Hiromi_X

Personally, I think a lot of the media polls are total bunk and not very scientific. I wouldn't believe it. They're the equivalent of a Cosmo test.

The media is having a field day trying to make the Clinton/Obama race be perceived as more angry, dirty, and a bitch-fest; when actually it's mostly been a fairly mild race with not too much bitchiness between the actual CANDIDATES so much as by other individuals who are marginally affiliated with the candidates at best.

If people are disaffected about one or the other candidate at all, I would guess it's a result of the perceived "ill treatment" of their candidate of choice by the other one. Which is just complete fabrication, trumped up by near-tabloidish press coverage. As one Obama campaign person pointed out on NPR yesterday, Obama gave three speeches last week, on three equally important topics to him, and the only one the media chose to pick up on and give any coverage to was his speech about race. And of course that was because it would sustain the sense of "controversy" the media was instigating behind the speech.

So if a Democrat can't see through that crap and is gonna buy into it and ruin their voting power because to it; maybe they're too dumb to be voting.

It really sickens me the way news had turned into reality TV, where they essential take clips of information and arrange them to create tension to keep something from being "boring." News is not about creating a "mood" for the public. It's about reporting hard facts with no "read" on them.

I am a social liberal, but a policy conservative. Only Obama holds any promise of that combination.

Bush isn't a Republican, he's a fundamentalist christian war hawk. People are able to segregate McCain from that clique.

McCain is well received by foreign leaders and has been for a very long time. Hillary and Obama.. not so much.. or at all.

McCain is the only candidate with any significant cross-aisle ties.

McCain is polling better in N.Y. than any Republican since Ray-gun and Clinton is the junior senator here. Mrs. Clinton has serious problems within her own party and it is not just the Obama Dems that find McCain the more palitable choice. Methinks he`s gonna take the middle and reluctant right. If Bush were running again he would be crushed by any dem but it looks like McCain has found that "sweet spot" once termed the Silent Majority. Dems will hold and gain in Congress and a McCain presidency may actually look a bit like Nixons in many respects.....Strong foriegn policy with good domestic programs,weak economy. If McCain gets that middle mandate you may see a fiscal conservative and progessive legislation. Of course I may just be dreaming and we will all be screwed with whatever "joker" sits in the White House

It's actually fairly routine for up to 20% registered Democrats to vote Republican, in Presidential elections at least. If you look at the breakdown of registered voters by party in the US you see way more Dems than Republicans, so the only way they can win is by crossover votes.

I agree with Miss Syl about the poor news coverage. Especially annoying is the constant reliance on polls instead of actual reporting. WTF do I care about what people think is happening? I want to know what is happening.

I wouldn't worry about the cross-overs very much. People will calm down once Hillary concedes.

Unless of course she pulls a Nader and keeps running as an independent, probably with Lieberman in the second spot.

When I saw that poll, I just thought "ah, bullshit". I think it's just talk. Things will change when this nonsense is over and Obama's the nominee. McCain's not that bad, but he's just not offering much of a change really. And I don't know how the foreign leaders view him, but here in La France, he's currently seen as a bit of a stooge by the public.

The only part of this that's hard to explain is Hillary's number. We know Obama attracts a lot of independents and non-insane-Republicans, and that both groups hate Clinton.

Why should McCain be particularly under scrutiny for his laissez-faire approach to the banking scandal? Neither of his potential opponents has offered anything that does not smack of the sort of policy "management" that, for instance, helped Japan translate her banking crisis into more than a decade of stagnation. Compared with that, letting markets work un-impeded seems quite reasonable to me. Besides, in these matters there is a really strong argument for minimal government intervention: such action nearly always create perverse perceptions and incentives that lead to a future crisis (for instance, there is a pretty much straight line of moral hazard leading from the LTCM bailout to the recent rescue of those jerkoffs at Bear Stearns). As an economist, I have to say that I am really disappointed that so little of the public discussion of this crisis has focused blame where it belongs in the policy community (squarely with Greenspan's Federal Reserve).

Viz the main question of this post, I start by disclosing my position (leaning McCain, could possibly be persuaded to vote Obama). I am not sure that many other Obama supporters share your ambivalence about Hillary. From the Obama people I have spoken to here in NC and in DC, there seems to be a mounting sense of disgust with Hillary. There is a sense that she will just through up any scumbag tactic (to borrow a metaphor appropriate to the moment, her campaign, in their view, is increasingly based on desperation threes and attempts to draw cheap fouls).

I liked the Nixon comment and could really sort of see that emerging (hopefully minus a few break-ins, of course).

Oh, and by the by, congratulations on your impending big move. I hope it works out to be a great new chapter in your life.

I should be fair about McCain though: the few things he does want to do about the banking debacle are almost wholly ill-conceived. He wins simply by having the fewest ill-conceived proposals.

Actually, I am less concerned with profits. What really concerns me are government moves that either:

1. Send the message that you will be bailed out of your bad decisions (Clinton and Obama are sending this, but somewhat weakly, to individual borrowers while McCain is sending it, somewhat weakly, to lenders). This was my point about Bear. I don't want either rich institutions or individuals like us to get the message that they can pursue any degree of risk at the margin and the gov't will implicitly or explicitly bail them out of the consequences. I actually have no problem with the notion of more regulation, as long as it it sensible. But the first and most important regulation is a signal that you, and not society, face the risks of your decisions.

2. Implicitly or explicitly draw out the process of confronting/disclosing losses. This is one of the huge errors Japan's policy makers made. Most of the proposal effectively in this vein are by Clinton or Obama.

So, I suspect our views are actually not very far apart. I just want the government out of the insurance business and don't want it used to help the private sector implicitly disguise losses.

Do you think Hillary is serious about taking this to the convention or do you suspect this is just Huckabee talk? My read on this is that unless she absolutely crushes Obama in most of the remaining states (which is not likely) there is no way she'll catch up on pledged delegates (although clearly she is making a play on them as well) or the popular vote. I wonder whether she will hang on even when her chances are exceedingly slim. I think the longer this drags on the more likely the kind of poll numbers you have in your post will have some real bearing on what actually happens in November.

Re: bullshit- Okay, admittedly, I was trying to cheer you up a bit. The Clinton people might well vote Republican.

Here's some good news though- if it ends up being Obama versus McCain, as it likely will be, I think that's pretty much the two best imaginable candidates. I couldn't live through Guiliani versus Clinton. Also, it's worth remembering that, as opposed to prior campaigns that have involved a hard right Republican versus a wimpy Democrat who's trying to seem as "conservative" as possible, in this one there's a Democrat who is genuinely to the left versus a Republican who is a lot closer to the left than most Republicans. I mean, he just met with the French to tell them he's going to close Guantanamo and fight global warming! So, maybe there's been a shift already.

I'm one of those Obama supporters who probably wouldn't vote for Hillary, at least not anymore. I'm an independent who tends to vote for Democrats, especially for presidential races.

If Hillary were to win the presidential nomination for the Dems, I'd seriously consider withholding my presidential vote. The reason is the way she's trying to win. She's using every Rovian tactic that there is in her scorched earth campaign. I'm not willing to reward that. An example was her comment that she and McCain were ready to step in as leader on day one, but Obama wasn't. She must have known that if she loses the nomination that McCain and his supporters will use that clip over and over.

The recent NYTimes article might have it right, she's either hoping to win it all this time or cause enough damage so that Obama would lose a general election and she'll have another chance to run again against McCain after 4 years.

Only the chance that a McCain victory would mean another conservative Supreme Court justice can make me consider voting for Hillary (no one will admit it, but our troops won't be coming home after any election no matter who wins).

Here's some casual empiricism, but I thought I'd relate the following peak at the other side of the coin: how the Hillary/Obama dynamic affects the behavior of McCain-leaning people. This morning I went shooting, an activity typically dominated by people at least somewhat of conservative leaning. As we waited for lanes we talked politics. Every one of my fellow shooters reported leaning Republican in general (though most said they were Independents) and toward McCain in particular, with significant exceptions (for instance, several expressed indifference as to whether gays have the right to marry).

Anyway, I asked the following:
-Is there any way you could ever vote for Hillary?
Resounding consensus answer: No.
-Is there any way you could vote for Obama?
-Answers: Many of the flavor "I could maybe see it, under some circumstances".
Now for the key questions:
-Would Obama being the Democratic candidate make it more likely that you'd vote for McCain?
-Consensus answer: No, in terms of either sentiment or actual turnout.
-Would Hillary being the Democratic candidate make it more likely that you'd vote for McCain?
-Consensus answer: Yes. Virtually every one of them said that that would transform them from probably McCain voters to definite McCain voters. They would definitely vote in that case.

This is consistent with my gut sense: Hillary would solidify the Mountain West and South for McCain, and be a very poor choice from the standpoint of winning over (or at least de-polarizing to the extent that they are less likely actually to vote) conservative leaning independents in swing states.

The point is, I think the great advantage of Obama for the Democrats is that, at least so far, people are not motivated strongly to vote *against* him.

McCain's stock is overinflated right now. He's running as the best guy to maintain a war that most people are sick of. Besides, who wants Bush Lite right now? McCain doesn't really inspire the same sort of... well, honestly, I think patriotism that Obama does. I've really seen a tremendous amount of patriotism in his supporters, which is sort of amazing to see in liberal Democrats, who haven't exactly been part of the political mainstream in the last decades. But they see him as proof that the American dream isn't a lie.

It's the same here in the "anti-American" world. People here get misty-eyed when you tell them you're voting for Obama. It's a bit weird actually coming from the French, but I think he inspires a belief that, in America, the smartest guy in the room really can become President. Of course, people are setting themselves up to be disappointed. But, as a talk-show host here put it, if Obama is elected, the image of the United States in the world- and hence its status- will be radically changed overnight, and all for the better. I think he needs to stress that when he runs against McCain because McCain hasn't got that going for him at all.