Against the Wind

I am going to go out on a limb and bet that Hillary will defy expectations and pull off narrow victories in Ohio and Texas on Tuesday. The wager is one drink per state at a venue of the loser's chosing. Sign up in the comments if you're feeling lucky.

My logic is very simple:

1. The polls have proven themselves as unreliable as ever, so Obama's narrow margin in TX and the closing of the gap in OH don't mean all that much. The same thing happened in NH.
2. Final tallies have broken down hard along tribal socio-economic and racial lines with few exceptions throught the race.
3. Demographics in both states favor Hillary's tribes.

I will grant the possibility that the polls are unreliably running in Hillary's favor--that is, vastly overstating her appeal--but I don't feel like this is the case. There's enough of an opportunity for turnout to throw this thing in either candidate's favor, though, so I'm not going to pretend to be super-confident about my guess.

If Hillary wins both states, it will be really interesting to see how the coverage plays out. My guess is that it will turn to how she still needs undemocratic, fatcat, Clinton holdover, disproportionately white male superdelegates to win, even though that is true about Obama as well, and in the Interest of Democracy and Fairness She Should Drop Out Don't You Think?

It is now amusingly clear that the press is covering Obama's campaign the same way US Weekly covers Tom Cruise, except in this case the fawning adulation was offered voluntarily. I can't criticize Obama for running a successful campaign. I can criticize the press for failing to draw attention to the stunningly vapid sloganeering and near-pathological refusal to commit to anything except to "belief that we can hope in," or "change we can finally be proud of."

Early on I admitted some warm feelings for her opponent, in large part because I felt that even if he was profoundly liberal, he was also sincere about overcoming some of the partisan rancor, and might even have some "Nixon goes to China" potential around issues like school choice. In short, I thought he had a lot of substance and maturity. The recent (and woefully under-reported) revelations that he's been feeding back-channel reassurances to the Canadian government that his anti-NAFTA talk wasn't all that serious is simply the latest example of why I now consider him a very, very bad idea. This isn't uplifting, hopeful, or honest.

The voters of Ohio and Michigan do have it rough--trade has overturned what were some very well-feathered nests for the previous two generations, and it's not clear that anything, not even withdrawal from NAFTA, GATT, and the WTO, would bring the Good Old Days back, or that Americans as a whole would be better off. There is no question that such a climbdown would have shocking effects globally, because it would economically hurt a great number of countries very directly, many (most) of them strong allies, which fortunately works to make it somewhat unlikely. Compare this to what John McCain said in a recent speech in Detroit:

But let's have one more piece of straight talk: globalization is here, globalization is an opportunity, but globalization will not automatically benefit every American.

There's a lot more to it than that, but it's also important to take the Santa hat off and say that some things just aren't going to be easy. McCain continued to say this when it mattered--when he was fighting against Romney to win Michigan--just as he spoke against crop subsidies in Iowa.  ¶ 11:14 AM