Progress Illinois

Jo Becker and Christopher Drew's lengthy New York Times' article on Barack Obama's "evolution from Hyde Park independent to mainstream Chicago politician" is meant to inform our understanding of how the Democratic nominee will build a viable electoral coalition this year. But the piece is more valuable for it's insight into how an Obama administration might govern if elected.

Take this quote from Will Burns, a former aide who consulted on Obama's now famous 2002 anti-war speech:

“What’s fascinating about Barack is what he’s trying to do is reframe and change the discourse so you build support for liberal alternatives within the electorate. He has an ability to frame stuff so it’s not an all or nothing proposition.”

This statement embodies the hope that his backers on the left see in Obama. Unlike the last Democratic nominee, who was badly damaged by the idea that his rhetoric was hollow and politically opportunistic, Obama seems to understand that a progressive agenda, while favored by voters on its merits, doesn't yet enjoy a popular political mandate. To get there, Obama seems focused on acknowledging and discrediting conservative policies while cultivating support for his own nuanced positions among a variety of voters who hold divergent views.

This "pragmatic" approach is rooted more in his experiences as a community organizer than his rise through Hyde Park. It will hopefully put him in a stronger position to not only win the race in November, but once elected, to push progressive policies more forcefully than any recent Democratic president.

Speaking at The New Yorker Festival this morning, Rep. Rahm Emanuel called Barack Obama the "presumptive nominee." From the Huffington Post:

"At this point, Barack is the presumptive nominee," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel during the New Yorker's magazine conference. "Hillary can't win but something could happen that could effect that Barack could lose the nomination."

Emanuel wouldn't go so far as to say that Clinton should drop out. "Next question!" he declared when asked. But his voice does carry political sway.

The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder offered the following analysis of Emanuel's remarks: "[H]is words reflect the developing consensus of many high-profile Clinton supporters. The race is over, but let's let Clinton will determine when and how to exit."

Shortly after Ambinder blogged about Rahm's comments, House Democratic Caucus communications director Sarah Feinberg walked them back a bit:

I would like to clarify two points:

1. All Rahm said was that Senator Obama is clearly now the frontrunner, which by and large means, because of the calendar, he is the presumptive nominee, at this point. He was stating the obvious. Its about the calendar.

2. The "presumptive" quote is only accurate if you ignore the several sentences proceeding this half sentence and the several minutes of conversation that followed it. I'd call it selective quoting. Congressman Emanuel also stated about 90 seconds after this that he thought Senator clinton can still win the nomination and he stands by that.

Of course, if it were only about the calendar, Barack should have become the "presumptive nominee" a good while ago.

Meanwhile, what MSNBC's Rachel Maddow is calling the "superdelegate drizzle" (not yet a flood) continued today.

This week the eyes of the nation moved from the Democratic Primary to the general election, and the Obama campaign is making the same transition. On Saturday, they are officially kicking off Vote for Change, a massive 50-state voter registration drive. The goal of the project is to harness the campaign's legions of volunteers across the country to drive voter participation through the roof come Election Day in November.

Broad voter registration efforts are nothing new, but as The Atlantic's Mark Ambinder reports, this could really be one for the record books:

I gather that the campaign is constructing an incredibly elaborate online interface to allow its more than a million donors and volunteers to directly persuade their neighbors through a variety of media. Names gathered from the voter registration effort will be merged with names gathered through Obama's primary efforts and the names off of the Democratic Party's integrated voter file as well as lists purchased from outside vendors.

On election day, Obama might have more than a million individuals volunteering on his behalf. That should scare the beejeesus out of the McCain campaign and the RNC.

More than a million volunteers.

As The Washington Post notes, the drive has the potential to not only boost Obama's general election chances, but also to benefit down-ticket Democrats nationwide. That includes Illinois.

In the Prairie State, there are four registration drives kicking off tomorrow. Follow the links to learn more about each event:

Waukegan at 10:00 AM

Round Lake at 10:00 AM

Joliet at 9:00 AM

Chicago at 10:00 AM

If you've never volunteered before, have no fear! Each event features a training on how to register voters before participants hit the streets to ensure a Democratic victory in November.

Rep. Melissa Bean (D-IL) is one of the Obama campaign's congressional whips, meaning that she's in charge of counting and coralling those undeclared or wavering superdelegates on Capitol Hill. Yesterday, Talking Point Memo's Greg Sargent asked Bean: "How often do super-dels raise concerns about Reverend Wright, or about Hillary's claim that Obama struggles with blue collar whites?" Here's her response:

"I have not heard that as a reservation from anybody. I only heard about Reverend Wright in the context of people saying it made them decide to step forward sooner to declare their support for Senator Obama."

If this is true, than the congressional superdelegates are quite a bit more shrewd than the media has given them credit for. For weeks and weeks, the talking heads have been telling us that the Wright controversy would cause superdelegates to second-guess Obama (while ignoring that his skillful handling of the matter might, to the contrary, encourage them). Media figures have also propped up the flawed narrative -- advanced by the Clinton campaign -- that Obama's relative lack of support among working-class whites in the Democratic primaries spelled doom for his general election prospects.

Well, if Bean's account is accurate, the congressional superdelegates didn't bite. Good for them.

In December, The American Prospect's Mark Schmitt wrote a widely-circulated piece on Barack Obama's "Theory of Change." In it, he assessed Obama's calls for bipartisanship, hope, and common purpose not as naive or overly idealistic, but as shrewd and transformational.

As Schmitt explained, by taking seriously Republican arguments and policies, which are often made in bad faith, Obama would be better positioned as president to show voters the true vapidity of conservative solutions and push through a progressive agenda. He would also be better suited to take advantage of Senate math, where three to five Republicans will almost certainly be necessary to break rank and pass Democratic-sponsored programs. To believers of this theory, it's the most powerful way to subvert what Schmitt calls the "unified conservative power structure."

At the Huffington Post, Matt Stoller has detailed another plank of Obama's theory of change: the ground game. By emphasizing the Internet, Alinsky-influenced leadership development, voter registration, and message discipline, he's reworked the fabric of a party apparatus dominated by the Clintons for 16 years:

The primary has been exceptionally good for party building. Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.

Given the amount of influence Obama has consolidated in such a short time, Stoller asks the right questions: Can he pivot and do the same thing against Republicans? Will he use this influence to advocate progressive causes? How can progressives "put ourselves in a position to help him take the country in a progressive direction?" While those questions are yet to be answered, it's clear that Obama's network and approach to politics are here to stay.

After a convincing showing last night, Barack Obama is turning his attention to the party's superdelegates. Lynn Sweet reports that the Illinois senator has scheduled rounds of meetings with uncommitted delegates in D.C. tomorrow. We can glean Obama's pitch from a memo that campaign manager David Plouffe sent out this morning, courtesy of The New York Times:

With the Clinton path to the nomination getting even narrower, we expect new and wildly creative scenarios to emerge in the coming days. While those scenarios may be entertaining, they are not legitimate and will not be considered legitimate by this campaign or its millions of supporters, volunteers, and donors.

We believe it is exceedingly unlikely Senator Clinton will overtake our lead in the popular vote and in fact lost ground on that measure last night. However, the popular vote is a deeply flawed and illegitimate metric for deciding the nominee – since each campaign based their strategy on the acquisition of delegates. More importantly, the rules of the nomination are predicated on delegates, not popular vote.

On Good Morning America, ABC News chief Washington correspondent George Stephanopoulos predicted superdelegates "will come three, four, five at a time" for Obama beginning today, essentially ending the nomination fight.

"More superdelegates will come out today for Barack Obama – they and this nomination will be locked up.”

Since the Pennsylvania primary, the Clinton campaign has succeeded in getting the media -- particularly the cable news talking heads -- to adopt an extremely flawed narrative: that her success among white working class voters in battleground state primaries calls into question Barack Obama's electability in the general election. The resulting conventional wisdom is that Obama has a "problem" with white voters.

Well, as we and numerous others have noted, using demographic voting trends from the Democratic primary as evidence of how either candidate would perform among certain groups in the general election is utterly nonsensical.

But more importantly, national polling data simply doesn't back up the claim that Obama should be concerned about his appeal among the white electorate. In fact, the data suggests the exact opposite: that Clinton may have a problem with black voters.

(More after the jump ...)

Faced with a barrage of ads from the Clinton campaign criticizing his opposition to a federal gas tax holiday, Obama hit back hard yesterday, ridiculing Hillary's position. In response, the Clinton campaign argued that Obama's comments on the issue shouldn't be taken "seriously" due to his support for a gas tax holiday as a state senator in 2000:

Phil Singer, a spokesman for Clinton, responded, "Considering that Sen. Obama voted to suspend the gas tax three times when gas cost less than $2 a gallon and has an energy lobbyist chairing his Indiana campaign, it's hard to take his latest criticisms very seriously."

But Obama should be taken seriously on this issue precisely because he grappled with it while in the Illinois Senate. Indeed, as I argued yesterday, how he came to his current position perfectly illustrates the virtues of legislative experience.

Furthermore, Singer's assertion that Obama voted for a gas tax holiday "three times" is quite misleading. It leaves the impression that he repeatedly signed off on such proposals as a state senator, only to change his position once in the presidential arena.

In fact, two of those votes were on the same bill -- SB 1310, which suspended the gas tax in Illinois for six months in 2000. Obama first voted [PDF] in favor of the measure on March 8 of that year. The bill then stalled, but was resurrected during a special session that June, at which time he again supported it [PDF]. The third vote, meanwhile, came on the House''s version of a gas tax bill -- HB 2873 -- which Obama voted for on April 15, 2000.

So the "three times" Obama voted for cutting the gas tax all came in a four-month period in 2000. Having been signed into law, the gas tax suspension occurred during the final six months of that year. And citing the negligible benefits to consumers, Obama went on to repeatedly oppose efforts to permanently cut the tax the following year. Not surprisingly, he now says we shouldn't cut it at the federal level either.

As for that bipartisan group of 150 economists that backed Obama's position on the gas tax, this morning Clinton minimized all that as representing "elite opinion" which has long supported "policies that haven't worked well for hard working Americans."

Elite opinion? Um ... wow. Check out Steve Benen's appropriate skewering of those comments.

As the gas tax debate has raged this past week between the presidential candidates in Indiana, one recurring suggestion is that Barack Obama's current opposition to a national gas tax holiday is hypocritical or an example of "flip-flopping." Those making this accusation -- whether Clinton or McCain supporters -- point to Obama's vote as an Ilinois state senator in 2000 in favor of a six-month suspension of the state gas tax. For instance, in a recent web video titled "Gas Tax Hypocrisy," the Republican National Committee aired clips of Obama criticizing McCain's gas tax proposals before showing the following text:

The Illinois Republican Party has also gotten in on the act, putting out the following statement from State Sen. Matt Murphy (R-Palatine):

The gas tax moratorium passed in 2000 with Barack Obama's help lowered gas prices and saved Illinois drivers hundreds of millions of dollars. So I’m surprised to learn that Obama now opposes a federal moratorium this summer. Lowering gas prices would deliver immediate relief to American drivers and help grow our economy. It worked in Illinois, and it would work nationwide. John McCain understands the plight of hardworking American families, that's why he's proposed a moratorium on the federal gas tax when we need it most.

Let's be clear: no one should be "surprised to learn" that Obama now opposes the idea of suspending the federal gas tax.

His is not a hypocritical position or one based on political opportunism. Obama did not switch his stance in the heat of the presidential race; rather, he did so shortly after supporting the suspension in Illinois and observing the meager benefit it offered consumers.

Perhaps Murphy should talk to some of his colleagues who actually served alongside Barack in 2000. If he did so, they might point out that, after supporting the state gas tax holiday in April of that year, Obama opposed a measure to make it permanent seven months later. Why? Because he could find no evidence that the suspension passed considerable savings on to the consumer. From his November 15, 2000, floor statement (PDF):

OBAMA: [T]here is an organization, the Illinois Tax Accountability Project, that is in the process of trying to track the gap between wholesale prices and prices at the pump during the period since we took this -- we removed this tax, and what they have found so far - and the study is not yet complete, but apparently it appears that any decline in prices at the pump have been perfectly matched by declines at the wholesale level. That is, that what you essentially can attribute declines in prices to are declines at the wholesale level, that have nothing to do with the tax. That would indicate, at least at this point, that the elimination of the tax has not been passed on to the consumer. [...]

I originally voted for the suspension because I thought that it was extraordinary circumstances, given the huge hike in prices, but I don't think that we have the evidence yet to make this a permanent three-hundred- or four-hundred-million-dollar hole in the General Revenue Fund. And for that reason, I'll be voting No at this time .

Oh, and Jim Ryan? Our Republican governor who proposed the gas tax holiday that year? He too opposed making it permanent.

Indeed, there remains no evidence that the benefit to Illinois consumers during the 2000 suspension outweighed the strain put on the state's fiscal situation -- a point that Obama has been making on the stump as he defends his current stand on the issue.

As Politifact.com's Bill Adair wrote in a fact-check of the RNC video, "[I]t's not fair to call it a flip-flop when the very reason Obama opposes a suspension of the gas tax now is because he concluded that it didn't work when he supported one in the past."

During this race, there's been a lot of talk about the importance of "experience." But what's the point of emphasizing experience if you're only going to attack a candidate for showing the ability to learn from his?