George Packer, who’s blogging now at The New Yorker website, has a post this week about Kentucky — Inez, Kentucky, specifically, the small town where Lyndon Johnson announced the War on Poverty more than 40 years ago and where John McCain made a campaign stop last week. Packer’s point is how Democrats can and cannot appeal to the working class and rural white voters we’ve been discussing so much for the last two months. But the background of the piece is just how readily many white Kentuckians admit that they simply won’t vote for a black man for president.
“I’ve talked to people–a woman who was chair of county elections last year, she said she wouldn’t vote for a black man,” J.K. Patrick told Packer. And he won’t either. “I really don’t want an African-American as President … I thought about it. I think he would put too many minorities in positions over the white race. That’s my opinion. After 1964, you saw what the South did … There’s a lot of white people that just wouldn’t vote for a colored person. Especially older people.”
With frankness like this, it was probably no accident that it was Kentucky Rep. Geoff Davis (R-KY) who got in trouble two weeks ago for calling Obama “that boy” at a GOP party dinner in his home district — a comment for which he later apologized.
And the pattern Packer is as observable statistically as it is anecdotally, where I’ve been noting it for a month or more. SurveyUSA has conducted three polls of the primary race in Kentucky over the last month. In each Hillary Clinton beats Obama by roughly a 2-1 margin. That in itself I do not think tells us that much on the topic of racialized voting. Each candidate has states where they greatly outpoll the other, though that is a steep margin. Where the contrast becomes stark is in the match ups against McCain.
Again, we need to rely exclusively on polls from SurveyUSA. Each sounding shows Clinton losing to John McCain. That’s not surprising since Kentucky is a strongly Republican state, though in mid-April, the most recent poll, she was in a statistical tie with him — 48%-46%. But while Clinton is competitive, McCain beats Obama by a 2 to 1 margins — 63% to 29% in the poll taken last week. I don’t know any state where either Democrat runs that much better than the other. And I think the conclusion that race is the primary factor in the difference is inescapable.
Kentucky itself isn’t that big a deal since it will almost certainly go Republican in November. But it will be a big win for Clinton later this month. And you only need to look at a map to see that Kentucky makes up the southern border of Ohio and Indiana.
Under the theory that if you give an inch Congress takes a mile, the Bush Administration cedes a nanometer on releasing DOJ legal memos on torture.
Jonathan Chait, on Karl Rove’s short memory.
I really don’t get what it is with the Clinton campaign sometimes. Getting Joe Andrew’s super-delegate endorsement is a minor coup for the Obama campaign. It certainly gives them some help in Indiana. But he’s hardly a household name. So why is it that when Howard Wolfson gets asked about Andrew’s switching his endorsement from Clinton to Obama on MSNBC, he questions whether Andrews is really from Indiana.
Why go there?
Just take it on the chin and move on.
It’s not that big of an endorsement. And why don’t these guys realize that this kind of dingbat sniveling does far more damage than it gains. I really think these kinds of Penn-esque jibes have done far more damage to Sen. Clinton than these folks realize.
(ed.note: I’m sure I’ll hear from Obama supporters on this one. My point is not to diminish Andrew’s significance. And this certainly isn’t a dig on him. What I’m saying is that this isn’t like Obama being endorsed by someone like Gore where perhaps you’d think the Hillary team was so flummoxed that they were grasping for something to say. It’s just the kind of thing where it’s difficult to understand why the public response can’t be, “Joe’s a great guy. It’s his decision. We’ve had three other big superdel endorsements in the last two days”, whatever.)
Late Update: A few of you have written in to say, ‘Well, obviously you don’t see how big a deal Andrew is. Otherwise they wouldn’t have reacted this way.’ Actually, no, that’s not it. The truth is that it doesn’t matter how big a deal he is because this sort of nonsense only makes him look bigger. It’s not a matter of him being a small-fry. It’s about the fact that in some situations talking trash — especially when the trash is transparent nonsense — just makes you look stupid. In itself, it’s not a felony in the press/communications law book. But it’s silly and counterproductive and, as I’ve said, has done them much more harm than they realize.
A pro-Obama union has ponied up $1.5 million for TV ads to begin softening up McCain in Ohio.
A few factoids have emerged in the last few days that shed new light on just what’s up with the remaining undeclared superdelegates. One was the claim of Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), an Obama supporter, that all the congressional superdelegates have actually already made up their minds. All that’s up in the air is when different representatives and senators are going to announce publicly.
Added to that is the fact that Sen. Obama routinely seems to be able to roll out solid superdelegate endorsements in the face of bad news for his campaign. There’ve been rumors or chatter for some time that the Obama campaign has a few dozen superdelegates basically on ice, ready to roll out as needed to juice momentum or change the headlines in the face of bad news. They deny it, for whatever that’s worth. And I’ve always found the theory a little difficult to completely credit since it’s dangerous to leave a endorsing superdelegate unannounced. They’re liable to go all wobbly on you at some point in the future if things don’t go well. But as I said above, stuff like Andrew’s announcement and the other reps Obama picked up earlier this week make me wonder.
But here’s one issue that we’ve been hearing about recently that sheds a little more light on the question: money. No, nothing nefarious. But if you’re out there running a competitive race yourself and you need to raise money (or think you’ll need to do so in the future) the endorsement game is a dicey business. By definition, when you endorse one or the other you piss off roughly half the Democratic party — or at least half the big funders, the people write and bundle the big checks. So that’s really not productive. And it’s a good reason to keep your powder dry.
With the parade of stuttering, parsing and forgetting witnesses that the Bush administration has produced, it can be easy to take such performances for granted. But we’ll never forget General Services Administration chief Lurita Doan. That’s because when it came to testifying before Congress, Doan was something special.
We count the ways in today’s episode of TPMtv…
High-res version at Veracifier.com.
The Clinton-McCain-proposed gas tax holiday is being panned by economists for any number of reasons, but this one may be the most persuasive:
Economists have a different take: They say the oil companies may end up the biggest beneficiaries, while the aid to families wouldn’t be enough to buy a $35 backpack.
The trouble with the plan, they say, is that oil prices are rising because of low supplies, and companies will continue to charge the average $3.60 a gallon and just pocket the money that would have gone to federal taxes.
“That’s $10 billion, and it’s going into the pockets of oil refiners,” said Leonard Burman of the Tax Policy Center in Washington. “The last time I checked, they didn’t need it.”
Supplies are “being cleared at the current price,” said Donald Parsons, an economics professor at George Washington University in Washington. “If you take away the tax, you’ll have the same number of consumers willing to buy the gas at the same total price.”
On one level this makes sense. If the market will bear $3.60/gal, then oil companies will seek to charge $3.60/gal. But doesn’t it also suggest a broken market? What the market will bear is only half the equation. In a functioning market, shouldn’t competition drive the price down to what it costs to produce a gallon of gas plus, ideally if you’re a producer, some profit? If the gas tax holiday were enacted, prices should settle at a level equal to the current price minus the excise tax, all else being equal.
I have a little familiarity with the retail gasoline business, and it is an extremely competitive business. So market dysfunction would have to be further up the pipeline. Is the gasoline wholesale market as resistant to competitive pressures as these economists suggest?
Late Update: A number of readers of responded with additional analysis, and the key point I didn’t mention is the inelasticity of supply, as explained by TPM Reader CS:
Is the gas market “broken” as you suggest? The short answer is no. You’re right that competition generally drives prices down, but that only works to the extent more product can be produced.
Where supplies are fixed — and oil/gas supplies, for all intents and purposes, are — it is the demand that determines price. One oil company could cut its gas prices, but it can’t sell anymore gas than it already is (because it already sells all the gas it has), so purchasers would have no choice but to get the rest of their gas from someone else. This leaves oil companies with no incentive for lowering prices. If I’m already selling out all my inventory, and I can’t make any more, lower prices cannot boost sales or take sales from someone else. All they can do is cut my profits.
Your model posits suppliers bidding against each other to sell gas. But with supplies fixed and limited, in effect what is happening is that buyers bid against each other to purchase gas.
Later Update: Some readers have chided me for a lack of knowledge of basic economics. So let me be clear: I wasn’t in anyway disputing the economists above, but rather noting that the dynamic they described spoke to a problem larger than merely the gas tax and whether you suspend it for time. Lack of supply, barriers to entry, and other non-competitive features of the market are what I meant by the market being “broken.” They all contribute to supply being fixed in the short-term (and arguably in the long term as well). They also set the conditions which make a gas tax holiday counterproductive.
Still Later Update: TPM Reader GC:
Please state Hillary’s position on the Gas Tax Holiday correctly. While McCain’s plan is a giveaway to big oil, Hillary’s plan imposes a “windfall profit” tax on oil companies to make up for the lost tax revenue. So Hillary’s plan breaks even. Instead of customers paying the tax, the oil companies pay the tax. The price of gas will stay the same.
But the bigger story is what a superior job Hillary did in neutralizing McCain’s announcement. Everyone knows this is just politics; this idea will never become law. So examine it on a political basis.
Imagine this issue came up in the general election and Obama is the Dem candidate. McCain and the Media echo chamber start asking the question, “Is McCain actually the campion of the little guy? Is Obama really an elitist who doesn’t understand the pain of poor folks?” Then Obama spends many news cycles “explaining” why it’s better to not cut the price of gas, it wouldn’t make much difference in the price anyway, this is just a gimmick,… You know the rule: If you are explaining, you are losing!
Clinton is focused on becoming the next president. Obama is overly concerned about being correct. Remember, this will NEVER become law. It is a political stunt by McCain and Hillary had the best counter punch.
Setting aside the political arguments GC makes, is there any reason to think that a windfall profits tax wouldn’t be passed on by the oil companies to consumers in prices at the pump? The fact that GC acknowledges pumps prices won’t change seems to concede the point.
Final Update: Let me bring this extended thread to a conclusion with this response from TPM Reader RS to my suggestion that the market is broken:
Actually, I would disagree on that interpretation. What exactly do you mean by a “broken market?” . . .
Barriers to entry often are viewed as something like patents or unfair competition or … However, the most common and most important barrier to entry is simply the size of the fixed costs and in a more general sense the shape of the cost curves. …
I would argue that the market is actually working as economists would argue that it’s supposed to under current conditions. That doesn’t mean that we’ll have cheap oil any time soon or that oil companies won’t have high profits, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the market is broken.
Another part of the story here is that there are a number of different albeit linked markets. You have the market for crude (which you could break down into different types if you wanted); then you have the refinery market; and finally you have the retail market. The worldwide increase in demand for crude is driving the price trend upward and I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon. …
There are major barriers to entry in this market that simply cannot be overcome. Those that come right to mind: ownership of the essential materials – e.g. oil in the ground – and the costs of getting it out. I don’t think this market is broken. It’s just that we don’t like the results.
Mark your calendar: It appears that Cheney’s Cheney — David Addington — has agreed to testify to the House Judiciary Committee next Tuesday, May 6.