The polls have been notoriously inaccurate in this primary season. There are probably better analyses why than my rumination here, but in a volatile situation where no real pattern or dynamic has been established and in which a large percentage of voters are undecided, the polls have little predictive value. Olbermann's "Keith Factor" is a good corrective: margin of error + undecideds. In many contests this winter, the Keith Factor was 15% or more.
But while the situation now is still dynamic, it is no longer volatile. We've settled into a pattern, which is that the more people learn about Obama, the more they are inclined to support him. The undecideds in the last several contests have broken decisively for Obama, and many of those who preferred Clinton early on, have switched their support once they get a better sense of who Obama is.
There still seems to be a lot of public doubt as to what the outcome on Tuesday will be, but is there any real reason to assume that this pattern will not determine the outcome in Texas and Ohio? It should, and if it does, it looks like easy wins for Obama in each. The current Zogby poll has Clinton ahead 47/46, which means that 7% are undecided. Should be at least an 8 to 10 point win for Obama there, let's say 54-36. Zogby has it 47/43 for Obama in Texas, which means a 10% undecideds factor there. This factor, coupled with other peculiarities that favor Obama, would indicate a blowout of Chesapeakean proportions for Obama there in the vicinity of 59-41. We'll see if the pattern holds. There may be forces at work that I'm unaware of, but I'll be surprised and curious to learn what they might be if the pattern doesn't hold.
Much of Clinton's early support has simply come from her greater name recognition or from the fact that people feel they know her better. That's not a solid reason for supporting her if there isn't much else that people know about her. And it's easy to dislodge many of those supporters with the kind of rock-star trendiness that Obama has been able to generate. So let's assume that neither is a good reason for supporting a candidate and call it a wash among the people who don't really pay that much attention. Obama's "personality-cult" advantage cancels out Clinton's name-recognition advantage.
But I've been trying to argue here over the last several weeks that Obama isn't simply the trendy choice, a fad from which we'll soon tire. His candidacy is a necessary choice if we are to have a chance of undoing all the damage done by the Republicans, especially in the last six years. It isn't a choice between charisma and competence. It's a choice between someone who lives primarily in the real world and someone who lives primarily in the Beltway bubble that accepts its distorted understanding of what is real, what can be done, and what is impossible.
That's what's so refreshing about Obama–he actually talks sense–and most sane Americans when they are exposed to it get that he does. He doesn't sound like one of these focus-group tested robo-pols because he isn't one. Much of his charisma lies in his simply not sounding like the typical pol. Especially in the debates he comes across that way. He's thinking on his feet. Sometime his answers are canned phrases from the stump–he has to be repetitive to some extent because so many new people are coming in every day–but often enough you get a feeling for the way his mind works not just what he has been programmed by his handlers to say. The Farrakhan exchange in last week's debate demonstrated the difference between the two candidates powerfully.
Clearly, there are some people who prefer the robo-pols–they are familiar and predictable–and they don't quite know how to deal with somebody who speaks in an idiom that sounds reality based. It scares them a little, I think. They are the ones–especially if they are already Beltway insiders–who seem most skeptical about Obama. He doesn't seem real to them; he isn't playing the game the way they were taught it. He can't possibly be for real because he cannot be measured by the metrics that they are most familiar with. If he is real, then everything changes, and they by comparison must be unreal. And whether they are Democrats or Republicans, they have a deeply vested interest for that reason in making sure he fails.
This is a theme I'm sure I'll return to next year, assuming Obama is elected. He is aware of the opposition he will face once elected, but one thing at a time. Right now we, the electorate, have the upper hand, and we have yet to do our job. We have the opportunity to put someone reality based into a significant position of power. Let's see if we have the sense to do it. It's so important that we do to give ourselves a chance. Let's just take things one step at a time.
P.S. For some interesting background about the difference between Obama's approach and Clinton's, read this article about Howard Dean's leadership of the DNC and how it is a repudiation of the the Clintonite DLC model. Dean's 50-state grass-roots strategy has been was strongly resisted by the DLC faction within the Democratic Party, but it has laid the foundation for Obama's transformational candidacy, and, I would argue, for the kind of realignment that the country so desperately needs in the next decade.
Tensions have cooled since then, and both Clintons have voiced their support for Dean's fifty-state strategy. Yet in a larger sense, Hillary's candidacy represents the polar opposite of what Dean built as a candidate and party chair: her campaign is dominated by an inner circle of top strategists, with little room for grassroots input; it hasn't adapted well to new Internet tools like Facebook and MySpace; it tends to raise big contributions from a small group of high rollers rather than from large numbers of small donors; and it is less inclined to expand the base of the party. . . .
In contrast to Clinton's campaign, Obama's–with its hundreds of thousands of small donors, Internet buzz and red-state appeal–reflects to a great extent the realization of Dean's ideals. Dean's argument for how to rebuild and expand the party base for the long term found its perfect short-term exponent in Obama, whose appeal to independents and liberal Republicans and talk of "unity" is planting Democratic roots in unfamiliar places. "The Obama for President campaign is what all of us hoped Dean for President would become," says Steve McMahon, a former top Dean strategist who's stayed neutral in '08. "Obama is Dean 2.0, dramatically updated to reflect the emergence of the grassroots."
The DLC has been to the GOP what liberal Republicans were to the Democrats in the sixties. They essentially conceded the basic governing framework to the opposition as "reality" and tried to find a niche to operate within that reality. Dean and Obama recognize how nauseating and corrupting that basic GOP framework has been, and have organized effectively to develop an alternative.
That's the more important significance of Obama's candidacy. It's not about what his position on healthcare is as contrasted with Clinton's–it's about his basic political imagination or governing philosophy. I've described it elsewhere as subsidiarist, but most importantly it's a repudiation of reality as it has been defined within the Beltway bubble.
UPDATE: I just came across this article by Digby about the difference between transactional and transformational politics. The Republicans were involved in transactional politics starting in the 70s, but after taking hold of power in the 80s, they fundamentally transformed the framework for discussing political reality. The Democrats were forced to adapt. They played a fundamentally passive role, cutting deals where they could, and that kind of deal-cutting is what transactional politics is all about. It accepts the basic framework established by the other party, and works within it to get the best deal that it can. It's the framework–the rules of the game–that must change, and that's what Clinton and her posse don't understand. She's satisfied to be a transactional politician at a time when there is an opportunity to change the framework.
That opportunity comes when the existing framework becomes a parody of itself, which is precisely what the Bush administration has become. It is the decaying mold on the dead plant that was seeded by Goldwater/Buckley in the early sixties, germinated in the seventies, bloomed during the eighties, went through a kind of death throe during the movement conservative hysteria directed toward Clinton, and finally became this ugly, parasitic organism living on the carcass of whatever principled conservatism may have ever been there. This kind of degraded conservatism, which has become the parody of conservatism, is toxic, and the disease it has caused in the body politic is everywhere evident.
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