Month: February 2008

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Super Tuesday Footnote

The morning of election day, the San Francisco Chronicle ran a piece by columnist C.W. Nevius recounting a story from Barack Obama’s 2004 campaign for the U.S. Senate. The piece was titled “Obama snub still rankles Newsom,” it says that Obama refused to have his pictured taken with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom because of the controversy swirling around Newsom’s decision to allow gay marriages in the city. Nevius quotes no less an authority than Willie Brown, the former mayor and maybe the state’s last true political kingmaker, as saying Obama told him directly that “would really not like to have his picture taken with Gavin.” Brown doesn’t give a date, but says the incident took place before an Obama fund-raiser he arranged at the Waterfront restaurant. Nevius doesn’t provide offer a date, either, beyond saying the snub happened four years ago. He gives no indication whether the incident has been reported before.

This may be a footnote in most parts of the country, but in San Francisco and perhaps in Southern California, too, the story could be damaging. The gay community in the state is very politically active and at least since the first Clinton candidacy has been a major source of support for Democrats. There are aspects to the story that make you wonder, if you’ve been in the Bay Area for awhile, whether there’s anything to it. It’s not impossible imagine Brown blowing smoke to help a candidate he favors, but I don’t see that he’s on record as supporting either Obama or Clinton. And among the story’s odd qualities is that it took four years to surface and that none of the principals speak to it. A senior Obama campaign activist who happens to be gay is quoted as saying there’s nothing to it, but the story treats the episode as fact. I heard this story discussed among some news types the day after it ran and heard anecdotally that some gay voters switched from Obama to Clinton after reading Nevius’s piece. Who would blame them? Here’s a guy who enjoys solid support from and friendly relations with gay voters in his own state who is portrayed as acting as some kind of weasel when he’s out of town.

So: where did the story come from, is it true, and can you tell anything meaningful without talking to the people involved?

Well, it would be great to have Newsom and Obama on the record, naming names. But that’s beyond my poor powers this time of night (or maybe any time). Without the principals, I think the key evidence about what happened is missing. But it’s possible to track the story back to 2004.

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Semper Berkeley

It’s national news: The Berkeley City Council voted last week to invite the U.S. Marine Corps recruiting office to leave our town. The council put the Corps on notice that if it failed to move on, it should know that its status here is one of an “uninvited and unwelcome intruder.” And last, our elected representatives expressed support for “antiwar groups residents and organizations such as Code Pink that may volunteer to impede, passively or actively, by nonviolent means, the work of any military recruiting office located in the city of Berkeley.”

Of course, things haven’t stopped there. The right-wingers are exercised, and a group of them, a clutch of Southern senators, has taken the probably predictable step of introducing a bill (the Semper Fi Act) to strip Berkeley of $2 million or so of federal earmarks approved in the last session of Congress. In its press release, the group points out that it’s trying to kill $975,000 for a project at the University of California, Berkeley, despite the fact the university had nothing to do with the City Council action besides happening to exist inside the same town limits.

The release also delights in announcing it would withdraw $243,000 set aside for “gourmet organic school lunches.” Oh, that stings, but the senators don’t know the difference between “nutritious” and “gourmet,” or believe that it means the same thng. What they’re actually referring to is a very successful and long-running project that turned an acre of weed-choked asphalt at a local middle school into a thriving organic garden. The kids at the school raise food; they learn how to prepare it, too. My guess is that the money might have been going to a project the school district has had a hard time funding: a new kitchen and cafeteria associated with the garden project. In any case, the Berkeley school district didn’t have a say in the City Council’s action, either.

And now: how about that City Council. The vote they took was intended to make a statement against the Iraq war. Why a statement was needed five years into the war and more than a year after the Marines arrived I don’t yet understand. But there it is.

I haven’t been writing about the war much lately, but I think about it every day, and the wastefulness of it on every level never fails to anger me. Beyond that, I’m more and more distressed to live in a country that has turned the military and the idea of military service into a superpatriotic cult. There’s a reason the nation was created without a large standing army and made do without one, except in the most dire emergencies, for the first 150 years after the Constitution was adopted. Beyond the mere fact of our huge armed establishment, the blind civic celebration of the military above and beyond every other institution in society is a danger to the democracy its supposed to protect.

I probably agree with most members of the City Council on the war. I have no problem with people protesting Iraq, or with people protesting the protesters, either. But I think the Marines are more than an agent of the war; in a very real way, they represent a viewpoint and are part of the debate in our society over both the war and the role of the military in society. They’re also a means by which members of the society might express their opinion of these issues; there are many thoughtful people in the ranks who are talking insightfully about the experience of war and the role of American military power in the world. Because I see the Marines, both the institution and the members, that way–as a participant in the marketplace of ideas–I think it’s misguided to try to shut them down here; to try to shut them down as a matter of public policy is simply wrong.

To do that, to shut up your opponent to score a point in an argument, betrays the ideal of free speech, one that need not and ought not rely on force or censorship. To give in to the temptation to muzzle an opinion invites intolerance from your opponent. And round and round we go.

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About Last Night

One lesson learned from Super Tuesday — one covered exclusively here, not at your CNN or your fancy East Coast paper or smart, edgy blog — is that I suck as a prognosticator. Not that I was trying to do much of that, but I was carried away oh so momentarily by a belief that an exit poll or two could lead me to some sort of interesting insight. I found it’s not true, though if you ever find yourself waiting for election returns, there are worse ways of spending your time than reading an exit poll.

Another more generally expressed lesson is that the people have spoken. I’ll just add my voice to say that Idaho, North Dakota, Kansas et cetera aside, for a Democrat to win a national election you need to win those big states where Hillary Clinton was finishing first, mostly. Just saying.

And finally: Last night I was volleying emails with my friend Pete as we watched election returns online. Perusing the count in my own county, Alameda, I checked on a whim what was happening in the Libertarian primary. With about a third of the votes counted, “Write-In” was leading a field of about a dozen identified candidates, with 67 votes. I conveyed the news to Pete, who wrote back:

“Or as Wolf Blitzer would put it: In the Libertarian contest, a highly contested contest, that contest in Alameda County, ‘Write In’ — ‘Write In’ — is leading a field of a dozen candidates. That race in Alameda County among Libertarians. 67 votes for the Libertarian candidate leading there, ‘Write In,’ besting a field of a dozen candidates right now, with a third of the precints reporting, that result right now in Alameda County among Libertarians. We’ll be watching that contest very closely throughout the night, this historic night, the biggest primary election day, now well into the night, in American history.”

I checked this morning. Write-In prevailed.

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Illinois

Comparing home state performances, it looks like Obama’s support among exit poll respondents was 68.3 percent. Clinton didn’t crack 30 percent (29.8). All sorts of ways you can spin that, but one that Obama’s folks will seize on — and rightfully so — is that he actually ran a fairly respectable race in Clinton’s home state compared to her performance in his.

And oh, yeah: Illinois is Clinton’s home state, too (born and raised there, if you’re keeping score at home).

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Exit Polls

A little experiment: Reading the primary exit polls (as reported at CNN.com, but used by other networks as well, I believe) and seeing how they track against the results. As of this writing — 9:15 ET/6:15 PT — they’ve accurately forecast how the networks would call the races in two places where it looks sort of close, Delaware (Obama) and Massachusetts (Clinton). In two other states, New Jersey and Missouri, the exit polls shows a dead heat. In any case, here’s a series of messages I sent out to my friend Pete and brother John over the last 45 minutes as I went through a few of the exit polls:

New Jersey

For what it’s worth … not much, perhaps, but we’ll see … the broadcasters’ exit poll (the one that CNN, MSNBC and perhaps others are using) gave Clinton 48.96 percent and Obama 48.64 percent (the poll doesn’t report that number; I’m extrapolating from the male/female vote percentage). I’d say that’s the very definition of “too close to call” (though of course since the Democrats aren’t running a winner-take-all contest, all this tells you is that there’s likely to be a very close division of the available delegates.

Missouri

Running the male/female exit poll numbers the same way I did for New Jersey, Missouri is another close one with Clinton holding a narrow edge: Clinton, 46.95, Obama, 45.45. Edwards took most of the rest; and there’s a category called “uncommitted” that 6 percent of the men voted in. …

Massachusetts

Clinton: 50.7

Obama: 45.88

Delaware

Obama: 48.69

Clinton: 47.26

Delaware

Biden drew 10 percent of the men’s votes in Delaware.

One pattern that’s consistent state to state: women consistently make up more than half of Democratic voters; men consistently make up more than half of Republican voters. Clinton is winning among the women in every state I’ve looked at, and Obama is winning among the men.

Connecticut

Obama: 49.51

Clinton: 45.08

New York

Well, I note that the networks seem to have called Massachusetts based on the five-point spread, Clinton over Obama, so maybe there’s something to this. Here are the numbers for New York:

Clinton: 56.54

Obama: 40.2

Is that a landslide? Not sure. If Obama winds up with 40 percent in New York and manages to get a chunk of the state’s delegates, that’s a good showing for him.

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Waiting for FROPA

Satsfcnps

Just after midnight, and it’s been raining since around noon. The forecast discussion has been saying all day that the rain will slacken after “the front” goes through, and all day long that moment — frontal passage, or FROPA in forecaster speak — has been predicted for about midnight.

What kind of front? Well, they’re hardly ever specific in the discussion; in that very cool map above — click for the larger versions — we’ve got a cold front depicted to the south and an occluded front passing over us. What’s an occluded front? This page at the University of Illinois shows a combination of fronts nearly identical to what we have over us right now.

Anyway, I just got back in from my late-night walk with The Dog, and it was just drizzling; we were out for about half an hour, and a few times the drizzle dwindled to nothing. Maybe that was FROPA

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Fifty-Two Minutes

Yesterday, my last class let out about noon, and I was scheduled to start work in San Francisco at 1 o’clock. The fantasy: I could take public transit and make it over to the city and be at my desk right on time. Reality: I know that if I leave class at noon straight up and walk down to the downtown Berkeley BART station, the first train under the Bay comes at about 12:25; with the walk from the 16th Street/Mission station on the other end, I’d be at work at 1:10.

There was an alternative: the F bus on AC Transit, which has a stop right at the student union on Bancroft Way. It departs for the city at 12:15. I could ride the F to downtown San Francisco, walk a block or so to BART, then finish the trip. I was pretty sure that it wouldn’t be any faster than just taking BART to the city, but seeing that I could ride the F for free with my student ID card and venturing forth in the spirit of experiment (and also without consulting the F timetable), I climbed on the bus. As it pulled away from the curb at quarter past the hour, I was thinking the trip from the middle of Berkeley — about 12 miles at midday — might take 30 or 35 minutes (by car at that time of day, and absent an exploding gasoline tanker along the way, the trip would take about 20 or 25 minutes).

One thing you forget about the East Bay buses if you haven’t ridden them for awhile is that, except for the rare express line, the stops are spaced maddeningly close together. In downtown areas, sometimes there’s one on every block. So progress along some streets can be slow. And it was yesterday. I noticed the route was somewhat similar to what I remembered from decades past; we even stopped at the site of the old 40th and San Pablo “station” — a shelter outside an old Rexall drugstore next to a defunct hotel that had become a small-stakes card joint called the Bank Club, as I remember it.

The F line in former days got on the freeway immediately at that point and went to San Francisco. Now, though, it throws in a long, time-consuming and seemingly pointless loop past Emeryville’s strip malls and big-box stores before finally, finally getting on Interstate 80 and crossing the Bay Bridge. The bridge portion of the trip is a highlight, because the bus puts you up high enough to see over the solid parapets across the water. We took the righthand lane yesterday, and I got my first end-to-end view of the bridge’s new eastern span (check a photo from a guy who has gotten a rep for documenting the project).

At freeway speed, that part of the trip doesn’t last long. Soon, we were off the bridge and deposited at downtown San Francisco’s doomed tabernacle of transportation, the Transbay Terminal. I say doomed because the place is going to be torn down. That fate aside, someone has seen fit to install some rather fancy new digital clocks on the passenger platforms. The one I saw when I alit from the F said 1:07. The trip took 52 minutes; the route taken was about 13.1 miles, so our average speed registered a hair over 15 mph (bear in mind that the first six miles took about 42 minutes to cover — under 9 mph; the final seven took about 10 minutes). The run I was on actually took six minutes longer than the scheduled called for.

Oh, well. The bridge view was great. But that’ll be my last trip on the F until I have some extra time to kill.

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