globalization = Holocaust

In the overkill of the week, Hillary Clinton applied Martin Niemöller's poem about the Holocaust to jobs lost to trade:

They came for the steel companies and nobody said anything. They came for the auto companies and nobody said anything. They came for the office companies, people who did white-collar service jobs, and no one said anything. And they came for the professional jobs that could be outsourced, and nobody said anything.

mind the gap

In New Jersey, a state that has not voted Republican since Reagan was in the White House, today Rasmussen polling reports that McCain leads Clinton by 3% and Obama by 1%.

But of particular note is that fact that, among men only, McCain would lead Clinton by 29%. Among women only, Clinton leads by 21%.

That's a full 50 point gender gap.

it ain't over til it's over

The Oba-maniacs calling for Clinton to quit should dial it down.

First of all, Rasmussen polling has Hillary leading Obama amongst Democats. Gallup has her up by a full 7 points. If it was presumptuous for Hillary to offer Obama the #2 position (veep) while he was running #1, it is even more presumptuous to call on Hillary to walk away with nothing when she is running #1.

Secondly, Rasmussen also has Hillary doing better against McCain than Obama amongst Americans in general. McCain is 7 points up on Hillary and 9 points up on Obama. CNN and Gallup polls also have Hillary doing better than Obama vs McCain. You additionally have to consider the Electoral College here. Remember how Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the 2000 election to GWB? The distribution of Obama's support is more problematic for Dems than Clinton's.

PENNSYLVANIA GOV. RENDELL [on Tim Russert's Meet the Press]: ... we decide the presidency not by a popular vote, we decide it by the electoral vote. And the traditional role of the superdelegates is to determine who's going to be our strongest candidate. Tim, you and I have been doing this for a long time, as Tom has, and we know the big four in any presidential election recently are Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida and Michigan. ... Look, it's great that Barack Obama is doing wonderfully well in Wyoming and Utah and, and places like that, but there's no chance we're going to carry those states. ... We've got to win three of the big four [and] Hillary Clinton's the strongest candidate to do that.

Rasmussen currently has McCain leading in all four, albeit by a statistically insignificant margin in Pennsylvania and Michigan.

To really make the point here, I could cite the Clinton campaign's statistics, but I would instead ask you to check this out. If the source's methodology is sound, as of late last week, Clinton is running AHEAD of John McCain on the College 294 to 231. Barack Obama is running BEHIND John McCain 238 to 288. These are not small numbers. In Pennsylvania, SurveyUSA has McCain leading Obama 47% to 42% while trailing Clinton 47% to 46%. Earlier this month Rasmussen said "In New Jersey, Hillary Clinton holds a double-digit advantage over John McCain... However, if Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee, the race in New Jersey will begin as a toss-up." On March 20 SurveyUSA released a poll showing Obama merely TIED with McCain in Massachusetts of all places. Rasmussen essentially agrees that with Obama as the nominee, Massachusetts could come into play for McCain ("Massachusetts: Clinton Leads McCain by 19, Obama Leads by 7"). 7 points would probably still be too much, but McCain could nominate Romney as his running mate. SurveyUSA's March 19 Ohio poll has Clinton over McCain 50% to 44% and McCain over Obama 50% to 43%. As Michael Barone notes:

In southeast Ohio, settled originally by Virginians and still Southern-accented today, [in the March 4 primary] Clinton carried all-white counties with 70% to 80% of the vote—more than she was carrying nearly all-white counties in central Texas. That raises doubts that Obama could run well in these counties, which provided critical votes in Bill Clinton's wins in Ohio in the 1990s and Jimmy Carter's narrow win there in 1976.

I don't doubt that Obama does better in the (non-Florida) South (today Rasmussen's polling said Obama would shrink a 16 point McCain lead over Clinton in North Carolina to 9 points over Obama), but a closer loss is still a loss. The African American voters who are breaking 90%+ for Obama are not the swing voters who will decide the general election.

Thirdly, why do the superdelegates get a vote if they are supposed to simply cast for whoever has more elected delegates? Presumably these superdelegates exist because they bring something of value to the table. If so, they should use that something. As of March 22, http://demconwatch.blogspot.com/ has it at a perfect tie, 1688 delegates each, when Michigan and Florida are included. While the February votes might have been a valid expression of sentiment when they were cast, they lose their authority as an expression of the popular will as they age. It is more than 200 days between between Super Tuesday and the Convention. If I were an undeclared superdelegate, I would continue to keep my power dry.

Obama could potentially be "swiftboated". Hillary cannot; she's simply been in the public eye for too long. Today's Charlotte Observer calls North Carolina "unexpectedly tight": the most recent poll in NC has Obama leading Clinton by a single percentage point. Older polls have Hillary within 4 to 8 points. A John Edwards endorsement would presumably vault Hillary into the lead in that state. If Obama should lose in NC on May 6 after getting blasted in Pennsylvania on April 22, expect to start hearing calls for Obama to quit!

Hillary vs Obama

A telling incident here was a debate in January where Hillary was asked about her vote for the Iraq war. If you're a Hillary supporter, her answer was that public policy is not as black as white as the hopers would like it to be. As someone who has worked inside the machinery of government and seen how complex issues like income trust taxation are demagogued in the public media debate, it's an answer I can appreciate. But there was no getting away from the fact that Obama supporters would have seen her response as lawyerly.

What gets me is that Hillary was not self-conscious enough to realize that to speak to Obama leaners she needed to drop her usual response and just state, clearly and without qualification, that she made a mistake and she regrets her decision. It's true that Hillary knows more than Obama. But I have to question her wisdom when she reinforces the popular stereotype of herself.

But all of this sort of analysis should be soundly trumped by whoever is going to be better at policy. The press is interested in what sells, and as a general rule policy doesn't sell. What sells is scandal, hence "NAFTA-gate". "NAFTA-gate" is of real interest, however, because of what it says about who Obama has appointed to advise him. This so-called "-gate" follows from what Obama advisor Austan Goolsbee told the Canadian Consul General in Chicago. Who is Austan Goolsbee?

On Jan 24 at the New America Foundation in DC the 2008 campaign advisors discussed their visions for the US economy. Participants were

Austan Goolsbee (for Obama)
Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business

Leo Hindery (for Edwards)
Managing Director, InterMedia Partners, L.P.

Kevin Hassett (for McCain)
Director of Economic Policy Studies and Resident Scholar, American Enterprise Institute

Gary Gensler (for Clinton)
Former Under Secretary of the Treasury for Domestic Finance
Former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Financial Markets

Notice who is working for whom here: Obama's got a tenured academic from one of America's most prestigious MBA programs, Edwards' has a hedge fund manager who likely shares with Edwards the attribute of being so filthy rich he can easily afford to pay higher taxes, McCain has a guy from what the charitable would call a think tank and the uncharitable would call a right wing astroturf organization, while Clinton has someone with a resume closest to my own (work in the Financial Markets group of the US equivalent to our Department of Finance), although when you consider that he made great gobs of money working for Goldman Sachs, you might suggest greater parallels with the extremely accomplished Mark Carney. In any case, this who's who is itself is quite revealing. Of these four, the academic is the least likely to politically savvy. And, indeed, let's look at what Goolsbee said:

I'm a University of Chicago economist and no one is ever going to be more in favor of open markets and free trade than an economist...

No less a conservative luminary than George Will saluted Goolsbee's "nuanced understanding" of traditional Democratic issues like globalization and income inequality and concluded that he "seems to be the sort of fellow--amiable, empirical, and reasonable--you would want at the elbow of a Democratic president, if such there must be."

Now is it any surprise that Goolsbee is not going to be inclined to tell the Canadians that if his man becomes President free trade will be threatened? If Obama was seriously opposed to NAFTA, he would have never hired someone like Goolsbee in the first place. And that's the real story here.

True, Goolsbee was not as clearly free trade as McCain's man. But of note is that it was Hillary's man, Gensler, who tried to insist on "smart trade" (to which McCain's man responded, rightly, that "you need to be very very careful allowing thoughts like smart trade to leak in, because there's so many politically important interests that are opposed to free trade").

But there's more: Goolsbee shows a remarkable even-handedness when he acknowledges the work of Lawrence Lindsey and Martin Feldstein with respect to progressive taxation. In a Slate column, Goolsbee says he is a "free market type" and even goes on to argue that the Canadian health care model should not be applied in the USA! Obama has two other economic advisors, David Cutler and Jeffrey Liebman, both of whom are Harvard academics.

This has led to some Obama opposition from the left. The Nation says "Obama's disappointing foreclosure plan stems from the centrist politics of his three chief economic advisers" and a variety of lefty pundits have taken umbrage at the fact Obama's campaign has butted heads with their favourite economist, Paul Krugman ("All my criticisms of Obama have been from a progressive direction" - Krugman on Feb 12).

The bottom line? Clinton may be more knowledgeable about policy issues herself but Obama's advisors are superior. One of Clinton advisor Gensler's claims to fame is advisor to Senator Paul Sarbanes, and it is now broadly recognized that the Sarbanes - Oxley Act is a major reason why London is eclipsing New York as the world's financial centre (in fairness, McCain's man Kevin Hassett doesn't look good either after having co-authored Dow 36000). Furthermore, as someone with some exposure to all three of Treasury / Finance Departments, investing banking / Bay St, and academics, it's my opinion that the academics are the least likely to spin.