Though I have often looked at the white male swing vote here at pw, Gallup notes that the current head-to-head match-up has Barack Obama losing white women to John McCain by 9 points. 

It is possible that this reflects some latent disgruntlement among some women over the technically ongoing contest between Obama and Hillary Clinton. But it is also more consistent with a broader trend.  Ruy Teixeira, co-author of The Emerging Democratic Majority, noticed the following about John F. Kerry’s 2004 electoral slippage relative to Al Gore’s performance in 2000:

3. Whites by Gender. Democrats’ falloff among whites appears to have been concentrated almost entirely among white women, rather than white men. This year, Bush carried white men by 25 points (62-37), only a point more than his 24 point margin in 2000 (60-36). In contrast, he carried white women by 11 points (55-44), a big improvement over the single point (49-48) by which he carried this group in 2000.

4. Education. Democrats’ slippage by education group was concentrated entirely among the non-college educated…

Given that Bush’s increased margin came entirely from the non-college educated and given the increase in Bush’s margin among white voters, we would expect that Bush’s performance among white working class voters must have improved substantially. This cannot be estimated directly from the NEP poll because they haven’t yet released that level of detail on their data. However, the Institute for America’s Future and Democracy Corps conducted an extensive (2000 interviews) post-election survey and they found Bush winning white working class voters by about 24 points. The compares to a 19 point margin in Democracy Corps’ 2000 post-election survey and a 17 point margin in the 2000 VNS exit poll.

Arguably, that’s the story of the election right there. An additional wrinkle on the white working class vote is that this falloff was likely concentrated among white working class women, not men, judging from the figures cited above on Bush’s big gains among white women, but no change among white men (however, this is an inference from the pattern of the data; no direct evidence on white class women vs. men is available from the NEP or DCorps surveys).

Between 1988 and 2004, the exit poll date suggests that the Democratic nominee won 36 percent, 37 percent, 38 percent, 36 percent and 37 percent, respectively, of votes cast by white men.  The Gallup data has Obama winning 36% of the white male vote, which is obviously right in line with that history.  Obama’s performance with white women at this point is similar to Kerry’s — which remains consistent with Gallup data from early May.

Of course, Obama will have to do better than Kerry to beat John McCain in a general election.  And one wonders whether Obama should not be doing better, given that the overall political envronment favors the Democrats more than it did in 2004.  Obama’s superiority over McCain in money, organization and partisan intensity may go a long way in that regard.  But for all of the discussion over whether Obama’s race will be a significant factor in the general election, it is worth noting that he is doing just about the same demographically as the more pasty John F. Kerry.

*

Me: “So, you following the elections this year?”

Ghost of Andy Gibb: “Elections?”

Me: “Yeah. The presidential elections. In the US.”

Ghost of Andy Gibb:

Ghost of Andy Gibb:

Ghost of Andy Gibb: “Here’s a little secret for you, brother. In Heaven, you can do enough coke to kill a freight train full of circus elephants — and still not get any more dead. Plus, the shit is free.”

Me: “So, that’s, like, a ‘no,’ then…?”

Ghost of Andy Gibb: “Okay, which one of my asshole roadies let you backstage, anyway? You’ve no tits to speak of. SECURITY!”

From a comment at Willamette Week, in response to their editorial endorsing O! :

I attended Sunday’s big Obama-rama in Waterfront Park. Had a fine time.

However - I was competely offended when I saw several different men in line wearing t-shirts that said “Bros before Hoes” with photos of B & H.

Dude - way to lose my vote !

protein wisdom offers an unsolicited response: “Dude. Pick a card, any card…”

Then, of course, there’s this — which originally appeared as an “[a]ctual illustration accompanying Willamette Week’s endorsement (via) of Barack Obama (which includes references to both “dare we say it?—hope” and “yes, we’ll say it—change”):

What bothers me most is not the gauzy, heavenly light — or even the sweaty, muscled chest and Fred Williamson-like Black Caesar bling. No, what really irks me, as a connoisseur of such cultish kitsch, is that the artist neglected to paint it directly on black velvet.

And of course, no tiger. Which leaves the unicorn hanging out there as a yin without its yang — and leaves Obamessiah as the Christ of the Lamb but not of the Lion.

– And that just ain’t gonna get my people’s warrior afro all a-tingling. If you feel me…

(h/t Rick Moran)

for Shannon Elizabeth

If I were a garden hoe
I’d be an independent
contractor.

It’s bad enough banging
rakes and manual sprinklers
for chump change –

You think I want to share
my hard-earned bread with
some asshole
     garden
           pimp?

Laugh n Pass!

Emma, aged 42, has a birth certificate and a “gender recognition certificate” to prove her legal status as a woman although she is still waiting for final surgery to make her transition from male to female physically complete.

She says she has never had a problem with any of her other pupils and says the complaints made by the man from the Meadowhall area of Sheffield, were: “hurtful, offensive and deeply upsetting”.

She is being backed by her boss, Laugh n Pass owner Joanne Dixon, who says the man had called her to accuse the firm of sending a man disguised as a woman because he was a Muslim.

Those pesky Florida Joooooooooooooooos:

At the Aberdeen Golf and Country Club on Sunday, the fountains were burbling, the man-made lakes were shining, and Shirley Weitz and Ruth Grossman were debating why Jews in this gated neighborhood of airy retirement homes feel so much trepidation about Senator Barack Obama.

“The people here, liberal people, will not vote for Obama because of his attitude towards Israel,” Ms. Weitz, 83, said, lingering over brunch.

“They’re going to vote for McCain,” she said.

Ms. Grossman, 80, agreed with her friend’s conclusion, but not her reasoning.

“They’ll pick on the minister thing, they’ll pick on the wife, but the major issue is color,” she said, quietly fingering a coffee cup. Ms. Grossman said she was thinking of voting for Mr. Obama, who is leading in the delegate count for the nomination, as was Ms. Weitz.

But Ms. Grossman does not tell the neighbors. “I keep my mouth shut,” she said.

(more…)

Classically Liberal writes:

The new law criminalizes more than child porn — which is already illegal. It criminalizes the assumption, appearance or belief that something is child porn. It specifically targets the individual who “advertises, promotes, presents, distributes or solicits . . . any material or purported material in a manner that reflects the belief, or that is intended to cause another to believe” that the material is child porn.

Notice how widely that the law is written. A person can be arrested as a child pornographer is something they produce causes “another to believe” that it is child porn. It doesn’t actually have to be child porn at all. All it has to do is give someone, somewhere, the impression that it might be.

What is illegal here is anything that “causes” another person to draw a conclusion. It makes producers of erotica potentially responsible for the assumptions of others. And since the material itself need not even exist, or actually contain illegal images of actual children, the fact that no child pornography may exist is not a defense. They have found a way to criminalize the possession of child porn without the defendant actually having to possess any child porn. What is illegal is not what they produce but the fact that their production caused someone else to perceive it as a child porn.

Probably such means will not be used one day to enforce thought on gender or race.

And only five months to O!

Reuters reports:

A study released on Wednesday reports a decline in fatal attacks of terrorism worldwide and says U.S. think-tank data showing sharp increases were distorted due to the inclusion of killings in Iraq.

“Even if the Iraq ‘terrorism’ data are included, there has still been a substantial decline in the global terrorism toll,” said the 2007 Human Security Brief, an annual report funded by the governments of Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden and Britain.

***

“We have concluded that the expert consensus (on terrorism) is probably misleading,” Andrew Mack, director of the Human Security Report Project, told a news conference.

No kidding. Longtime pw readers have known this from prior posts dating back to my very first guest-posts here in September 2006.  The critics of the Bush Administration, inside and outside the establishment media have for years applied ever-shifting definitions of terrorism to advance their political agenda.  They have used the statistics from the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism and the US National Counterterrorism Center to argue that the war was increasing the global level of terrorism.  Yet they have also characterized the sectarian violence within Iraq as a “civil war,” when that suited the politics of the moment.  And the media is otherwise loathe to label groups inside Iraq as terrorist, preferring euphemisms like “militant” and “insurgent.”

Finally, a think tank like the Human Security Report Project has been able to show a wider audience that the way these statistics have been used have been distorting the public’s view of global trends in terrorism.  Now more attention needs to be paid to those who did the distorting and their agendas in doing so.

(h/t Memeorandum.)

I hate to thump Andrew over this, as if he’s been consistent about one thing over the years, it’s been that the Clintons are ethically pernicious.  So, when Mrs. Clinton demagogues the vote in Florida, stating that it would be tragic if once again, after the way they were robbed by Bush in 2000, their votes (in the primary) weren’t counted.  It makes Andrew’s gob tingle painfully, in a way that he thought could never happen again because of Mrs. Clinton, and he avers that this behavior “should cause even veteran Clinton-hating jaws to drop some more.”

Now I agree with Andrew’s characterization of Mrs. Clinton when he states that she shouldn’t be anywhere near the presidency:

I think she has now made it very important that Obama not ask her to be the veep. The way she is losing is so ugly, so feckless, so riddled with narcissism and pathology that this kind of person should never be a heartbeat away from the presidency.

But it makes my gob tingle painfully some that Andrew either fails to see or doesn’t care to mention that Mrs. Clinton is given this opportunity by virtue of eight years of leftist lying about the 2000 election in order to cultivate the victimology that is a central tenet of their core dogma.  It is terrible that Mrs. Clinton would deploy this canard, to be sure, but the only thing, presumably, that makes it more terrible than the way it has been chanted like a leftist mantra for the last eight years is that it is now being utilized against Mr. Obama.  In fact, without recognizing the potential, apparently, Andrea Mitchell trotted this legend out in expressing anxiety over Mr. Obama’s fortunes in the upcoming General Election just this week.

So, you know, suck it up, Andrew.  I have no sympathy for you.

(PS: sorry, Karl: lost the first draft of this; we must have been in there at the same time)

TIME magazine’s Mark Halperin calls it Hillary Clinton’s “baldest” appeal to Florida and Michigan voters.  Fernando Suarez of CBS News calls it a “desperate” ploy for attention to her cause to seat Florida and Michigan delegates.  TNR’s Jonathan Chait calls it a “shocking gambit” and “simply incredible.”  And of course Excitable Andy is gobsmacked/ nauseated/ heartsick at her “shameless” and “unconscionable” efforts; her poor losing is “so ugly, so feckless, so riddled with narcissism and pathology” that she cannot be considered by Obama for veep (as if).

Comparing the struggles of the voters in Florida and Michigan to those of abolitionists, suffragists and the current plight of Zimbabweans is indeed ridiculous hyperbole.  But the equally hyperbolic reaction from people who have so much less at stake than Clinton is riotously amusing in its naiveté.

The spectre of Hillary Clinton as Jesse Jackson has been apparent for months.  But go back to January and you will find lefty bloggers Jerome Armstrong and Chris Bowers reporting that sources in the DNC were admitting that Michigan and Florida would be seated.  At the time, after quoting MI Rep. Coleman Young Jr., I noted:

The key term there is disenfranchised.  Democrats still claim (albeit without evidence) that voters in Florida were disenfranchised in 2000.  The DNC does not really want to be in the business of disenfranchising voters in Florida… and if it does not penalize Florida, fairness - and the desire to avoid antagonizing these voters in the general election - will demand that Michigan be seated also.

Moreover, as to Michigan, it was established at the time that Obama and other candidates removed their names from the ballot due to a political maneuver by Obama to keep the focus of the race on Iowa:

Five individuals connected to five different campaigns have confirmed — but only under condition of anonymity — that the situation that developed in connection with the Michigan ballot is not at all as it appears on the surface. The campaign for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, arguably fearing a poor showing in Michigan, reached out to the others with a desire of leaving New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton as the only candidate on the ballot. The hope was that such a move would provide one more political obstacle for the Clinton campaign to overcome in Iowa.

So, putting aside Clinton’s currently extreme rhetoric, the winning candidate now finds himself in the position of having to address these disputes without annoying the political establishments in Florida (a state Obama thinks is critical to the GOP) and Michigan (which is probably equally important for Obama to win).  The current polling places Obama significantly behind in Florida and dead even in Michigan.  He finds himself playing catch-up organizationally.  He traded short-term advantage for a long-term headache.

That headache was exacerbated by the DNC, which chose to go beyond the standard sanction for moving a primary too close to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, stripping these delegations of all of their votes, instead of half.  On the other hand, if the DNC always contemplated seating the delegations, eventually settling on the standard sanction looks more like a compromise.  In the meantime, however, it has created a lot of unnecessary sturm and drang — not least among the pundit class which finds itself so deeply in the tank for Obama that it feels compelled to ignore the closeness of a race between evenly matched candidates and favor the harshest treatment for states Obama would like to win in a general election.