Liberal Media Elite

If Barack Obama doesn’t become the Democratic nominee because he’s been assassinated, my guess is that we’ll have far greater problems then whether or not the nominee is then Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden or something.

So this is what they mean when they say irony is dead.

As I read the ongoing coverage of Obama’s “big win” on Tuesday and the epitaphs being written on behalf of the Clinton campaign, I can’t help but think that one of the many things that has plagued the Clinton effort is that it seems to suffer from a bad case of “inside the beltway” disease. It’s a disease that’s echoed in the analysis that so many pundits are now engaging in.

Let’s take Obama’s “big win” in North Carolina. That “big win” expanded his lead by 17 additional delegates. Really…that’s not alot. Ms. Clinton’s “big win” in Pennsylvania let her pick up 12 delegates more than Obama. Ohio gave her an 11 delegate advantage. Texas let her gain ground…by giving her 4 more delegates than Obama won. So, in the last three “big” wins for the Clinton campaign she inched a total of 27 delegates closer to catching Obama. These are not “big” shifts in the delegate mathematics. The press, because it’s more fun and dramatic and sells more papers, talks about primaries and caucuses as if they are winner-take-all battles. On the Democratic side they aren’t. It ain’t like the electoral college. Mr. Obama’s campaign showed an awareness of this, Ms. Clinton’s…until very late in the game…did not.

Hillary paid alot to high profile strategists who, I think, have not served her terribly well. It was as if they were running a campaign based on the electoral college. “We won Pennsylvania!” is a much more exciting battle cry than “we got marginally closer but not enough to matter!” If you look at the Clinton strategy, it was to focus resources heavily on winning big states with fat delegate counts. And, to an impressive degree, they succeeded. But they did so at the price of not just “losing” the small primaries and all the caucus states, the lost them by more than they had to. Until late March, the Clinton campaign essentially ignored those small states. They didn’t set up much in the way of campaign machines in them, they made token appearances, they stayed off of TV and (because of the few appearances and missing machines) out of the press compared to the Obama campaign. Right now, if you average out the difference between Obama’s and Clinton’s pledged delegate counts, it works out an advantage by Obama of just under 3 delegates per contest. If they had played to minimize the losses in smaller contests instead of only maximizing the wins in big ones…this would be a very different race.

Ms. Clinton’s campaign never seemed to grasp that a loss wasn’t a total loss and a win wasn’t a total win. Take her “big” win in Pennsylvania. Three months ago the thought that Barack Obama could capture 45% of the popular vote there was laughable. He still campaigned hard and spent a ton of money.  He tried to minimize the loss. The net? Hillary gaining on him by a total of 12 delegates given the number of contests left at that time and his lead was trivial. Yeah, yeah, yeah…I know…the pundits will tell you that it signaled this or that or whatever and Obama was on the ropes and blahblahblah. But it seems to me that the Obama camp (wisely) ignored those histrionics and kept doing the arithmetic and came to the correct conclusion that they were still winning and didn’t need to panic. Given how far behind she was in the pledged delegate count, Hillary’s net gain of 12 delegates in Pennsylvania, in April, towards the end of the primary season was the equivalent of a football team being down by 17 points with 3 minutes left and scoring a field goal…yeah…they needed it…but it really didn’t change alot.

I’ve been listening to talking heads from the Clinton camp say silly things like…”if this were winner-take-all like it is for the Republicans Hillary would be winning”. Well…yeah. She would be. But it isn’t winner take all. It was never winner take all. It’s never been winner take all. So that lament is, to me, a huge indictment of the campaign. It is saying, obliquely, “we didn’t pay attention to the rules”. Which is cool, I guess. But at that point your only hope is that your opponent drinks the same Kool-aid as you. And in this case, he didn’t.

Here’s an interesting li’l tidbit from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (for reasons I don’t understand when I tried to put the link in I kept blowing up this post).

H.J. Heinz Co. plans to close a plant in Dallas next month, affecting nearly 200 employees. The Pittsburgh-based food company says work now done at the plant will be transferred to Heinz facilities in Mason, Ohio, Jacksonville, Fla., and Chatsworth, Calif.

The reason I bring this up is that here in Minnesota (and happening in states all over this great land) the righties in the state legislature have an annual drama-fest over “lower the corporate tax rate! lower the corporate tax rate! Businesses leaving! Can’t compete! blahblahblah”. In the case of Heinz, I don’t know why they decided to consolidate operations and shut down one of their four plants. I do know that corporate tax rates weren’t the reason. In fact, if you read about consolidations taking place and the reasons for choosing one state over another, etc…the one thing that rarely comes up, and when it does it’s way down the list, is the corporate tax rate. In this instance I know, unequivocally, that it wasn’t the corporate tax rate. How, you ask? ‘Cause California is a high tax state, Ohio is medium-high, and Florida is generally low. And Texas? The state they left? The “we’re a damn tax-haven state so come bring your biness (Texan for business) here” state. It hasn’t got a fucking corporate tax rate (okay, okay…it has a thing that’s called a Franchise tax but it’s full of loopholes and even when applied it’s roughly 3x lower than Florida’s low ass rate).

So, righties in the legislature, shut the hell up. Stop selling the theory that the corporate tax rate leads to decreased business investment. Bring me data…not anecdotal examples…but solid data.

I issue this challenge with great confidence. ‘Cause their ain’t no data to support it. Sure, you could set the rate so high that businesses would bail. Absolutely. But the tax rates that currently exist in this state, high as they are, show zero…ZERO…correlation to corporations exiting the state or cutting back on operations within it.

The TV just told me that Hil’ry is gonna “take on OPEC”. She’s gonna “break them up” apparently by filing an action with the WTO. Yup…the working mom ($120MM income in the last few years) is gonna save the working class ’cause she knows what it’s like to struggle (rich daddy paid her room, board, and tuition but nothing more when she was in college so if she wanted “a cup of coffee” she had to go work) and she knows who the bad guys iz (those damn A-rabs - just like George Bush sez).

She ain’t stupid. She knows that filing an action with the WTO is going to accomplish nothing. She knows the OPEC nations will simply ignore it. She knows she can’t get the gas-tax holiday passed and she knows it would be a policy that would do absolutely nothing to help anyone. She knows she’s promising things she can’t deliver and, more important, that she doesn’t want to deliver. She also knows there’s an opportunity to use that false populism to keep the race tight so that after the primaries she can win over a bunch of superdelegates.

And the most alarming thing judging from recent polls is this shit it working. In the same way that a rich guy (Prezzz Bush) recast himself as a good ol’ boy a few years back and got the shit-kicker vote to carry him home to the White House.
Jesus…are we really this stupid?

Here on the eve of the North Carolina and Indiana primaries, the haggling of the candidates over Hillary’s genius “gas-tax holiday” strategy…genius in the “I’ll do anything to win” sense, spectacularly stupid as policy. You can bet your life that oil companies, knowing that consumers will pay the current price, will just raise the damn price up to the current levels as soon as the tax is rolled back. Duh.

Anyway, it got me to thinking about inflation. Kevin Phillips has an interesting piece in Harper’s this month. I like Harper’s because I often read things that remind me of things I learned back in econ school that blew my socks off. Here’s the reminder I got from the Phillips piece…

All the inflation numbers you read in the paper are total, utter horseshit.

First, you will always read that the CPI, excluding food and energy, is blahblahblah. Food and energy are taken out because they are volatile. Meaning, they cause the inflation rate to jump and fall. Because…um…they represent huge expenditures for each and every household. Think about that for a moment. Taking out food and energy from inflation is the logical equivalent of taking inflation out of inflation. As an example, between March 2007 and March 2008 the “core” inflation rate (inflation minus food and energy) was 2.4%. Don’t seem so bad. But the inflation rate on food was 4.5% and on energy a whopping 17%, making for an inflation rate with food and energy of 4% and rising.

But wait, there’s more…

Due to numbers cooking by Ronnie Raygun (with ongoing assistance from Bush the first and Bill Clinton) our inflation numbers have been cooked even farther. If you want to see how much, check out Shadowstats.com. The long and short of it is that the inflation rate, if we still measured it the way we did in 1992 (which means reporting core inflation without food or energy) isn’t 4%…it’s about 7.3%. What does that mean? It means that social security payments are far too low. It means that real GDP is grossly over-calculate. It means that your buying power ain’t shit and hasn’t been for awhile.

So…if you were wondering why the inflation numbers don’t match up with your personal experience…it’s because on a bipartisan basis we’ve been cooking the books for years.