| I thought the debate was boring and irrelevant at the time it happened. And it turns out that the public pretty much agreed.
Data from the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll shows that on the two nights following the debate (Wednesday and Thursday) Clinton held a 45% to 18% lead over Barack Obama. For Clinton, that's an improvement from Monday and Tuesday nights when her lead over Obama had been 40% to 24%.
John Edwards was at 10% on the first two nights and 12% on Wednesday and Thursday. Bill Richardson went from 5% to 7% during the same time frames.
Caution must be used in interpreting these results for several reasons.
First, the sample sizes are very small-447 Likely Primary Voters on the first two nights and 435 on the second two nights. The margin of sampling error for each set of data is +/- 5 percentage points with a 95% level of confidence. So, Clinton's gain and Obama's decline may be nothing more than statistical noise. However, it is fairly safe to conclude that Obama did not immediately gain any ground.
Rasmussen reports that most of the country just wasn't paying attention. And that makes sense. The reason that Clinton's 'awful week' didn't matter at all is because her week was only awful in the land of pundits and hardcore political supporters of the other candidates. There's this weird magic synthesis necessary to make a change in a political system. It can't be done just by supporters, and it can't be done just by a candidate or elite decision-maker. It has to be both at the same time, an elite decision-maker deciding to do something a large group of people have organized to ask that decision-maker to do.
Clinton has that synthesis with women and base Democrats who hate the right-wing. They want her to win as a woman, and she's winning as a woman. It's sad that she's a conservative, and I can't support her, but you can't overlook her synthetic relationship with many Democrats. Obama and Edwards have both blown up their relationship with progressive opinion leaders, and so they can't achieve this synthesis. They have done so by refusing to commit to removing all troops from Iraq, by condemning Moveon, and by generally failing to lead on anything progressive.
There's a large untapped group of people who believe that the Republican Party leadership is a gang of criminals and that the Democrats need to stop them and haven't. No one is talking to this group of people. Instead, the arguments at the debate centered on attacking illegal immigrants, going after a Clinton for spinning, and attacking Hillary Clinton for being a political woman. Yeah, ok, these are great arguments to use in a Democratic primary.
I don't want Clinton to win. I really really don't. I've been in a campaign commercial attacking her, and I'm on record going after her for failing to lead on Iraq and on having a corrupt Clintonista machine. But I'm not a fool, and I'm not going to lie about a race and pretend her rivals are doing a good job or acting like progressives when they aren't. Clinton is a bad candidate, but there's very little difference between Obama, Edwards, and Clinton, except that Clinton is a more skilled politician.
This race is putting progressives in a horrible position. There's no candidate to get behind. |
