Daniel Larison is a bit too charitable here in assessing Mike Huckabee’s finish in last year’s presidential primaries:

While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still have been a losing bid, it is not certain that Huckabee could have managed his second place finish.

In fact, the 2008 Republican race wasn’t even a contest.  Mitt Romney quit the race during CPAC on February 7 and pledged his delegates to McCain.   Rudy Giuliani had failed to make his push in Florida — coming in way behind Romney, who finished second.  The race was over.

Except that, technically, it wasn’t.  Huckabee stayed in the race, along with Ron Paul, despite no chance of beating John McCain for the nomination.  As a result, they padded their totals as everyone not happy with McCain as the nominee had to vote for one of them.  And, really, since Paul was a fringe candidate, that meant Huckabee.

The results, per CNN, are at right.

The fact of the matter was that Huckabee, a virtual unknown at the beginning of the contest, was mostly a stalking horse.  Huckabee finally withdrew on March 5, once McCain mathematically sewed up the race on his own — that is, not counting Romney’s delegates.   As I wrote at the time:

But let’s not get carried away, either. He’s a personable fellow who went a long way with very little money, a weak organization, and zero Establishment support. But there was no time in this race when it was plausible that he’d be the nominee. He won Iowa as the “anybody but Mitt Romney” candidate in a contest McCain, Giuliani, and others skipped. He didn’t win again until garbage time, when he was running as “the conservative alternative” to a man who had all but sewn up the nomination.

Huckabee will not win the nomination in 2012. Or 2016. Or 2020. He’d easily win a Senate seat from Arkansas if he changes his mind. But he’s not going to be elected president.

I  stand by that assessment.

Timothy Sandefur is embarrassed:

So I was watching this insane video of Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie discussing the War on Terrorism with Mos Def. And it’s amusing to laugh at the utterly hapless ignorance of “Mr. Def,” as he is repeatedly called—until you stop and wonder. Why is the black community not outraged by this? Bill Maher hosts a talk show to discuss the threat of Islamic terrorism and the Middle East, and he invites two world-renowned white male intellectuals and Mos Def? If this show had been choreographed by the Ku Klux Klan it could not have been more infuriating. Did Maher not have the phone number of a black intellectual? Were Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Orlando Patterson, Julian Bond, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter all busy?

Here’s the video:

While I agree entirely that this is an absurd pairing, it’s most definitely not a racist one.  Sandefur has apparently never seen “Real Time with Bill Maher.”  The premise of the show, from its inception more than six years ago, has been to pair politicos and pop culture figures in discussion.  (Whether the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the latter are morons or that their opinions are equally valid, I could never determine.)

Here are the seven season openers.

February 21, 2003. Guests: Author Ann Coulter, actor Larry Miller, writer, radio host and professor Michael Eric Dyson, comedian Sarah Silverman, comedian Chris Rock.  Topics: The UN, Affirmative Action.

January 16, 2004. Guests: Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark, artist Moby, Rev. Al Sharpton, actor Ron Silver, Rep. Darrell Issa. Topics: American values, Iraq, MoveOn.org, environment.

February 18, 2005. Guests: Correspondent Lesley Stahl, actor Robin Williams, former H&HS Sec. Tommy Thompson, Sen. Joe Biden, and actor Don Cheadle. Topics: On protecting sources, Jeff Gannon, on Interrogating prisoners, Iraq elections, Darfur.

February 17, 2006. Guests: Sen. Russ Feingold, commentator Fred Barnes, actor Eddie Griffin, reporter Helen Thomas, Iraq advisor Dan Senor. Topics: Cheney shooting, on the Patriot Act, Bush, Mohammad cartoons.

February 16, 2007. Guests: Fmr Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, fmr Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, TV host Craig Ferguson; via satellite, fmr Sen. John Edwards and basketball player John Amaechi. Topics: Developments in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq; global warming; Mitt Romney and Mormonism; Al Franken Senate campaign.

January 11, 2008. Guests: Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, fmr Court TV anchor Catherine Crier, fmr Bush Press Secy Tony Snow, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi (election correspondent); via satellite, humorist P.J. O’Rourke. Topics: New Hampshire primary, electronic voting machines, Iraq troop surge, subprime lending and prospects for economic recession.

February 20, 2009. Guests: Financial Times editor Chrystia Freeland, journalist Tina Brown, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA); via satellite, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), journalist Brigitte Gabriel The economy, President Obama’s first month in office.

See the Wikipedia episode guide if you fear the season openers are not representative.

The pairings are, in most if not all cases, patently absurd. They include plenty of famous white guys who would, on the face of things, seem to be woefully out of their elements and plenty of black guys who would seemingly mop of the floor with the competition.

For what it’s worth, Mr. Def was really good in this week’s “House.”

Inspired by an OTB comment thread, Steven Taylor has written two essays questioning the use of the phrase “A Republic, Not a Democracy.”   In Part I: Looking at Terms, he cites the political science literature to show that the terms are interchangable.  Part II: Madison, Republican Government and Federalism, he argues that even the founders wanted democratic institutions — i.e., a nascent form of representative democracy — despite the use of the term Republic throughout the Constitution and other founding documents.

He’s right, of course, on the merits.   I’ve used the phrase myself in casual conversation to mean that we have a limited government rather than one in which the majority has the right to do whatever it wishes.   That’s an important theoretical concept that many Americans seem not to fathom.

Walter Williams, amidst a lot of drivel, captured the essence of that distinction:

John Adams captured the essence of the difference when he said, “You have rights antecedent to all earthly governments; rights that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; rights derived from the Great Legislator of the Universe.”

[...]

Nothing in our Constitution suggests that government is a grantor of rights. Instead, government is a protector of rights.

In recognition that it’s Congress that poses the greatest threat to our liberties, the framers used negative phrases against Congress throughout the Constitution such as: shall not abridge, infringe, deny, disparage, and shall not be violated, nor be denied. In a republican form of government, there is rule of law. All citizens, including government officials, are accountable to the same laws. Government power is limited and decentralized through a system of checks and balances. Government intervenes in civil society to protect its citizens against force and fraud but does not intervene in the cases of peaceable, voluntary exchange.

[...]

John Adams said, “Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.” Chief Justice John Marshall observed, “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos.” In a word or two, the founders knew that a democracy would lead to the same kind of tyranny the colonies suffered under King George III.

The phrase is a popular one, used by paleocons like Pat Buchanan and libertarians like Ron Paul.

As a matter of political science, however, all polities that empower popular sovereignty employ representative democracy, which filters the passions of the people through elected politicians, with some restrictions on what those leaders can do with their power.   Some, like the United States, put more obstacles in the way of the majority than others, such as the UK.   But there are no “pure” democracies.

As 2008 winds to an end, it’ll soon be time for the OTB staff to post its predictions for the coming year.   First, though, is the painful look back at our predictions for 2008.

Predictions that came to pass

• The Republicans will eventually nominate someone, pundit chatter about a divided base notwithstanding.

• “Ron Paul won’t win a single state primary. If he runs as a Libertarian or other third party, he won’t get a single electoral vote.”  (Paul came in 2nd place in 10 states and 3rd in 17.)

• The eventual president will be either a Democrat or Republican, regardless of whether Ron Paul, Mike Bloomberg, or anyone else runs on a third party ticket.

• “Nothing of any substance will be accomplished by the Congress on any of the following issues: immigration, healthcare, Social Security, education, product safety of imports.”

• “President Bush will not be impeached by the House of Representatives” — nor will any past or former administration official be tried for war crimes.

• The United States will have 100,000 or more troops in Iraq at year’s end. The trend toward lower body counts will continue but civil society will remain an elusive goal.

• Vladimir Putin will still be running Russia at year’s end — but with a new title. (Arguably, this could go in the “Not Enough Data” category.  But most analysts think Putin’s still the Man.)

• Neither the U.S. nor Israel will either bomb or invade Iran.

• The Lisbon Treaty will fail, forcing a dramatic rethinking of the European Union’s agenda.

• The Wall Street Journal will be a more successful paper with Rupert Murdock running it.

• Sirius and XM will be allowed to merge.

• The television writers strike will end but the major networks will never recover their market share, making it a lose-lose proposition.

• The Boston Celtics will win the NBA championship.

Predictions that did not come to pass

• The winner will be a Protestant white guy, defying predictions of the First Woman, First Black, or First Mormon President.  (If I were a lawyer, I’d claim to be mostly right here in that a Protestant guy was elected.  As a political scientist, however, this was all wrong.)

• Pervez Musharraf will still be president of Pakistan at year’s end. One way or the other.  (He resigned on August 18th.  I’m happy to be wrong on this one.)

• The New England Patriots will beat the Dallas Cowboys in the Super Bowl, becoming the first 19-0 team in NFL history.  (The Pats went 18-0 before losing in the Super Bowl to the wild card New York Giants.  The Cowboys went 13-3 and then choked in the playoffs, losing to the Giants.)

• The Atlanta Braves will win the World Series with a starting rotation of pitchers in the twilight of their careers.  (Instead, all three of their top pitchers wound up on the injured reserve and the team was quite mediocre.)

• Katie Couric will not finish the year as anchor of the CBS Evening News.  (She’s rumored to be out in January, though.)

• NBC will pull the plug on one of its cable news ventures. (Why they haven’t escapes me.)

Half-Right / Half-Wrong

• The Democrats will retain both the Houses of Congress, picking up two seats in the Senate while losing fourteen of the House seats they picked up in 2006.  (Even aside from the over-specificity of the prediction, the Dems picked up House seats.)

• Tiger Woods will win two Majors, passing Bobby Jones and coming within two of Jack Nicklaus.  (He won one in spectacular fashion — on a broken leg — but then sat out the rest of the season.)

• The United States will finally win the gold medal in basketball again, along with the overall gold medal count, in this summer’s Olympic Games. Few will much care.  (China won the gold count easily, although the USA won more medals overall.)

Final Tally:  Actually, better than I remembered having done:  13-6-3.    If you take off the overly glib predictions, it falls to 11-6-3, which still isn’t bad.   I did, however, get the 2008 presidential election, World Series, and Super Bowl wrong, so not great on a weighted scale.

Correction:  I moved the Olympics prediction into the half/half category and updated the tally accordingly after a commenter pointed out that I’d ignored a third of my prediction.

Patrick Ruffini takes up where Jon Henke and John Hawkins leave off, offering a lament that conservative bloggers don’t engage in activism to the extent that their lefty counterparts do, thus leading to the demise of Western Civilization as we know it.

Righty Pundits vs. Lefty Activists

Ruffini thinks the rightosphere is mired in 2003 and are too shy or aloof to use their blogs to raise money for Republicans, content instead to be mere pundits.

Almost without exception, conservative bloggers are hobbyists, and those that aren’t are usually employed by old line conservative media. A lack of politically sophisticated full-time bloggers, as well as dependence on existing center-right institutions, is holding the rightroots back from becoming a full-fledged counterpart to the netroots — one that is not beholden to the Republican Party or the offline conservative movement.

Speaking only for myself — and thus becoming part of the problem! — I’m not in this to raise money for political candidates, let alone rally the base.  Blogging is an outlet for conversation.  Regular readers know my partisan inclinations but drive-by readers often guess wrong.

Constitutionally, I’m just not geared for flackery or hackery.  Hewing to the party line in order to advance The Cause comes at too high a price, I’m afraid.

A Soros for the Right

He’s intrigued by Hawkins’ idea of finding a conservative sugar daddy to finance would-be activist hacks.

On the other hand, you could have one conservative donor with deep pockets who could hand out, let’s say, twenty $25,000 grants, for two years in a row, and they could double the size the blogosphere.

How?

Well, there are a number of bloggers who could go full time if they could add $25,000 a year to the money they’re making off of advertising. There are other bloggers who could use that money to advertise their blogs. Some other people could use the money to recruit talent and do reporting. Given that the traffic in the blogosphere tends to be heavily concentrated in the top blogs, of which there are a relatively small number, you could see the size of those blogs dramatically increase with these grants.

This strikes me as rather problematic.  For one thing, without conducting a formal census, I’m pretty sure there are more than twenty existing blogs.  So, adding another twenty would not “double the size the blogosphere.”  Even if the $25k was only a one-time deal, adding another forty wouldn’t do it, either.

More importantly, what is it that we’d be getting for this money?  A gang of people who couldn’t attract enough of an audience with their blogs to make a go of it before getting an infusion are suddenly going to be the next Daily Kos?  For $12 an hour, no less?

Oddly, the actual Daily Kos — a Lefty Democrat with no ideological qualms about subsidies  — managed to make a go of it through sheer entrepreneurial zeal.  Something doesn’t smell right here.

Do We Really Need a Rightroots?

Beyond that, I simply reject the premise of this Movement to Create a Movement (not to be confused with Hank Williams Jr.’s failed effort to create a Coalition to Ban Coalitions).

First, I would submit that there are a plethora of activist blogs on the starboard side of the blogosphere.  Red State, TownHall, The Next Right, Right Wing News, and others already banging the drum and rattling the can.

Second, it’s far from clear to me that it much matters.  Yes, the Netroots are way ahead of us in organizing.  They got first mover advantage because 1) they were galvanized by coming out on the wrong end of the 2000 election brouhaha and then the Iraq War and 2) they’re younger and thus more attuned to the latest technology.  But Republicans are quickly catching up, simply copying what’s worked for their opponents and innovating on their own.

Sure, it looks like our side’s down at the moment.  The 2006 midterms were a bloodbath and it’s looking like we’ll go back-to-back come Tuesday.    Might I suggest that this has nothing whatever to do with the comparative organization of the two sides online but rather the poor job Republican politicians did when given the chance?

Yes, Barack Obama raised a truckload of money, partly through superb organization online.  Then again, so did Ron Paul.  Frankly, John McCain would have, too, had he heeded my advice and opted out of federal funds for the general election campaign.   In any case, it’s the candidates, not their blogging entourage, that mostly matters.

Back on January 2 of this year, I made a number of predictions for 2008, among which was this:

Ron Paul will take at least third place in several primaries, much to the surprise of many, and will not drop out of the race until the last vote is counted. His candidacy will lead to no lasting change in the Republican Party.

So far, Ron Paul is proving me correct. He did manage to take third in 17 primaries, and he’s actually on the Presidential ballot right now in Montana. So now all that’s left is for him to have no lasting impact on the Republican party. And I think he’s pretty much assured that now.

The Libertarian Party Candidate admonished me for “remaining neutral” in the presidential race and not stating whom I will vote for in November. It’s true; I have done exactly that due to my respect and friendship and support from both the Constitution and Libertarian Party members. I remain a lifetime member of the Libertarian Party and I’m a ten-term Republican Congressman. It is not against the law to participate in more then one political party. Chuck Baldwin has been a friend and was an active supporter in the presidential campaign.

I continue to wish the Libertarian and Constitution Parties well. The more votes they get, the better. I have attended Libertarian Party conventions frequently over the years.

In some states, one can be on the ballots of two parties, as they can in New York. This is good and attacks the monopoly control of politics by Republicans and Democrats. We need more states to permit this option. This will be a good project for the Campaign for Liberty, along with the alliance we are building to change the process.

I’ve thought about the unsolicited advice from the Libertarian Party candidate, and he has convinced me to reject my neutral stance in the November election. I’m supporting Chuck Baldwin, the Constitution Party candidate.

If, after reading this, you asked yourself, “What’s the Constitution Party?” Then, well, you’ve proved my point. But for those who are curious, info about the Constitution Party can be found here.

For those of you curious about what this Chuck Baldwin fellow is all about, Dave Wiegel has got some link roundups of Baldwin’s writing, including this tidbit, in which he claims that the 9/11 attacks were a punishment from God. Or China–it’s a bit muddy:

Who do you think is the benefactor of these fanatical, Islamic states that carried out and or facilitated these terrorist acts? Communist China, that is who. Moreover, who is China’s benefactor? The United States. This kind of nonsense must stop and must stop now!

There is one more lesson. Our Founding Fathers knew that our nation’s protection was ultimately in the hands of God. Freedom and security are the blessings of God. Since God was no idle spectator when our country was birthed, He is no idle spectator today. Both blessing and judgment belong to Him. He can accomplish either according to His will.

It is, therefore, imperative that America returns to God! For nearly a half-century, we have forsaken the moral principles of Heaven. We have legally murdered too many unborn babies. We have too readily accepted aberrant, sexual behavior. We kicked Heaven out of our schools, out of our homes, and out of our hearts. As a result, God is giving us a little taste of Hell.

Perhaps I’m out of touch with the majority of Americans, what with my fancy book learning and my preference for craft beers over Budweiser, but selling a guy who thinks that 9/11 is God/China’s punishment/declaration of war for our sins/technology transfers as the next President of the United States doesn’t strike me as a move likely to lead to any significant impacts on the Republican Party, much less politics as a whole.

Hillary Clinton’s speech is the big draw tonight at the Democratic Convention.  She’s going to have to convince a lot of people  — perhaps starting with herself — to put aside their grudges and voter for Barack Obama to be the next president.

Matt Yglesias echoes my longstanding view that this will happen organically and notes a recent parallel:

As you may recall, several months ago it looked as if one of America’s two major political parties was going to have a serious “party unity” problem. Their nominating contest produced a winner who’d prevailed against divided opposition without ever proving himself to be a clear majority choice anywhere. What’s more, the party’s base was divided between a substantial element that strongly approved of the party’s unpopular incumbent president, and another substantial element that joined the majority of the public in disapproving of his job performance. What’s more, the winner had a long history of personal and professional tensions with key stakeholders in his party’s political movement and with leading party politicians.

He’s referring, of course, to John McCain.  While a not insignificant number of Republicans still remain less than enthusiastic about him as their standard bearer, almost all have come around to its inevitability.  Few people who voted in the Republican primaries, perhaps excepting the Ron Paul crowd, will seriously consider Obama.

Matt argues that the transformation happened “by shifting attention off the internally controversial of their nominee and his relationship to other party figures and on to the internally uncontroversial subject of how awful the other political party is.”  I would argue that this happened without much help from Team McCain but is the natural state of affairs for partisans.

Slate’s John Dickerson, likewise, has thought the talk about a lasting riff between Obama and Clinton supporters was nonsense.  But, he confesses, “I’m getting wobbly. ”

In the two and a half months since Barack Obama won the nomination, he’s been trying to convince Hillary’s supporters—but his standing with them has gotten only worse. Roughly 30 percent of Clinton voters say they won’t vote for him, and this is not a one-poll anomaly. The number is the same in the Pew, ABC, and CNN polls. That’s as bad as it was during the heat of the Democratic primary.

[...]

Whatever role these PUMAs (”Party Unity My Ass”) ultimately play, we are learning that Barack Obama’s ability to persuade is limited. This has obvious implications for the coalition he needs to build to win, but it also raises questions about the way he intends to govern. He’s promised he can rally the nation to change, but it may be that he can rally only a certain constituency (and boy can he rally them) rather than being able to sway opinions and emotions across several constituencies.

I must confess, that I thought the healing would have taken place by now.  At times, it does seem like Team Obama has gone out of its way to poke Hillary supporters in the eye, as with the hiring of Patty Solis Doyle or by not even pretending that Hillary Clinton had any shot whatsoever to get the VP nod.

But, seriously, it’s simply bizarre to contemplate that all that many Clinton supporters are going to vote for McCain in a huff.  The amount of public policy light between the two Democratic contenders was miniscule, whereas McCain is a rock solid Republican on all but a handful of issues.  One can’t imagine, for example, partisans of Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee flocking to Obama in a huff.

Team McCain has launched an exciting new program that, as WaPo’s Paul Fahri puts it, “combines the features of ‘AstroTurf’ campaigning with the sort of customer-loyalty programs offered by airlines, hotel chains, restaurants and the occasional daily newspaper.”

Here’s how McCain’s site puts it:

Help spread the word about John McCain on news and blog sites. Your efforts to help get the message out about John McCain’s policies and plan for the future is one of the most valuable things you can do for this campaign. You know why John McCain should be the next President of the United States and we need you to tell others why.

Select from the numerous web, blog and news sites listed here, go there, and make your opinions supporting John McCain known. Once you’ve commented on a post, video or news story, report the details of your comment by clicking the button below. After your comments are verified, you will be awarded points through the McCain Online Action Center.

Just when you thought your comment sections were safe from Ron Paul’s supporters!  And, so far as I know, Paul wasn’t offering any fabulous prizes.

Ezra Klein is somewhat bemused by the whole thing.

[I]f you’d like to become part of the McCain action team, go here for some suggested blogs to spam and today’s talking points. Did you know, for instance, that “John McCain has a comprehensive economic plan that will create millions of good American jobs, ensure our nation’s energy security, get the government’s budget and spending practices in order, and bring relief to American consumers?”

I’m not sure whether to be relieved or miffed that OTB didn’t make the cut.  I am, however, amused that InstaPundit, which hasn’t had comments in six years or so, did. Denise Williams, who also missed out on free spam, observes, “This is a perfect opportunity for those of you who are grammar and spelling challenged and cannot form independent thought.”

The odd thing is that this is actually begins with the basis of a good idea:  Give people information and have them engage in the comments sections of skeptical or hostile blogs.  Inevitably, though — especially if there’s a points system and prepacked talking points — it’s going to be a bunch of drive-by yahoos pasting in tangentially-relevant comments and going away.  This will have precisely the opposite of the intended effect.

UPDATE: A correspondent informs me that he stumbled upon that page “a few months ago” and observes that the fact we’re just now learning about it means it’s not creating its desired effect.  Quite bizarre.

Ron Paul has officially ended his quest for the Republican nomination, months after John McCain secured enough delegates to win, and is using his war chest to start something called The Campaign for Liberty.

The new entity will be used to push a slate of libertarian-minded Republican candidates for public office in local districts nationwide, according to a description provided to ABC News by the Paul campaign. Paul also recently published a new book on his political philosophy, The Revolution: A Manifesto.

The Texas congressman’s campaign to win the Republican nomination raised about $33 million in nine months, and he and his organizers hope to reignite that grassroots support for the new organization. They’re setting a goal of raising $35 million over the next year.

Despite the dedication and moxie of Paul’s supporters, maintaining that level of interest without the vehicle of Paul’s presidential campaign could be difficult, especially given the frenetic, laissez faire interaction between Paul and his supporters through the presidential campaign. The congressman in many ways served as a figurehead, while independent actors drawn to his message did most of the organizing.

The Liberty Campaign is meant as a means for harnessing some of that energy and maintaining interest on a more micro level, by recruiting like-minded people to seek political office.

While it likely won’t generate the same buzz as his presidential campaign, this strikes me as a much more profitable use of his time and that of his followers. True libertarians are a tiny minority in American politics (indeed, it’s debatable whether Paul himself qualifies) but we have a strong libertarian strand running through our culture. It’s quite feasible that, with proper organization and funding, the Campaign could recruit small government-minded folks to run for Republican seats, especially in the West and Northeast where Evangelical Christians have less sway.

Realistically, this will have to be done mostly at the local level, working to get people elected to school boards, city councils, and state legislatures rather than prestige “national” offices. That, incidentally, is how the religious right built themselves into such a force within the GOP.

It remains to be seen whether Ron Paul, unlike Ross Perot, can build a movement without himself in the center.

One of Barack Obama’s key advantages in building grassroots support, especially among young people usually not apt to vote, has been his innovative use of the latest Web techniques, including the integration of social networking technologies. Not only did he lap the field in getting “friends” on Facebook and MySpace but he actually hired the guy who invented Facebook to work for him. This translated into a viral campaign and certainly boosted a staggering fundraising haul. Obama may have, as Micah Sifry suggests, built something that will sustain itself even after the campaign is over.

The down side of this, as anyone who has run a blog with open comments knows, any yahoo can put whatever they want on the site and some will naturally blame the site host for those comments. Charles Johnson knows that better than perhaps anyone, as one of the fabled Four Horsemen of the Ablogalypse and the owner of perhaps the most controversial comments section of the Right Blogosphere.

Johnson has joined John Hinderacker, Pam Gellar, seeDubya (at Michelle Malkin), Carl in Jerusalem, Stacy McCain, Doug Ross and many, many others in decrying an anti-Semitic screed on “How the Jewish Lobby Works” that appeared on the site for several hours until a blogstorm erupted and the site moderators took that down and apparently started a major effort to scrub the site for other potentially embarrassing content. Which, naturally, spawned charges of a cover-up.

Marc Danziger, Patrick Frey, Sean Hackbarth, Patrick Ruffini and others have very calm, rational takes on this that I hope will spread as the facts come out.

Danziger also has several good suggestions for Team Obama and any other institutional site which allows diaries and comments. Striking a balance between an energetic, open discussion and protecting the brand is difficult. MyObama has leaned too far towards the former and is apparently now correcting course. They’ve certainly got the resources to do that and they would have been foolish not to at this stage. And, it would seem, the McCain campaign needs to follow suit. The fact of the matter is that most people have no clue how these sites work and it’s far too easy to demagogue these incidents to take the risk of an absolute free-for-all under your logo if you’re running for high office.

UPDATE: Cernig and mattbastard suspect foul play involving Ron Paul, cutting-and-pasting, and some amorous rodents. No, seriously.

Yet another reason to monitor what’s being posted on one’s site.

Jim Henley assesses the complete and utter failure that was the Ron Paul campaign for the Republican presidential nomination:

Paul failed to win any states, to move the GOP debate in his direction, to accrue significant delegates or to leverage his fund-raising into a third-party run. And word is he’s staying quiet about endorsing an independent because he doesn’t want the Congressional GOP leadership to strip him of committee assignments come the fall. Paul accomplished the one thing he’s always been good at: using political appeals to get people to send money. I don’t feel freer.

But other than that, he did a super job. Revolution!

As has been long expected, former Rep. Bob Barr has announced that he’s running for President as a Libertarian.

Former Republican Rep. Bob Barr has announced that he’s running for president as a Libertarian.

His candidacy would be a wild card in the White House race and many believe it would hurt Republican Sen. John McCain.

Barr made the announcement Monday at a news conference. He first must win the Libertarian nomination at the party’s national convention that begins May 22. Party officials consider him a front-runner thanks to the national profile he developed as a Georgia congressman from 1995 to 2003.

This is, I think, bad news for McCain. That said, I’m sure there’s a few libertarian-leaning Obama supporters who might find Barr’s run tempting if he can make a real go at it. (Like, for example, this writer.) Barr already has a website up here. All politics aside, let me just say that the design on his site is really clean and easy on the eyes. Campaign web designers, take note!

UPDATE:

In the comments below, yetanotherjohn asks why Bob Barr as the Libertarian candidate really matters, given the poor performance of Libertarian candidates in the past. Here’s why I think it does:

(a) As a former Congressman, Bob Barr has more credibility than any Libertarian candidate in recent years. This will result in more and better media coverage, which translates into better returns.

(b) It’s about the electoral college, not overall popular vote, and Barr could make a difference in swing states. As my colleague Dave Schuler points out, rightly, this Presidential race is going to be won on the margins. Bob Barr is an attractive candidate for conservatives disaffected with McCain who wouldn’t dream of voting for a Democrat.

(c) If Ron Paul doesn’t pursue a third-party candidacy, Bob Barr is an attractive candidate for his supporters who, though small in number, are well organized and can raise money.

(d) I have seen Bob Barr on TV many times, and he does not come off as crazy. This is important. It ensures that he will be taken more seriously and lead to better quality coverage.

Obviously, Barr is probably not going to be elected President, but I do think that he’s a strong third party candidate. I’m hoping that he’s credible enough that his really strong, sound rhetoric on civil liberties will help both McCain and Obama strengthen their policies and rhetoric in that direction even more–both candidates already have strong civil liberty instincts, and it’d be nice if the political winds pushed them to coincide with those.

Andrew Malcolm reports that “the forces of Rep. Ron Paul have been organizing across the country to stage an embarrassing public revolt against Sen. John McCain when Republicans gather for their national convention in St. Paul at the beginning of September.” What form that’d take is decidedly unclear:

According to a recent Boston Globe tally, Paul has a grand total of 19 Republican delegates to Romney’s 260, Huckabee’s 286 and McCain’s 1,413.

The last three months Paul’s forces, who donated $34.5 million to his White House effort and upwards of one million total votes, have, as The Ticket has noted, been fighting a series of guerrilla battles with party establishment officials at county and state conventions from Washington and Missouri to Maine and Mississippi. Their goal: to take control of local committees, boost their delegate totals and influence platform debates.

Paul is, at best, a nuisance candidate. He’s raised wads of cash but he spent little of it and made nary a dent in the primary process. It would be absurd to give a guy who received less than one percent of the amassed delegates at the convention a platform for harming the party.

Elizabeth Edwards, who despite no public policy credentials other than having been married to a one-term senator and yet oddly seems to get op-ed space in the major papers whenever she requests it, has a rather strange editorial in today’s NYT whining about how the mainstream media is failing in its duty to inform the public.

The first several paragraphs make the silly argument that the press covers only the drama of the race and ignores the issues, with the effect that “voters who take their responsibility to be informed seriously enough to search out information about the candidates are finding it harder and harder to do so, particularly if they do not have access to the Internet.” This, frankly, is nonsense. There’s so much information out there that it’s virtually impossible for those who can’t devote full time to immersing themselves in it to read it all. And who are these people who are simultaneously starving for information about Joe Biden’s health care proposals and yet lack Internet access? Presumably, there are people who are poor and don’t work in a connected office who are interested in public policy. But there’s always the public library.

Interspersed in this is a more interesting, if not particularly novel, complaint: That the press decides who the legitimate candidates are.

What’s more, the news media cut candidates like Joe Biden out of the process even before they got started. Just to be clear: I’m not talking about my husband. I’m referring to other worthy Democratic contenders. Few people even had the chance to find out about Joe Biden’s health care plan before he was literally forced from the race by the news blackout that depressed his poll numbers, which in turn depressed his fund-raising.

[...]

Who is responsible for the veil of silence over Senator Biden? Or Senator Dodd? Or Gov. Tom Vilsack? Or Senator Sam Brownback on the Republican side?

The decision was probably made by the same people who decided that Fred Thompson was a serious candidate. Articles purporting to be news spent thousands upon thousands of words contemplating whether he would enter the race, to the point that before he even entered, he was running second in the national polls for the Republican nomination. Second place! And he had not done or said anything that would allow anyone to conclude he was a serious candidate. A major weekly news magazine put Mr. Thompson on its cover, asking — honestly! — whether the absence of a serious campaign and commitment to raising money or getting his policies out was itself a strategy.

This is fair enough. Then again, Thompson was a more plausible contender than Dodd or Vilsack or Brownback for the same reason that Hillary Clinton and John Edwards and Barack Obama — are relative novices — were. It’s a Catch-22: Candidates with name recognition and decent poll numbers are deemed legitimate enough to warrant press coverage but without press coverage it’s very hard to build name recognition and poll numbers.

Then again, Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul managed to do so.

The press, while holding a certain public trust, is ultimately not a collective but rather a myriad of private businesses that together form a web. Do we really expect the Big 3 networks, already losing viewers at a rapid rate, to devote their 8-12 minutes of nightly political coverage equally among all declared candidates? Or to spend it on the eye-glossing details of Joe Biden’s health plan rather than the interesting kerfuffle of the day?

Similarly, newspaper circulation is declining in almost every market. Papers have more space to devote to features than the television networks and, sure enough, they provide more in-depth coverage. But how often are they supposed to print charts comparing the health plans of the various candidates? If they do so once, are they good? Or must they do so repeatedly to reach occasional readers or those who happened not to read that particular edition?

Here’s the thing: If the public displayed an appetite for these things, the businesses would cater to it. Instead, readers demand more comic strips, horoscopes, recipes, movie listings, gardening tips, “human interest stories,” “good news,” and so forth.

At the same time, though, the incredibly tiny minority of us who are interested in public policy have more ability than ever in human history to get that information in as much detail as we want, as often as we want, and at a time that is convenient to us. That’s a pretty good trade-off.

John Edwards, Joe Biden, Chris Dodd, Mitt Romney, and the others lost, not because the press didn’t cover them properly but because the public looked them over and didn’t see them as “presidential.” It’s probably true that most people couldn’t tell you much about the health plans of these guys. But, really, who cares? There was never much chance that these people would be president. Why waste your time reading their white papers?

Hillary Clinton won the Pennsylvania primary by ten points [actually, 8.6* or whatever**], continuing her string of large state victories and thereby keeping her dim hopes for the presidency alive.

Unfortunately for Clinton, the press is treating this is a foregone conclusion, despite inconsistent polls and a hard fought six week battle. ABC’s Jennifer Parker:

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., has won the Pennsylvania primary vote as expected, claiming victory in a Philadelphia speech.

“Some people counted me out and said to drop out but the American people don’t quit, and they deserve a president who doesn’t quit, either,” Clinton told supporters at a victory rally after walking out to Tom Petty’s song “I Won’t Back Down.”

“We were up against a formidable opponent who outspent us 3-1… trying to knock us out of the race,” Clinton said of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., “Well the people of Pennsylvania had other ideas today.”

Apropos of nothing, really, but the choice of songs is amusing for reasons other than her having started the race with every conceivable advantage.

George W. Bush used [it] in his 2000 Presidential campaign. When Petty found out, he threatened to sue, as he did not support Bush. Bush stopped using the song but won the election anyway. Petty’s home state of Florida decided the election when Bush won the state by a very slim margin.

Petty performed this for Al Gore at his house an hour after he conceded the election (the second time) to George W. Bush.

But I digress.

Most of the postmortem has focused on two issues: demographics and the impact of the negativity of the primary campaign on the eventual general election race with John McCain. David Paul Kuhn for The Politico:

For all the campaigning and money spent, Hillary Rodham Clinton won Pennsylvania with the same base of white women, working-class voters and white men that revived her candidacy in Ohio last month. The demography that has defined the Democratic race went largely unchanged, according to exit polls.

To Clinton’s relief, Pennsylvania proved more of a repeat of her win in Ohio rather than an echo of Wisconsin, where Obama won with the support of white men and blue-collar Democrats while neutralizing Clinton’s base of white female support.

There were few surprises in Pennsylvania, according to the exit polls conducted by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International for television networks and The Associated Press. Clinton held about 65 percent of white women and about 55 percent of the key swing bloc of white men, a strong showing though slightly weaker than her Ohio showing.

Clinton has now won white men in 12 states and Obama has done the same in 10 states. Obama did win more than nine in 10 black voters, continuing his unbroken support of African-Americans. And Clinton continued her trend of winning white women in all but a couple of contests. But other trends may prove disconcerting for Obama.

Obama won six in 10 voters age 29 and under. But Clinton split young white voters, as she did in Ohio. In early February, Obama heavily lost whites in Missouri but narrowly won the state with the help of 57 percent of the white youth vote. Young Democrats made up only 12 percent of voters, however. In comparison, fully 22 percent were age 65 and older. Clinton won more than six in 10 senior voters while winning a majority of all voters 40 and older.

Also similar to Ohio, Clinton won nearly six in 10 of those voters without college degrees, a strong indicator of working class status. Obama’s bus tour and advertising blitz targeting working-class voters appears to have had little effect. The same can be said for the row over Obama’s remarks about “bitter” Midwestern small town voters, though that too was expected, as polling indicated that it was mostly non-Democrats who were offended. Obama won only a slight majority of voters with college degrees, again largely reflecting the Ohio results. That is a disconcerting result for Obama, as the Illinois senator needed to dominate voters with higher levels of education to overcome Clinton’s advantage in the state. It has been Obama’s base of blacks and highly educated whites that has formed the bedrock of his victories throughout the primary race.

Clinton won about six in 10 of those who had decided in either the past three days or the past week whom they were going to support, again mimicking Ohio. One in four Pennsylvania Democrats decided their vote in the past week. Six in 10 voters said they chose their candidate more than a month ago, a higher proportion than usual and one more indication that many Pennsylvanian Democrats had their vote resolved early on in the race.

As has been the case throughout the Democratic primary, the economy was the most important issue to voters. Of the more than half of voters who said the economy mattered most, Clinton won a clear majority. About one in four voters said the war in Iraq mattered most to them, and Obama won a clear majority of them. Only 14 percent of voters said health care mattered most, and Clinton won a majority of their support.

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Clinton won six in 10 Democrats who had a gun in the home and nearly six in 10 weekly churchgoers. Half of Democratic voters lived in the suburbs and a quarter in small cities or rural areas. Clinton won a strong majority of both groups, while Obama won a strong majority of those voters in cities with populations over 50,000.

On the surface, this is very bad news, indeed, for Obama. He’s comparatively weak with the very groups he’ll most need in November. Then again, he’s currently running against another left-of-center Democrat. That won’t we the case in the Fall. For all of the trepidation movement Conservatives feel about McCain, he’s well to the right of both Clinton and Obama on the issues that matter to independents.

Of more concern, though, is the sense that the bitterness of the campaign will tarnish the winner. ABC’s Gary Langer:

The tough tone of the Pennsylvania Democratic campaign tarnished both candidates — more so Hillary Clinton, with 68 percent of voters saying she attacked Barack Obama unfairly. Yet it appears to have worked: Late deciders favored Clinton by a wide margin, boosting her to an essential victory in the state.

[...]

While two-thirds of voters said Clinton attacked Obama unfairly, 50 percent also said Obama unfairly attacked Clinton. Both numbers were higher than in previous primaries overall — by 16 points for Clinton and 12 for Obama — reflecting the negative tone of the campaign’s closing days.

However, voters who said Obama attacked unfairly were more apt to punish him for it: Clinton won those voters by 67-33 percent; of those who said Clinton attacked unfairly, Obama won by a narrower 55-45 percent.

The NYT editorial board, apparently, was among the “unfair” crowd. They weigh in this morning with a scathing piece entitled, “The Low Road to Victory.”

The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.

Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.

If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.

Nonsense. There’s obviously no way to know how the race would have gone had she refrained from going negative. But her 20-point advantage was a function of having been a household name since 1992. Obama was going to close the gap. Indeed, I would not have been shocked had I woken up this morning to find that he’d won a narrow victory.

Further, as Langer points out,

For many voters, moreover, it didn’t matter; more than usual decided early. Sixty-one percent said they picked their candidate more than a month ago, compared with 45 percent in previous primaries this year. Yet as noted, those who did decide late went for Clinton, reversing Obama’s edge among those who decided in the previous week to a month.

This is where Clinton deserves, but likely will not get, a lot of credit. Both candidates had six weeks to make their case in Pennsylvania and essentially unlimited money with which to do it. She won and won handily.

But, again, demographics was destiny to a large extent. Langer, again:

Among white voters who said the race of the candidates was important in their vote — albeit a small group, 13 percent of all voters — just 54 percent said they’d support Obama vs. McCain.Of the rest, 27 percent said they’d back McCain, and 16 percent said they wouldn’t vote. Whites who discounted race as an issue were 18 points more apt to favor Obama against the Republican.

This, as Dave Schuler recently noted, could well be decisive in close contests in the Fall.

UPDATE: I was swamped at the office for a couple of days, so missed out on the Pennsylvania Primary Predictions. My colleagues predicted a very narrow Clinton victory; I thought she’d win by maybe 7 or 8 points but, as noted earlier, wouldn’t have been shocked had she lost. Jim Henley and yetanotherjohn both got it right, saying Clinton would win by “10 or more” percentage points.

*UPDATE: Taegan Goddard points out that, “Though most articles this morning say Sen. Hillary Clinton beat Sen. Barack Obama last night in Pennsylvania by 10 points, the official tally actually shows her margin at 8.6%.”

UPDATE: In light of the second update, it occurs to me that the first update now needs updating: Alex Knapp’s 7-9 points was actually closer.

UPDATE:**The number keeps sliding incrementally, since they’re technically still counting. From my understanding, however, neither Al Gore nor Ron Paul can win. With 99.44% of the votes tallied, it’s 54.6% to 45.4%.