Barack Obama vs. John McCain

People who want Barack Obama to be our next president really think that Hillary Clinton should drop out of the race right now:

In the past few days, Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont has called for Mrs Clinton to pull out of the race and the influential ex-governor of New York, Mario Cuomo, has been suggesting Obama and Clinton should be on a ticket together.

New Mexico governor Bill Richardson now thinks Obama's lead is "insurmountable", and he has a lot of pull with Hispanics. The pundits are now squealing for a resolution.

"She's got to stop thinking about herself," said one of the young bloggers I spoke to. "The election is just too important and she can't surely want to risk the election just to prove a point to herself and her husband?"
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The fact is that every other person you speak to in this country just now feels that Hillary should call it a day. She got it wrong when she supported Iraq, and the progressive drift is moving against her. From here on in, her efforts will only help McCain, a man who believes it might be worth keeping troops in the Middle East for a hundred years.

This kind of thinking is understandable if you have become infatuated with Barack Obama and believe that he is the far left liberal who can bring this nation together. But if you are not caught up in the messianic hysteria, then the idea that Clinton should drop out seems very strange. As everyone knows, the Democratic nominee will be decided by the superdelegates, and they have to base their decision on who would be the strongest candidate against John McCain. If it seems that Clinton would be the stronger candidate, then they have to weigh that fact against their fear of alienating black voters. But despite that fear, they are surely going to attach some weight to their assessment of who would stand up better against McCain in November.

In big important states that the Democrats have to win to retake the White House, Clinton does better than Obama. She always beats him in the big-state primaries (a pattern that seems likely to hold when Pennsylvania votes on April 22), and polls from those states suggest that she has a better chance against John McCain. Here is a snapshot of the race from RealClearPolitics, and the poll numbers of interest are in the lower part of the chart:


As you can see, according to current polls, McCain easily beats Obama in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. Does anyone really believe that the Democrats can win the White House if they lose those 3 states? It doesn't seem likely to me, and those same polls show that Clinton does much better than Obama does against McCain. She is even ahead of McCain in Ohio as of right now, whereas Obama is way behind (and the Jeremiah Wright scandal seems unlikely to help him there in the long run). Yet Hillary should just drop out? And the superdelegates should just ignore Obama's weakness in these 3 states and robotically choose him because of his slight lead in the pledged delegate count? That seems like an odd way to think.

Some might think that, because of the strong support he receives from blacks, Obama will win southern states that the Republicans almost always win. But what makes you think so? Democrats always get a very large percentage of the black vote in the south, and the fact that they will get slightly more if Barack is the nominee seems unlikely to push many southern states into his column. And one has to consider how white southern voters are going to react to the Jeremiah Wright videos. Will their attitude be to just forgive and forget? Or will they flock to the conspicuously patriotic candidate in the race?

Just as in these 3 big states, McCain leads Obama in national polls, a phenomenon that occurred after the Jeremiah Wright videos hit the internet:


Democrats were not very affected by Wright's lunatic anti-American ravings, which makes sense, but Obama's appeal to independents and to some Republicans was affected. Obama could obviously retake the lead, but he is trailing as of now (according to averaged polls).

Usually, the betting and the averaged polls tell the same story. It's not that way this time, and I am intrigued by that. Despite all that has happened recently and despite McCain's strong showing against Obama in critical polls, the betting at Intrade favors Obama to the same degree it has for weeks:


I circled the relevant results, which show that bettors give Obama a 48% chance of winning it all (compared to 40% for McCain). This is fascinating to me. It is as if the bettors believe that the Jeremiah Wright scandal is meaningless, and so are the polls showing that McCain leads nationally and in 3 critical states that the Democrats need to win. Perhaps they are right. Because I do not favor an Obama presidency, I cannot attach great weight to my own strong feeling that he will not be competitive against McCain in November. I honestly do feel that way, but I know that such feelings are not that informative when they happen to coincide with what you want to be true. That's why I try to keep focused on the objective evidence. Right now, the objective evidence (i.e., the average of multiple polls) seems to suggest that McCain is the favorite to win, so my belief that Obama cannot compete effectively against McCain is not completely without merit. Still, there is wisdom in the betting markets, and they foresee an Obama victory in November. I don't get it, but I do not reject the possibility that they know more than I do.

In addition to the recent polling results that favor McCain, the reason I don't think that Obama can win is that he is a far left liberal lightweight, and Americans ordinarily don't go for that. That he is a lightweight is shown by Factcheck.org's response to a circulating e-mail suggesting that Obama's record is legislatively substantive (even more so than Clinton's). It turns out that the opposite is true. In fact, Obama's Senate record is spectacularly unimpressive. Here is a table that summarizes their records:


The article describes these results as follows:

Using the numbers above, we calculate that Clinton has been the sole sponsor of a few more bills and resolutions per year – 51, to Obama's 43. And she has steered twice as many through the Senate and almost four times as many into law per year, on average, as Obama has.

Clinton has steered almost four times as many into law per year as Obama has (2.7 per year vs. only 0.7 per year). As an aside, if you check the table at the Newsweek site, you'll see that has an error (it has a value of 0.7 for both Clinton and Obama in the last line, but if you do the math or check the original table at Factcheck.org, or if you read the words that describe the results, you'll see that the real number is 2.7 per year for Clinton). That's what I mean when I suggest that he is a lightweight. I realize that, being the far left liberal extremist that you are, you can look at the actual legislation and convince yourself that the legislation sponsored by Obama is of great substance, whereas the legislation sponsored by Clinton is trivial by comparison. But any such analysis would be extremely subjective and would just say something about you. The objective numbers are not debatable, which is why it is better to go with those. What they show is that many people are prepared to vote for Obama despite the fact that he has been a conspicuously ineffective Senator. I don't really hold that against him (he is new, after all), but I also don't regard his failure to distinguish himself as a Senator as a reason to vote for him.

Finally, I don't think he will be competitive with McCain in November because he really is just a far left liberal extremist despite the fact that he runs from the liberal label every chance he gets (and Americans usually don't go for the extreme left when they choose a president). Just take a look at his various positions:

Obama and the 'L' Word
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National Journal rated him as the most liberal person in the Senate in 2007, and for good reason. On economic policy, Mr. Obama favors higher income, Social Security and corporate taxes. He supports massive increases in domestic spending and greater government regulation of the economy. He favors a significantly larger role for the federal government in health care. He opposes the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mr. Obama has criticized the Supreme Court's decision to uphold a partial birth abortion ban, and he wants to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. He voted against John Roberts and Samuel Alito for the Supreme Court. In Illinois, Mr. Obama supported banning the manufacture, sale and possession of handguns. And he supports granting driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

On national security matters, Mr. Obama voted to deny legal immunity to telecom companies that have cooperated with the government in warrantless wiretapping of suspected terrorists. He wants to grant habeas corpus rights to detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. He supports a full-scale withdrawal from Iraq. And he says, in his first year in office, he would meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea without preconditions.

It's no wonder that Mr. Obama has been endorsed by Moveon.org – one of the most radical groups within the liberal universe.

Adding to Mr. Obama's problems is his close association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., whose anti-American rantings are the kind of thing routinely said by the far left.

The polls show that Obama is behind McCain nationally and even further behind in critical states that the Democrats have to win to retake the White House. The Senate record shows that Obama has been a legislative non-entity, and the positions he has endorsed show that Obama is about as liberal as any elected politician who holds national office. But the bettors continue to give him the edge, and I don't rule out the possibility that they are right. I'm just saying that I don't understand their thinking.