Can Clinton Save The GOP?

Unfortunately, I have to agree with Andrew Sullivan (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/01/can-clinton-sav.html)on as to what Hillary as the Democrat nominee will mean for the GOP. She will unite the factions within the GOP like no one else. Moreover, should the GOP end up with McCain as its nominee, I suspect that he would beat her in November, 2008. I would be tempted to vote for McCain myself (I favored him in 2000 and he is a good friend of a mutual friend who spent 7 years as a POW in Vietnam) since I think he would usher in more change in the way government is conducted than would Hillary. This would be especially true if Obama supporters stay home out of disgust or and inability to vote for Hillary and bring in another 4-8 years of Clinton scandals redux. Here are highlights from a conservative blogger that Andrew correctly quotes:

Everyone, Republicans and Democrats alike, know why the GOP wants to face Hillary in November. It's not because they like the Clintons, but because the Clintons unite the Republican base like no other Democrat -- and perhaps like no other Republican. Hillary will star in thousands of mailers, television ads, and websites, all cajoling Republicans to open their wallets, organize, and get to the voting booth.

And -- it will work. Even in a year where the fractures among the Republican coalition have been painfully evident, everyone will unite to keep the Clintons out of the White House. While Obama may have won some moderate Republicans to his side just based on his personal appeal, none will endorse the Restoration. Fredheads, Log Cabins, evangelicals, small-L libertarians, and hawks will all find a truce to battle Hillary to the last vote.

If Democrats want real change (plus a better chance of winning in November, 2008), Hillary is not the one to win over independents and moderates. I am not saying that any of it is necessarily Hillary's fault - it's simply the reality.

Wednesday Male Beauty

France Best, USA Worst in Preventable Deaths

The Chimperator and many others will claim that the USA health care is the best in the world. For certain individuals it no doubt is the best. However, in a new study of preventable deaths, the USA ranked last out of 19 leading industrialized nations, as reported by Yahoo News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080108/hl_nm/deaths_rankings_dc). With over 45 million Americans without health insurance, this low ranking should not be a surprise since hospital emergency rooms and similar facilities that must treat life threatening emergency cases regardless of insurance do not render preventive care. Imagine how the Chimperator (who just recently vetoed an increase in health insurance coverage for childen) would express outrage and engage in all kinds of political posturing if over 100,000 Americans lost their lives to a terror attack. Also, where are the Christianists who want no abortions, yet support Bush and care little for living Americans (especially if they are minorities)? Here are some story highlights:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - France, Japan and Australia rated best and the United States worst in new rankings focusing on preventable deaths due to treatable conditions in 19 leading industrialized nations, researchers said on Tuesday.

If the U.S. health care system performed as well as those of those top three countries, there would be 101,000 fewer deaths in the United States per year, according to researchers writing in the journal Health Affairs. Researchers Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine tracked deaths that they deemed could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care, and ranked nations on how they did.

Nolte said the large number of Americans who lack any type of health insurance -- about 47 million people in a country of about 300 million, according to U.S. government estimates -- probably was a key factor in the poor showing of the United States compared to other industrialized nations in the study. "I wouldn't say it (the last-place ranking) is a condemnation, because I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access. But if you don't, I think that's the main problem, isn't it?" Nolte said in a telephone interview.

France did best -- with 64.8 deaths deemed preventable by timely and effective health care per 100,000 people, in the study period of 2002 and 2003. Japan had 71.2 and Australia had 71.3 such deaths per 100,000 people. The United States had 109.7 such deaths per 100,000 people, the researchers said. After the top three, Spain was fourth best, followed in order by Italy, Canada, Norway, the Netherlands, Sweden, Greece, Austria, Germany, Finland, New Zealand, Denmark, Britain, Ireland and Portugal, with the United States last.

Ballot Changes Cited in Vote's Discrepancy With Polls

ABC News is reporting (http://abcnews.go.com/PollingUnit/Decision2008/story?id=4107883&page=1) that the format of the New Hampshire ballot used in yesterday's primary election may be responsible for Barack Obama receiving less votes than the various polls suggested. While no one will know for certain, from my years working as a precinct captain, one should NOT underestimate the ability of voters to not understand lengthy ballots and as a result vote differently than intended going into the voting booth. Some years back when I ran for school board, the ballot had 25 names on it and there was widespread confusion on the part of some voters. If the Obama campaign did not have enough poll workers to make sure voters knew what ballot line his name was on, there may well be some substance to this story. Here are some highlights:

Without a doubt, a big source of the discrepancy between the pre-election surveys and the election outcome in New Hampshire is the order of candidates' names on the ballot and in the surveys. Our analysis of all recent primaries in New Hampshire showed that there was always a big primacy effect — big-name, big-vote-getting candidates got 3 percent or more votes more when listed first on the ballot than when listed last.

This year, the secretary of state changed the procedure so the names were alphabetical starting with a randomly selected letter, in all precincts. The randomly selected letter this year was Z.
As a result, Joe Biden was first on every ballot, Hillary Clinton was near the top of the list (and the first serious contender listed) and Barack Obama was close to last of the 21 candidates listed. Thus, I'll bet that Clinton got at least 3 percent more votes than Obama simply because she was listed close to the top.

More importantly, if New Hampshire had rotated name order in the voting booth as it has always done in the past, the race would probably have been too close to call without a recount and might even have been an Obama victory.

Adirondack Beauty

More Tuesday Male Beauty

Advocate Review of Barack Obama on LGBT Issues

The Advocate has an article that reviews the position of some of the presidential candidates (http://www.advocate.com/exclusive_detail_ektid51483.asp). Inasmuch as I was very harsh on Obama at the time of the McClurkin disaster, I thought it appropriate to post portions of the Advocate article where Obama responded to this. I recommend the article for information on the other candidates as well. Here are Obama highlights:

Sen. Obama made a telling comment at the very end of my interview with him last October. Dismayed over the level of attention the community gave to the McClurkin imbroglio, he said, “It is interesting to me and obviously speaks to the greater outreach that we have to do, that [my record on LGBT issues] isn’t a greater source of interest and pride on the part of the LGBT community.”

He seemed genuinely disheartened that people didn’t know more about his stance for full repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (Edwards also supports full repeal, while Clinton supports partial repeal), or the fact that he sponsored a gay nondiscrimination bill in the Illinois state legislature, or that he regularly addresses AIDS and homophobia in black and religious venues that are not particularly gay friendly.

When he spoke about HIV/AIDS to evangelical leader Rick Warren’s congregation at Saddleback Church in California, Obama said, “Like no other illness, AIDS tests our ability to put ourselves in someone else's shoes – to empathize with the plight of our fellow man. While most would agree that the AIDS orphan or the transfusion victim or the wronged wife contracted the disease through no fault of their own, it has too often been easy for some to point to the unfaithful husband or the promiscuous youth or the gay man and say ‘This is your fault. You have sinned.’ I don't think that's a satisfactory response. My faith reminds me that we all are sinners.”

This is perfectly consistent with his message of bridging communities gay and straight, red and blue, black and white. But a big part of why many gays and lesbians don’t know Obama’s record here is because it wasn’t readily available. It required digging and a beat reporter covering his campaign at the national level – resources that are the province of mainstream magazines and big-city dailies. This is where a publication like The Advocate, viewed by many as essentially mainstream media, doesn’t actually have the same reporting capacity as those other outlets. Instead, the LGBT community and gay journalists were left to put together information piecemeal from sightings by bloggers at campaign events and the slow trickle of gay mentions that flow from the straight press.

Obama was very accessible to the LGBT press during his eight years in the Illinois state legislature. “He always was open, certainly with our newspaper,” says Gary Barlow, editor of one of Chicago’s gay weeklies, the Chicago Free Press. “He didn’t avoid phone calls and stuff like that. We talked on occasion. When we called, he responded. I think that says something about a person.” Barlow adds that Obama's campaign has paid close attention to the newspaper and been communicative throughout the race.

Though the Illinois Human Rights Act did not pass until 2005, when Obama had already graduated to the U.S. Senate, he did sponsor a bill to outlaw workplace discrimination that included both sexual orientation and gender identity while he was still a state senator. Barlow says Obama also lobbied other legislators to vote for the pro-gay bills being considered. “When we’re talking about an African-American legislator in the state legislature, to have someone of his stature lobbying his peers was important,” says Barlow.

Home Sales Sink Again, Outlook Darkens

At times over the last few months I have felt like a Cassandra when it comes to my view of the residential real estate market - the turbine that powers so much of the domestic economy. Sadly, my views appear to have been on point and the gloomy predictions are becoming reality based on this new CNNMoney.com story (http://money.cnn.com/2008/01/08/news/economy/home_sales/index.htm?postversion=2008010810cnn?=yes). The lower housing goes, the lower the economy will go and the wider the economic damage will spread. We can look forward to real estate related businesses cutting staff and re-entrenching as much as possible in the face of plummeting revenues. Here are some story highlights:

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Contracts to sell existing homes fell in November and there could be darker days ahead for home values, which are expected to post their biggest decline on record this quarter as a full-year rebound in prices now isn't expected until 2009, according to an industry trade group. The Realtors also cut its existing home price estimate for the current quarter to a 5.3 percent year-over-year decline, which would mean the current period would see the steepest drop in that price measure on record.

Only a month ago the group's estimate was for only a 2.5 percent drop in prices in the first quarter. The group's forecast released Tuesday also no longer sees even a modest rebound in existing home prices this year, as it had previously forecast, and pushed back the estimate of a full-year uptick in prices to 2009.

The November reading is even worse than the 89.8 reading recorded in September 2001, the month when terrorist attacks shook buyer confidence. That reading had been the weakest month on record before the current housing downturn. An index reading of 100 represents the level of sales at the start of 2001, when the index was started.

Tuesday Male Beauty

A List of Reasons for Hillary's Travails

Howard Fineman at MSNBC/Newsweek, who I generally like, has an article (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22539570/)that looks at the problems with Hillary Clinton's campaign. While events and circumstances can change, the list is wort considering. The first relates to what I said in my previous post for today. Here are highlights from Fineman's list:

Hiring the topmost insiders Hillary underestimated the hunger for change outside the Beltway. Nothing proved that more than the professionals she chose to run her campaign. They were brilliant, but had grown wealthy in their work and perhaps had lost a fingertip feel for the urgency and everyday fear that grips most of middle-class America these days.

Running on experience The fact is, she doesn’t really have that much experience that is truly hands-on as an official. It was too easy for her opponents to question its validity.

Ignoring Obama In some ways, Obama isn’t quite the outsider and systematic change agent that he claims to be. Yes he is an African-American who now calls the South Side of Chicago home – and that will always make him an outsider to some extent. In many other ways, however, he is just a new wave of what Bill and Hillary were years ago – an on-the-make, Ivy League-educated, Democratic lawyer eager to seize power in Washington. If Hillary was going to say that, she needed to have done it months ago. She did not.

Waiting too long to get specific The Clintonistas held a conference call yesterday to point out some relevant things: that Obama’s New Hampshire co-chair was a drug-company lobbyist; that the senator had vehemently opposed the Iraq war but then voted repeatedly to fund it; that he had said he wanted to scrap the Patriot Act and start over, but then voted for it. As I listened to the conference call, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why the Clinton folks didn’t highlight these and other items much earlier. By the time they did so, it was too late. You can’t do things by half in politics; if you are going to go after an opponent you have to do it with gusto.

Dealing with an antagonistic media Hillary and her inner circle come by their loathing of the media honestly, I suppose. After all, she has spent much of her career waiting for journalistic shoes to drop. But that is no reason to have adopted a distant, hermetically-sealed media strategy for the campaign. It was counterproductively control-freakish. She knew she was going to be treated poorly by the national media – and in many ways she has been – but the answer was not to make that a self-fulfilling prophesy. As others have said many times, she can be utterly charming and convincing in small groups. Why didn’t she at least try a charm offensive at some point?

The Iran vote Whoever advised Hillary to try to burnish her commander-in-chief credentials by voting to declare the Iranian Army a terrorist organization did her a deep disservice. It cost her dearly, by giving Obama a way to outflank her despite his votes for funding the war in Iraq. The fact that Senators Joe Biden and Chris Dodd voted against it made her vote all the more vivid, and damaging.

The kickoff slogan “I’m in it to win it,” in retrospect, said way too much about the mentality of the campaign. It didn’t seem to be about the American people, but about her and her coterie of well-placed acolytes inside the Beltway.

Focusing on women Senior strategist Mark Penn bragged repeatedly months ago about how Hillary had a solid, unassailable base among women – and a core that, if all else failed, would guarantee her the nomination. Three things wrong with that. For one, it made her sound like a for-women-only crusader (no way to attract men). Second, it violated the strategist principle used shrewdly by another top aide, Mandy Grunwald, in designing Hillary’s first run for the Senate in New York in 2000. In that race, Hillary focused on her weakest spot, upstate New York, and turned it into a positive. She should have done the same thing demographically, as opposed to geographically, this time around. Third is perhaps the result of the other two – she didn’t even win the female vote in Iowa.

Bill Having seen him on the trail (not to mention on “Charlie Rose,”) I think the former president is a net positive for his wife. It’s not his fault that no one else in the campaign had tried aggressively to call Obama to account. He had to do it. He also summarized her resume better than she herself did. But the visibility of her husband allowed Obama and Edwards to more easily outflank her on the “change” issue. It seems that the country really has had enough after 28 years of Bushes and Clintons.