Lincoln Mitchell

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This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell

Posted in: US Politics

This Was Never Going to Be Easy →

During the last week or so it seems like the frustration with Obama's inability to expand his lead in the national polls has spread to pro-Obama quarters where supporters are getting nervous as the election approaches. The election is far from over; and it would be surprising if there are many people left who still think Obama has this wrapped up. However, the news is not all bad. Obama, while unable to move decisively ahead, still leads in most national polls, while the state level data still indicates that Obama will likely win the election.

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McCain's Most Absurd Week Yet →

In the last week the McCain camp has run a strange add attacking Obama for being a celebrity and linking him to the likes of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, accused Obama "playing the race card from the bottom of the deck," suggesting that Obama is both a racist and a cheater, because the Democratic nominee suggested, in rather innocent language, that the Republican Party might make try to scare voters away from voting for a Black man, and now run an even stranger advertisement that, as far as I can see, uses faux religious imagery to suggest that Obama believes himself to be some kind of religious figure or savior.

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Will Obama's Trip Have an Impact

The presidential campaign has begun to fall into a recognizable pattern. Every week, Obama seems to begin to appear more presidential and generate good news for his campaign, while McCain seems less able to handle the task of running for president. Each week he seems to make a few more gaffes, get a few more details wrong and generally fail to generate much excitement. Yet, the poll numbers remain stubbornly close. The newest national polls continue to show this race as almost a dead heat while statewide polls show Obama and McCain splitting the likely battleground states. The good news last week for McCain was that he was pulling ahead in Ohio and in a dead heat with Obama in Florida, while Obama had slight leads in key states such as Virginia, New Hampshire and Colorado. Obama is still the favorite but the poll numbers seem to be moving a lot more slowly than the campaign narrative.

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Take Me Out to the Vice Presidential Nomination →

I try not to be a myopic New Yorker who sees the world entirely through the lens of New York City, but when I saw Rudy Giuliani and John McCain together at Yankee Stadium on Sunday, it occurred to me that McCain could make a lot worse choices for running mate than our former mayor. Giuliani, is a compelling mixture of positives and negatives and would be a risky pick as vice-president. However, lost in all the obvious negatives is that there is a potentially very large upside to putting Giuliani on the ticket.

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Not Getting Late Early Enough →

This presidential election is beginning to have a strange feel to it. All the big picture signals, the weak economy, frustration with the war in Iraq, dissatisfaction with President Bush and Democratic strength in congressional contests across the country indicate that Barack Obama should be able to win, if not in a landslide, than at least decisively.

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Three Mistakes the Democrats Shouldn't Make Again →

In a highly contested political campaign, four months can seem like a lifetime, or it can seem like just a brief moment. Usually it feels like both. There are a lot of things which could happen over which Obama and the Democrats have little control. McCain could suddenly get back some of his old magic and become a strong candidate again. An event could serve as a rallying point for conservative forces who seem unexcited about this year's campaign. Voters could begin to view the surge and the efforts in Iraq as successful and support McCain's argument that somehow this makes him the candidate best able to finish the job in Iraq. While these are all things that are largely out of the control of Obama's campaign, the campaign can make its work a lot easier by learning from, and not repeating, mistakes from their party's very recent past.

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Are They Experienced? →

The question of how we define foreign policy experience, however, is worth examining a little more closely. Currently foreign policy is experience is defined far too narrowly with credit being awarded for only a few conventional accomplishments. Understanding how the US government makes decisions about foreign policy and having detailed knowledge about the perspectives of people outside the US are both valuable components of foreign policy experience, but the former is usually the criteria used for measuring foreign policy experience. The latter, however, for the most part, cannot be gained once somebody is elected to the senate or holds high office in the American government. Congressional delegations, for example, can be used by participants to gain a deeper understanding of a foreign policy issue, or how the leadership of a particular government thinks, but they are not the same as spending time working or living in a foreign country. This kind of experience is best gained before a candidate becomes a famous public figure.

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Charlie Black: Not Just Offensive, but Wrong →

Recent comments by John McCain's advisor Charlie Black regarding the potential impact of future terrorist attacks on McCain's presidential campaign, "Certainly it would be a big advantage to him," are not just offensive and inappropriate, but indicate that the McCain campaign is increasingly out of touch with how American voters are feeling this year. Black's comments rested on the notion that somehow Americans, if they feel threatened, will naturally turn to the crusty old Republican veteran rather than the untested, liberal, anti-war Democrat.

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Presidential Politics After the Clintons →

After a period of a few weeks when Hillary Clinton and her husband had receded from the political scene somewhat, they have been back in the news during the last few days. Party insiders claimed that Bill Clinton was a little "miffed" at his treatment by the Obama campaign, while Hillary Clinton returned to the senate for the first time since ending her presidential bid and made her first public campaign appearance in support of Barack Obama. Clinton's return to the senate seemed to go well, but she certainly would have preferred to return as her party's presidential nominee, rather than just the junior senator from New York.

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Can the Republican Party Begin to Look Forward? →

To some extent the Republicans electoral woes can be attributed to an unpopular president winding down his second term while the country is mired in an unpopular war and the economy is struggling. More thoughtful Republicans, however, may begin to realize that something larger than this is going on. In recent decades, the Republican coalition has rested on three core groups: social conservatives, foreign policy hawks, and small government/anti-tax voters. Although this coalition was first forged by Richard Nixon in 1968, it could more accurately be described as the Reagan coalition because nobody held it together as well as Reagan. Through his hawkish views on the Soviet Union, anti-tax rhetoric and conservative social views, Reagan was able to get elected president relatively easily two times. Moreover, he seemed to effortlessly balance the needs of these three often conflicting constituencies. Wealthy voters who were not social conservatives seemed unconvinced that he was really a social conservative, while social conservatives did not seem to mind that he prioritized tax cuts and building up the military over their goals.

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Is America Ready for Another White Male President →

During the Democratic Primaries, when discussing the chances of Obama and Clinton, with some frequency, the person with whom I was talking would lean in towards me and say "Do you really think America is ready for a black/woman president?" Like many people, I found the former question racist and the latter one sexist. As a white man, I also resented the implication that I somehow understood that America wasn't ready, whatever that meant.

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Running Mates and the New Electoral Map →

The campaigns have an unusual opportunity to define the playing field on which they will play because there are a higher number of potential battleground states, spread over more parts of the country than in recent elections. For example, a campaign between an Obama-Strickland ticket and a McCain-Jindal ticket would be decided in the rust belt, but an Obama-Kaine ticket against a McCain-Whitman ticket might make the Republicans competitive in important parts of the Northeast which had previously been Democratic strongholds while making the Democrats competitive in southeastern states that were never in doubt for George W. Bush in his last two elections. An Obama-Salazar ticket would give the Democrats a chance to make real gains in the west.

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Reforming the Nominating System: Maybe There is No Better Way →

In 2008, Hillary Clinton tested the assumptions behind the primary system, refusing to give up, thus prolonging a process long beyond the point when Barack Obama had amassed a prohibitive lead in pledged delegates. Depending on your views, this can be attributed to her perseverance and commitment or to her ambition and selfishness, but in either case she was the first candidate to do this since the McGovern-Fraser reforms created the modern nominating system.

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A Different Look at Hillary Clinton's Campaign →

The notion that Hillary Clinton ran a terrible campaign in 2008 has become accepted wisdom among the punditry and in the blogosphere. Criticizing her campaign for not having a post-Super Tuesday strategy, losing key Democratic constituencies, raising expectations in key states and all her other campaign shortfalls, is an appealing narrative to many people including supporters of both Clinton and Barack Obama, but it is driven as much by tautology, Clinton lost therefore she ran a bad campaign, as by thoughtful analysis.

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Whose Dream? Whose Ticket? →

Obama-Clinton may not be a dream ticket for everyone, but it would certainly be exciting and historic. However, before we get too focused on the excitement and history, two very conventional questions need to be addressed. First, will Clinton's presence on the ticket add more value than that of any other candidate and second, will an Obama presidency be strengthened by having Clinton as vice president. However, Hillary Clinton would not be just any vice-presidential nominee, so there are other issues to be considered as well.

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Should She Stay or Should She Go? →

Hillary Clinton is at the point where staying in the race for the Democratic nomination for president will yield increasingly small and unlikely returns, and potentially be very damaging to her. After Obama and Clinton split Oregon and Kentucky on Tuesday, Hillary Clinton finds herself confronting the usual question of whether or not she should continue in the race, and if she does, how strongly she should criticize her primary opponent, Barack Obama. This is the question which has been facing Hillary Clinton for at least a month now. There seems to be a belief among many pundits and commentators that Senator Clinton has much gain and little to lose by staying in the race and continuing to do what she is doing, but it is worth investigating this notion more closely.

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1964 →

Accepting this different road to 270 electoral votes will be difficult for many in the Democratic Party who have spent decades searching for the silver bullet that would bring white blue collar workers home to the Democrats. Unwillingness to accept this was at the heart of Hillary Clinton's electability narrative. Her narrative, that she was uniquely positioned to bring Reagan Democrats back home in November was prima facie absurd, but got an enormous amount of traction and was largely unchallenged in the media or, frankly, by the Obama campaign. The reality was that Clinton remained unpopular with this group, with 55% of white voters who had not completed college viewing her unfavorably in an April, 2008 AP poll.

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Wall Street's Credibility Problem →

Monday saw a very interesting and telling moment as the newest iteration of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's banking recovery was met on Wall Street by a jump in the Dow Jones of almost 500 points, a gain of fully seven percent. The big gains on Wall Street occurred amidst several days of bad press and attacks on the banking recovery plan, the AIG bonuses and Secretary Geithner in general from across the political and media spectrum. Progressive economists such as Paul Krugman attacked the plan as being insufficient and essentially the same as the original Bush/Paulson "cash for trash" plan, while conservative Congressman Eric Cantor (R-VA) referred to Geithner's plan as a "shell game.

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Why AIG and Jim Cramer Matter →

In the last months, because of the economic crisis a number of stories about the nature of American business have been brought to the attention of many Americans. These anecdotes include not only banks using bailout money for spas, travel and redecorating, CEOs of automobile companies flying on private jets to come to the Washington to ask for bailout money, and the current story of the AIG paying bonuses to top executives while being bailed out by the US government, but also stranger stories such as the ongoing silliness, to be generous, of business journalism and the bizarre television feud between Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart.

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Managing Expectation and Understanding the Financial Crisis →

The expectations calculation is not so simple for Obama because the tone coming from the White House is viewed as having an effect on the country's economic performance. So, if the economy only improves slightly in the next 18-20 months, during a period when Obama carefully reduces expectations for a recovery, many will undoubtedly blame the tepid recovery on the failure of Obama to instill confidence in markets or consumers, leading to reduced support for Obama which will make it increasingly difficult for the administration to pass additional legislation. If Obama becomes a cheerleader for the economy, there is a chance that this will have some short term impact on confidence of investors and consumers and begin a short term economic recovery, but it will also have the added effect of raising expectations to a level which the recovery will almost certainly not meet. So, from a partisan strategic angle, it is not clear what the best course for the president should be.

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