician. It is indeed a belly laugh, if not a “big belly” laugh, and it compares favorably with the incumbent Presidential laugh, a series of rapid “heh-hehs,” at once threatening and insipid, accompanied by an exaggerated, arrhythmic bouncing of head and shoulders in opposite directions. [emphasis added]