Interesting: there was a ton of justified piling on Hillary over her gas tax holiday proposal here on TNR online.  But did I miss the legions of posts on Obama supporting the farm bill?  Check out David Brooks today (and for the genocide-lip-service tnr editors, note the effect on starvation in Africa).  Can somebody explain why this Iowa pander isn't a few times worse than a summer gas tax pander?  

lymon, did Hillary oppose the farm bill?

In the event, neither Obama nor Hillary, nor McCain, voted for or against the farm bill in the Senate. The three of them, and Ted Kennedy, were the only senators not voting on the bill. I know McCain says he would veto the bill, and good on him for that, but when he had a chance to do something about the bill in the real world, rather than in his imagination, he did nothing.

Also, Joe Lieberman voted for the farm bill. What's up with that? Are there really that many Republican farmers in Connecticut?

Yes, lymon, I can explain.  Obama didn't invent the farm bill, and to vote against it in an election year is political death.  So, there is simply no choice regardless of his opinion and regardless of the impact.  Hillary wasn't backed into a corner where she had no alternative other than to push the gas tax holiday.  

more o

I agree with Michelle's basic point, but things are a bit more complicated.  Basically, with nothing left to lose, Hillary discovered her inner Republican and began running as one, more openly trolling for racist votes, climbing aboard the Republican "elitist" meme, etc.  Certainly this works better for her in part because it is really who she is, a Republican who, due to circumstances (her marriage) and her generally opportunistic approach to politics, found her "home" in the Democratic party.  She's still the Goldwater Girl she was at the beginning, just with a few dozen layers of political varnish courtesy of Bill.

However, it is also freedom attributable to being at the tail end of the political calendar.  At this point, she has no reason to worry about how her turn to the right might be exploited against her in states like California.  That's done.  She can pander freely to West Virginia and Kentucky with no worries.  More broadly, in moving over to run the Republican campaign against her fellow Democrat, she found rhetorical freedom precisely because, in the Democratic race, that is unoccupied turf.  Previously, she had to share a crowded rhetorical space with Edwards, Obama, etc. and was not the one showing well in the crowed.  With the Republican turf all to herself, she has a much easier time of it.  Of course, this would have been very perilous early on as she could have been pushed right off the edge.

An additional element is that while Hillary has nothing left to lose, Obama has nothing left to gain.  If this were early on, he would be trying to figure out how to punish her for her Republican tilt.  At these point, he has already won, cannot win anything more, and has to worry about alienating her supporters in the general.  Thus, Obama really has "benched" his stars in the final minutes which allows Hillary to look better than she is.

Even so, Hillary has not really done any better.  Just by applying polls to delegate, I estimated prior to PA, Hillary's "last stand" that the PA-IN-NC exchange would most likely be a wash with a slight bias (1-2 delegate) toward Obama.  In fact, he picked up net 3.  At around the same time, I estimated that the remaining races would net Hillary about 20, with 30 her best case.  As of now, it looks like about 25, smack in the middle, largely because of her improved results in WV and KY.  Put it all together and Hillary ends up about 2 delegates ahead of what you could see even before PA was the most likely outcome.  That is what her latest pander right-ward has gained for her.  She might have done better, but, as usual, her political tin-ear betrayed her.  She paid a price for her gas-tax pander and some price for her "hard-working whites" race-baiting.  So, any notion that Hillary has suddenly discovered how to win, just too late, is, at best, extremely speculative.  With Obama sort of sitting on his hands, she will have gone through races, starting with PA, with 566 delegates at stake.  She will have gained about 22 net, closer to the bottom than the top of the net 20-30 range that was already evident in the polls before she came out as a Republican and discovered her inner cocktail waitress.

Any hope that Hillary will "go gracefully" is forlorn.  I continue to believe that her race from nowhere to nowhere is more about her ego than anything else, with a healthy does of spite thrown in.  Now that she feels she has an audience of her own (the Republican wing of the Democratic party), she is going to cling to the stage absolutely as long as possible, Democratic party be damned.  The only upside I see is that more and more of her erstwhile supporters are going to come to see the narcissistic, self-aggrandizing Hillary that some of us have recognized all along.  I just hope that by 2016, worthier women than she have will have emerged to run for president so that we don't have to live through the Return of the Political Zombie.

There is one other point worth making.  Some pundits seem to think that, even though it was already too late for Hillary, her recent, essentially chimerical, gains, are portentous for the general election.  Not really.  Take a look at this wonderful NY Times piece about the electoral map of Appalachia, the very region that represents the core of Hillary's strength in the east of the country.

www.nytimes.com/.../17blow.html

Of 410 counties stretching the length of Appalachia from Alabama to the souther tier of New York, Obama has won only 48.  But in the general four years ago, Kerry won only 48 in the region and Gore eight years ago won only 66. This is Republican country -- poorer, older, less-educated, insular, immobile.  Whatever her results against Obama, this was no more going to be a winner for Hillary in the general than it would be for him.  It is reasonable to surmise that, given the Demographics, there are cleavages within the Democratic party, as to age, income, education, etc., that mirror the large cleavage between the two parties.  Thus, as the Democrat who looks most like a Republican (visually as well as metaphorically), Hillary is the Queen of Appalachia.  But she was never going to be once the card-carrying Republicans appeared on the scene.

We cannot be rid of Hillary Clinton soon enough.  If we can beat her in NY in 2012, maybe she can move to West Virginia and run for the senate there.  Or, even better, back to Arkansas.  I here there may also be a senate seat available in Illinois.

According to Brooks' article, McCain has been railing against it, Obama supported it.  Obama and Clinton (and McCain) have some political capital to speak of.  I believe that Clinton supported the farm bill as well, but on this point I'm 99% with the Obama-ites in that the primary is over (which might be why Brooks didn't raise it).  I hope Obama waits until the end of the primaries to declare victory though, and not based on a false statistical rubric.  But back to the farm bill: why the selective outrage?  Even on energy, I appreciate Obama's refusal to pander on the gas tax, but pandering to silicon valley on dubious alternative energy programs and not echoing John McCain on nuclear power deserves attention.

For McCain to "oppose" the farm bill is a pander to the left.  For Obama and Hillary to support it is a pander to the right.  Each needs to position against type in order to pay the lowest possible political price.  The right will not punish McCain for his pander.  The left will not punish Obama (or Hillary had she been the nominee) for pandering in the other direction.

Sometimes politics is just politics.  Politicians do not have unlimited freedom of action.  The question, and the thing that distinguishes one from the other, is what they do with the space they are given and what they seek to do and are able to do to change the political landscape to create opportunity where previously there was none.

That, in the end, is what is so appealing about Obama.  The possibility, although far from a certainty, that he has both the skills and the motivation to move us away from the current stasis that is so bad for the country.  Anyone who thinks either Hillary or McCain is an agent for change, or even aspires to be .  .  .  

One might also point out in re the fam bill that Obama is a senator from ILLINOIS.  Now, as a native Iowan, I am fullly aware and agreement that the farm bill is massively stupid, ineffective boondoggle, one that I am against.  However, I am also aware how much it plays to the folks back home, regardless of its merits.  As an East Coast urban "elite", it is easy for me to decry bad ideas like the farm  bill, it ultimately does me no good.  But the farmers back in Iowa, and Illinois, don't feel the same way.  And lest we forget, Illinois, outside of Chicago, is a farm state. Obama's position strikes me as nothing more as the expected politcial posturing of a Midwestern pol.

Hmmm -- No one is quite sure when Hillary "stopped caring about the polls?"  Must have been sometime *after* that gas tax holiday proposal.  Yeah, sometime in the last two weeks she's transformed into a Profile in Courage . . .

Oh, gee. It takes a hypertalented political analyst to ferret out for us rubes that Hillary is actually Barry in drag. The truculent right thinks that she is still the Wellesley girl radical. I just love the ideologues who think from within cardboard stereotypes. The pluralism of life and the complexity of character defeats these confused Neanderthals.