The Wall Street Journal's Washington Wire

February 28, 2008, 7:40 am
Political Perceptions: ‘Junk Food Polling’ You Can Just Ignore

Here’s a summary of the smartest new political analysis on the Web:
By Gerald F. Seib and Sara Murray

In their final sprint toward the March 4 primaries, the campaigns of both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are using a lot of “junk food polling” to impress voters and superdelegates—and you should just ignore it, writes MSNBC’s Tom Curry. This is the kind of polling that declares, based on some hypothetical matchup, that one candidate or the other would beat the Republican nominee in some state, and hence is the most “electable” in the fall.

Curry notes, for example, that the Obama forces want you to know “that if the Illinois senator were the Democratic nominee in November, he’d defeat Sen. John McCain in Iowa, winning 53 percent to 36 percent. This, at least according to a Des Moines Register survey of 674 Iowans last week.” Such polling is touted mostly to impress Democratic superdelegates, who can go whichever way they want in the Clinton-Obama matchup. But Curry recalls that similar polling once showed former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (who’s not even in the race any more) poised to beat Obama in Pennsylvania, and had retired Gen. Wesley Clark beating President George Bush nationally in 2004. Don’t take it all too seriously: If voters really know now who will win some state in the fall, perhaps they can also answer this: “What will be the price of gasoline at the pump on Nov. 4?”

With Obama potentially reneging on his promise to publicly finance a general election campaign, and McCain in the beginning throes of a brouhaha with the FEC about fundraising for the primaries, the high and mighty candidates’ images are already tarnishing, writes Salon’s Mike Madden. Both of them are playing into the “political drama” and trying to best each other morally, but it’s likely they’ll both just come out looking bad. “The vision of a McCain-Obama race that raises national politics to lofty new heights is starting to fray,” Madden notes. “If the campaign begins with two self-styled reformers squabbling in the media over which one is actually the biggest hypocrite, it’s hard not to wonder what might come next.”

Time.com’s Karen Tumulty looks at Bill Clinton’s trip on the campaign trail, which has been a lesson in irony as the former hope candidate tries to convince voters that it takes more than talk of hope and change to run the country. Bill Clinton’s contributions have been a double-edged sword as the man who could once woo crowds better than any candidate is outshone by Obamamania, leaving more of his detrimental qualities in the wake. “Bill’s presence has become a reminder of the past and of the style of politics that Barack Obama has promised to bring to an end,” Tumulty writes. “Even worse, say many Democrats, Bill has put his wife’s political career in jeopardy by displaying the same character traits that almost ran his own presidency off the rails—a lack of self-control and an excess of self-absorption.”

Campaign 2008 has shown that the evangelical vote is alive and, well, maturing, the Council on Foreign Relations’ Walter Russell Mead writes in Atlantic Monthly. That’s hardly clear in all the analysis you’ve heard so far, he notes: “This political season has only heightened the confusion over the future of religion in the nation’s culture and politics. Journalistic coverage of evangelical Christianity has oscillated between confident declarations that the Christian right is dead and horrified discoveries of its continuing influence.” But the reality is that the religious vote is spreading, moderating and becoming part of the mainstream of American politics: “In every way, the evangelical movement in the United States looks as if it is maturing. That means more social and political influence, not less, as the movement broadens, reaches into the elite, and develops messages with wider appeal. Yet it also means a more pluralistic and less strident movement, more apt to compromise and less likely to be held hostage by a single issue or a single party.” It is, all told, making a “shift from insurgent to insider, with all of the moderating effects that transition implies,” Mead concludes.

It’s not too soon to recap how this year’s crazed primary calendar has worked out. Stateline.org surveyed the nation’s governors and found that many of them think the incredibly front-loaded schedule actually worked for their states this year—but that, overall, it was “a mess to be avoided for 2012.” States that went early got new influence, and states that “hung back from the Feb. 5 frenzy are even happier” because they have been able to play kingmaker in the extended race. Still, “the current process is nuts, absolutely nuts,” Pennsylvania’ Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell tells Stateline. He, like many others, “advocates dumping the current caucus and super-delegate systems in favor of a rotating regional primary plan,” Stateline reports.