Democracy for Utah - Democracy Begins With You

Democrats and the Iron Law of Institutions

Wed, 14 May 2008 15:38:47 -0600

[T]he Democrats operate according to the Iron Law of Institutions. The Iron Law of Institutions is: the people who control institutions care first and foremost about their power within the institution rather than the power of the institution itself. Thus, they would rather the institution "fail" while they remain in power within the institution than for the institution to "succeed" if that requires them to lose power within the institution.

This is true for all human institutions, from elementary schools up to the United States of America. If history shows anything, it's that this cannot be changed. What can be done, sometimes, is to force the people running institutions to align their own interests with those of the institution itself and its members.

Pretty much explains the actions of Congressional Democrats, 2000–2006. A weak-kneed Democratic Party is fine with them as long as they still get their perks.

State convention results

Wed, 14 May 2008 15:32:09 -0600

Utdemocrats.org has the results of the national delegate elections for Utah's Obama and Clinton delegates as well as the election for national committeewoman (Patrice Arent) and committeeman (Joe Hatch).

John Edwards to endorse Obama

Wed, 14 May 2008 15:30:17 -0600

WaPo:

Former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) will endorse Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) tonight in Grand Rapids, Michigan, ending a long period of neutrality for the two-time presidential candidate and giving the Illinois senator another boost of momentum as he draws ever closer to the nomination.

The endorsement was confirmed by a source familiar with Edwards' thinking.

Democrats want to turn the U.S. into France

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:26:07 -0600

I can't stop giggling about this comment from Sen. Mitch McConnell (DailyKos):

"It's pretty clear to me that the Democratic agenda is to turn us into France," the Kentucky Republican told The Washington Times in an unusually blunt interview at his office in the Capitol. "Americans may want change, but the question is, what kind of change?"

Well, let's see. France's healthcare system has been rated the best in the world (the U.S. ranked 37th). They have the 11th-highest life expectancy (the U.S. is 45th) and the 6th-lowest infant mortality rate (the U.S. is 43rd). French employees get 5 guaranteed weeks of vacation every year. (In the U.S., that number is zero.) And yet, despite having all that vacation and the burden of "socialized medicine" and only one-fifth the population of the U.S., France is the world's 6th-largest economy.

So, yeah, Democrats want to make the U.S. more like France. It wouldn't exactly be a bad thing.

Obama has a very specific problem with white voters

Tue, 13 May 2008 14:02:01 -0600

Obama has a very specific problem with white voters — the ones in Appalachia don't like him. The following graph, from DHinMI at Daily Kos, shows the counties where Hillary Clinton won at least 65% of the vote. (The states in white haven't voted yet.)

Interesting pattern, isn't it? However, Obama easily won Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, and many other predominantly white states. He's also projected to win white voters in Oregon by 55%–42%. DHinMI concludes:

Obama doesn't appear to have much of a problem with white voters. But it seems quite likely Appalachia has a bit of an Obama problem.

Hillary: Arrogance or Racism?

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:58:17 -0600

When I first heard Hillary's statements about "hard working Americans (vs lazy Americans) and White voters without college degrees (student loans have dried up?)
supporting her above Obama, I gasped..Hillary! Is this the same women married to the First BLack President??

Who's Blogging» Links to this article
By Eugene Robinson
Friday, May 9, 2008; Page A27

From the beginning, Hillary Clinton has campaigned as if the Democratic nomination were hers by divine right. That's why she is falling short -- and that's why she should be persuaded to quit now, rather than later, before her majestic sense of entitlement splits the party along racial lines.

ABC News: Obama takes the lead in superdelegates

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:36:20 -0600

The exact number depends on how you count, but it's clear that Obama has essentially erased Clinton's lead in superdelegates (ABC News):

Sen. Barack Obama moved into the lead today in the last category that Sen. Hillary Clinton had claimed to have an edge — support among the Democratic Party's superdelegates.

The Illinois Democrat grabbed the superdelegate lead thanks to a switch by New Jersey Rep. Donald Payne and an endorsement from previously uncommitted Rep. Peter DeFazio of Oregon.

Those two votes gave Obama a 267–266 lead over Clinton. That is a huge shift since the days when Clinton boasted about a 60-plus vote lead among the party's pros back on Super Tuesday.

And Obama's lead will only get wider.

The post-American world

Fri, 09 May 2008 10:29:40 -0600

Ezra Klein reviews the new book The Post-American World by Fareed Zakaria:

In short, Zakaria makes two arguments, one descriptive, one normative. The first argument, the descriptive one, is that moment of unipolarity is ending. This odd interregnum between the fall of the Soviet Union and the maturation of other world powers (ranging from developing behemoths like India and China to major alliances like the EU) is coming to an inevitable, and entirely predictable, end. America will neither rule nor run the world alone. India, China, Brazil, Russia, and Europe are simply too big to let us have the globe to ourselves. [...]

The question, then, is not whether a multipolar world will arise, but how we will react to it. We can, as many of the neoconservatives advocate, react with fear and suspicion, viewing the power of others as a threat to ourselves. [...] We can, in other words, create a zero-sum international competition with all the attendant risks and consequences.

Or we can see the arrival of other powers as a positive-sum development. We can realize that just as Japan benefits from the internet created in America, so too can we benefit from advances discovered in China, Brazil, and Germany. A cancer cure developed in Singapore can save lives in South Dakota, an energy technology discovered in Germany can cut emissions in Georgia. And on a global political level, we can see these emergent powers as protectors and guarantors of regional stability and progress who will do much to better their own regions and reduce the sort of chaos that could spin beyond borders and across continents.

Liberals see opportunities for cooperation, while conservatives see nothing but competition.

See Newsweek for an excerpt from the book.

Superdelegate Matheson won't endorse until the primaries are over

Thu, 08 May 2008 10:25:28 -0600

Deseret News:

Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, still hasn't made up his mind about which Democratic presidential candidate to support — even though the party's state chairman sees the race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama winding down.

"I really want to keep my powder dry until this process is done," Matheson, the only one of Utah's so-called superdelegates to the Democratic National Convention in August not committed to a candidate, told the Deseret News Wednesday. [...]

"Neither of the campaigns have been knocking at my door," Matheson said. "I have made it real clear that I'd like to watch this process play out. I am learning, I think all of us are learning, more about the candidates every day as this campaign rolls through all 50 states."

But unless Matheson is committed to voting for the candidate with the most pledged delegates at the end of the process, what's the point of waiting? What more are we learning?

Clinton's five biggest mistakes

Thu, 08 May 2008 10:16:14 -0600

Good analysis from Karen Tumulty in TIME:

2. She didn't master the rules

Clinton picked people for her team primarily for their loyalty to her, instead of their mastery of the game. That became abundantly clear in a strategy session last year, according to two people who were there. As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified — and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much-vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?"

John McCain, lifetime beneficiary of 'socialized medicine'

Wed, 07 May 2008 12:27:11 -0600

Ezra Klein:

As Sarah Arnquist has written, aside from his awful internment in a Vietnamese prison camp, it is hard to find a day in McCain's life when he was not sheltered by the government-run health care he now claims to loathe. Born the son of a Navy admiral, he was cared for by Navy physicians during his childhood. After graduating from high school, he enrolled in the United States Naval Academy, and the military's care continued until he retired from the service in 1981. In 1982, he won a seat in Congress, ushering him into the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program, and in 2001, he qualified for Medicare. When he says, "we have the highest quality of health care in the world in America," he is speaking as a man who has enjoyed a lifetime of government-run care.

But now John McCain is seeking the presidency as a Republican, and a healthy distaste for government-run health care is de rigueur. "I am convinced," said John McCain at Miami Children's Hospital, "that the wrong way to go is to turn over your lives to the government and hope it will all be fine. It won't." Spoken like a 71-year-old whose government health coverage has kept him healthy enough to run for the presidency.

Krugman: All the GOP offers is deregulation and tax cuts

Tue, 06 May 2008 09:54:10 -0600

Paul Krugman:

Rather than admit that pollution is a problem the government has to solve — even as the consequences of acid rain became ever more alarming, not to mention as America's failure to act provoked a near-crisis in relations with Canada, which was suffering the effects of U.S.-generated sulfur dioxide — the Reaganites insisted that there was no problem at all. They denied the evidence, questioned the science, called for more research and did nothing. Sound familiar?

And that, surely, is the line the Democrats should be pushing in this election: Republicans have become the party of denial. If a problem can't be solved with deregulation and tax cuts, they pretend it doesn't exist. [...]

The health care situation, in case you haven't noticed, is going from bad to worse. [...]

The Democrats have been offering real plans in response; they're not perfect, but they are serious.

The GOP, by contrast — and this goes as much for McCain as for the Bush administration — hasn't even tried to address concerns about coverage. Instead, it has all been about costs, which Republicans insist (wrongly) can be dramatically reduced by a policy of, you guessed it, deregulation and tax cuts.

Your summer reading list of progressive books

Mon, 05 May 2008 11:04:50 -0600

So once you've finished the reading list of anti-conservative books, you can get started on these:

Why We're Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America, Eric Alterman
The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman
Reason: Why Liberals Will Win the Battle for America, Robert Reich
Being Right Is Not Enough: What Progressives Must Learn from Conservative Success, Paul Waldman
Thinking Points: Communicating Our American Values and Vision, George Lakoff
Framing the Debate: Famous Presidential Speeches and How Progressives Can Use Them to Change the Conversation, Jeffrey Feldman

Buttars avoids primary challenge by 1 vote

Mon, 05 May 2008 10:58:55 -0600

Salt Lake Tribune:

Buttars escaped a primary contest with the strongest of his rivals, Gary Armstrong, by a single vote at the Salt Lake County Republican Convention. One ballot was discarded because the delegate had apparently marked both names. The two-term incumbent now goes on to face Democrat John Rendell in the November general election.

Armstrong did not challenge the discarding of a spoiled ballot even though, had it been added to his total, it would have put him over the 40 percent mark to force a primary in June.

But he expressed bitter disappointment at the race's outcome.

"Our district can't survive four more years of Chris Buttars. I will support the Democrat," said Armstrong.

Republican delegates and party activists tend to be farther right on the political spectrum than Republican voters as a whole, so we can expect Buttars' support in the general to be even less than what he got at the convention.

Your summer reading list of anti-conservative books

Fri, 02 May 2008 11:34:03 -0600

Back in 2006, I remarked "it's about time liberals start taking aim at conservatism itself" and not just individual conservatives like George Bush, Bill O'Reilly, and Ann Coulter. It looks like others had similar thoughts, because there's a bumper crop of anti-conservative books available now.

The Conservatives Have No Clothes: Why Right-Wing Ideas Keep Failing, Greg Anrig
Conservatives Without Conscience, John Dean
Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, Glenn Greenwald
Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy, Jeffrey Feldman
God's Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters, Sarah Posner
The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics, Jonathan Chait