Gridiron Politics

Two interesting news items I read today that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. First: In the fairly-certain event that Obama is our next president, Sarah Palin will not simply disappear. She will, instead, remain a standard bearer for the hard right crowd and a possible candidate for 2012. Don’t believe me? Explain this quote, then, as Palin dissect’s McCain’s anti-Obama robocalls:

“If I called all the shots, and if I could wave a magic wand, I would be sitting at a kitchen table with more and more Americans, talking to them about our plan to get the economy back on track and winning the war and not having to rely on the old conventional ways of campaigning that includes those robocalls and includes spending so much money on the television ads that, I think, is kind of draining out there in terms of Americans’ attention span. They get a bit irritated with just being inundated…”

This isn’t an isolated incident, either. Observe Palin’s reaction two weeks ago when the McCain camp pulled its campaign staff out of Michigan [polls released a few days later showed up to a 15 point gap between Obama and McCain.” Via Fox News:

Palin said the decision to pull out of Michigan, which was announced Thursday, was “not a surprise” to her since polls show McCain slipping in the state. But Palin said that when she read the news, she “fired off a quick e-mail and said, ‘Oh come on, do we have to?’”

“Todd and I, we’d be happy to get to Michigan … I wanna get back to Michigan and I want to try.”

It’s unclear whether the McCain campaign will heed Palin’s request.

Now there are certainly alternate explanations to Palin’s comments. Maybe she’s actually been authorized by the McCain camp to speak off-the-cuff, and give a down-to-earth perspective while the campaign makes the hard decisions. Think of it as a “gee, I’d love to come over to your house Billy, but dad, you know how he is, I guess I just can’t do it.” More likely, however, Palin is creating distance between herself and McCain, giving her an exit strategy in November to blame McCain for the loss. If only he’d listened to Palin, he’d be in the White House, you betcha!

In other news, plants are poised to take over the world. Via Andrew Sullivan, Japanese techno-botanists have created a blogging houseplant. Really. The plant blogs in Japanese, obviously, so check out this site here for an explanation. Then, to see the plant in all its glory, go to http://plant.bowls-cafe.jp/. Hopefully the plant will start blogging in English soon, and maybe set up its own Twitter feed so I can skip all the boring chlorophyll stuff and figure out who he’s picking to win the presidential race.

Well, I’m happy to say the country has suffered through its final presidential debate this year, which means all those poor people chained to a desk and forced to twist dials up and down can finally return to their homes.

I think both candidates did well in the final debate. McCain was at his strongest when he flatly stated he wasn’t George Bush. I thought his anti-abortion content was strong, too. Obama’s best moments came when he strongly refuted McCain’s character attacks, and when he detailed his health care plan. Most non-partisan bloggers seem to think Obama ran away with it, and the aforementioned focus groups definitely favored Obama by 60 to 35 type margins. It was McCain’s best performance so far, but on balance Obama probably was a bit stronger, and with his lead in the polls all he really had to do was play prevent and hope McCain wouldn’t make it to the end zone.

There’s been talk of ACORN the evil vote-fraud monster as of late. If you haven’t heard, ACORN, a community organization who enjoys favored-child status with mainstream Democratic groups, pays people to get voter registrations. Sometimes, the people they pay make up names, like Mickey Mouse, because they’re getting paid either way and it’s hard to verify all the voters they register. This is nothing new to Oregon, where the law used to allow people to get paid for collecting signatures for ballot measure petitions. Then they couldn’t get paid, the courts said, then they could, then they couldn’t and I lost interest in the whole thing. The thing about fake registrations, though, is who does it really harm? The poor election workers who have to process extra registrations, maybe, but who else? If you register Mickey Mouse to vote, how do you actually plan to get him to vote? Are you going to pay someone to wear a Mickey costume and go down to county elections? Does anyone honestly believe that the few people turning in fraudulent registrations actually bother to go through with voting multiple times and risking federal or state jail time?

Real voter fraud, on the other hand, usually occurs when candidates actually pay people for voting one way or the other. Per Rick Hasen, law professor and election-law poobah, here’s an example of voter fraud from 1999, back before the Y2K bug destroyed us all.

Highlight: Incredibly, each of the two camps–McCranie and Mullis-actually set up tables inside the courthouse at opposite ends of the hall, where supporters on both sides openly bid against each other to buy absentee votes. At trial, a Dodge County magistrate described the rowdy courthouse atmosphere during the absentee voting period as “a successful flea market.” (R3-446). One of the vote buyers in the Mullis camp also testified that the open bidding for votes was “[l]ike an auction.” Vote buyers for both sides paid the voter $20 to $40 after the voter cast his or her absentee ballot. Sometimes, the cash payment occurred in the courthouse bathroom. More frequently, the voters received their payment while the “haulers” drove them home after they voted. McCranie’s haulers generally drove the absentee voters to the courthouse to see Bryant Williams (”Williams”) whose primary role was to physically mark the voters’ absentee ballots for McCranie and Jones, no matter what the voters’ preferences were. Williams was not a county employee but a volunteer campaign worker for McCranie. Williams’ wife, however, was McCranie’s clerk at the Dodge County Courthouse. Approximately 40 absentee voters also testified at trial that they were paid by one side or the other to vote for either Mullis and Jones or McCranie and Jones.

We’ve come a long way from 1999. Now, instead of making secret voting payments in bathrooms, we follow in the footsteps of the great Larry Craig and make secret advances toward undercover police officers.

Welcome to the 2008 season for college football! I can’t wait to watch games this year, and, as usual, I’ll make a series of wildly inaccurate guesses of how I might bet these games if I lived in Nevada, where sportsbetting is legal. A reminder of terms: the line is + or -. If I pick a team that’s + 5, for instance, that means that if I actually drove down to Las Vegas and put 10 bucks on that team, I would win that bet if the team won, or if the team lost by fewer than 5 points. If I pick a team that’s -5, that means that I win my bet if the team wins the game by more than 5 points, otherwise I lose the bet. If my favored team wins by exactly 5 points, or my underdog loses by exactly 5 points, it’s a tie and the bet is canceled. Sometimes I’ll speculate about a moneyline bet. This is a bet that simply picks one team to win, no matter how good or bad they are compared to their opponent. A moneyline of +400 means that if I bet $10 on that team, if they win I am paid $40 on my bet. A moneyline of -400 means that I must risk $40 to win $10. Next to the bets, I will list how confident I am by rating the number of units I would wager on the game, if I were able to place such a wager. Make sense? Now to the games.

Please note: Games I would hold off this week: Washington @ Oregon and Oklahoma State @ Washington State. The spread on Oregon is around 13, and I think that’s too many points for a team whose quarterback was just injured. Plus it’s a rivalry game and you never know how those will turn out. I’d stay away from the Cowboys because they’re playing in Pullman, which is a really unfriendly place for visiting teams. And Wazzu might be bad, but they can be unpredictable. Obviously if I had to bet it I’d take OSU but I think it’s smarter simply to stay away.

Well, the New York Times makes the blog two posts in a row! This time, the Grey Lady ran an op-ed from Geraldine A. Ferraro on why superdelegates know what’s best for the Democratic party. You might ask yourself, ‘Who is this woman and why do I care?’ Oh, well she was the Democratic vice-presidential candidate in 1984, playing sidekick to Walter Mondale as the two offered themselves as sacrificial lambs to the Reagan juggernaut. You might think with her experience losing to a moderate Republican, she would be happy to note that voters have turned out in the primaries this year in record numbers. You would think she would be happy that independents and even some Republicans are casting their primary vote for a Democratic candidate.

Nope. She’d rather keep the Democratic party as an insular group of labor unions, feminists and activists instead of broadening the tent and giving a voice to people who are dissastisfied with the dishonesty and hubris of the Republican party. Ms. Ferraro, I changed my registration to Democrat this year after being a Republican since I turned 18. But apparently, I’m not good enough for your party. Luckily, the superdelegates will be able to take care of my vote. Here are some choice excerpts from her article:

… [T]he delegate totals from primaries and caucuses do not necessarily reflect the will of rank-and-file Democrats. Most Democrats have not been heard from at the polls. We have all been impressed by the turnout for this year’s primaries — clearly both candidates have excited and engaged the party’s membership — but, even so, turnout for primaries and caucuses is notoriously low. It would be shocking if 30 percent of registered Democrats have participated. If that is the case, we could end up with a nominee who has been actively supported by, at most, 15 percent of registered Democrats. That’s hardly a grassroots mandate.

Translation: While Obama is on a 11-0 winning streak, remember that some states that favor Hillary haven’t voted yet (can you tell she’s a Hillary supporter?) Oh, and despite incredible turnouts for state primaries this year, the people who have voted are unable to create a “grassroots mandate” because the poor people who didn’t bother to participate in the process are now disenfranchised. We continue …

More important, although many states like New York have closed primaries in which only enrolled Democrats are allowed to vote, in many other states Republicans and independents can make the difference by voting in Democratic primaries or caucuses. In the Democratic primary in South Carolina, tens of thousands of Republicans and independents no doubt voted, many of them for Mr. Obama. The same rules prevail at the Iowa caucuses, in which Mr. Obama also triumphed. He won his delegates fair and square, but those delegates represent the wishes not only of grassroots Democrats, but also Republicans and independents. If rank-and-file Democrats should decide who the party’s nominee is, each state should pass a rule allowing only people who have been registered in the Democratic Party for a given time — not nonmembers or day-of registrants — to vote for the party’s nominee.

So Ferraro really believes that a candidate is stronger if you only allow people registered in your party to vote for them. Here’s a question for you: How can you possibly counter partisan politics and unite a country when your only measure of support until the day of the election is the votes of people who are voting for anyone with “Democrat” by their name, no matter how weak a candidate or whatever qualities he or she may have as an actual leader. I understand you don’t want your party’s agenda hijacked by an outsider; but even if you select a candidate through open primaries (like I wish Oregon did), a Democrat-In-Name-Only will never be selected in a Democratic primary because the voters themselves won’t select such a candidate.

Perhaps because I have endorsed Mrs. Clinton, I have noticed that most of the people complaining about the influence of the superdelegates are supporters of Mr. Obama. I can’t help thinking that their problem with the superdelegates may not be that they’re “unrepresentative,” but rather that they are perceived as disproportionately likely to support Mrs. Clinton. And I am watching, with great disappointment, people whom I respect in the Congress who endorsed Hillary Clinton — I assume because she was the leader they felt could best represent the party and lead the country — now switching to Barack Obama with the excuse that their constituents have spoken. I may be a cynic, but I’m a fairly knowledgeable political cynic. If Mr. Obama wins the nomination, those members are undoubtedly concerned that they would be inviting a primary challenge in their next re-election campaign by failing to support his candidacy.

Ferraro’s problem here is she thinks elected officials (who comprise the majority of the 796 superdelegates) are better than the Democratic voters that elected them. Truly, she speaks wisdom: It would be a terrible thing for a Congressman to be voted out of office for overriding the wishes of his constituents, wouldn’t it?

But if they are actually upset over the diminished clout of rank-and-file Democrats in the presidential nominating process, then I would love to see them agitating to force the party to seat the delegates elected by the voters in Florida and Michigan. In those two states, the votes of thousands of rank-and-file party members will not be counted because their states voted on dates earlier than those authorized by the national party. Because both states went strongly for Mrs. Clinton, standing up for the voices of grassroots Democrats in Florida and Michigan would prove the integrity of the superdelegate-bashers. The people of those states surely don’t deserve to be disenfranchised simply because the leaders of their state parties brought them to the polls on a day that had not been endorsed by the leaders of our national party — a slight the voters might not easily forget in November.

Nice rhetorical finish. Remember in the last paragraph, Ferraro was talking about the dilemma of elected officials when they like one candidate but their constituents like a different one. If they REALLY want to represent their constituents, she says, they would fight to get Florida and Michigan delegates seated. What? Excuse me? So let’s say I’m a congressman from Georgia. It’s my job to make sure that Florida and Michigan get a full say in the process, even though their states broke party rules and Obama wasn’t even on the BALLOT in either state? Certainly, her suggestion is the epitome of democracy in action. Now, I agree, Florida and Michigan delegates SHOULD be seated … once those states actually hold a fair election where both candidates play by the rules. Have each state hold a caucus, or even a new election, and make it a fair contest. But don’t go whining in the New York Times that 1) Primary voters don’t represent the party, 2) Congresspersons are being held hostage by their constituents, 3) Make Florida and Michigan count by breaking the rules.

It is a great mercy that Geraldine Ferraro never got a chance to serve a heartbeat away from the presidency. And with a little luck, the party elite she claims to represent won’t get a chance to ignore the voters and prop up Clinton as the Democratic nominee.