A reader, Sarah, recently emailed me for my reaction to John McCain’s speech Tuesday on the federal judiciary. She writes:

 

Speaking of ludicrous comments that McCain has made, what do you think about this comment that McCain made yesterday in a speech about checks and balances: "[It] is the common and systematic abuse of our federal courts by the people we entrust with judicial power. For decades now, some federal judges have taken it upon themselves to pronounce and rule on matters that were never intended to be heard in courts or decided by judges. With a presumption that would have amazed the framers of our Constitution, and legal reasoning that would have mystified them, federal judges today issue rulings and opinions on policy questions that should be decided democratically. Assured of lifetime tenures, these judges show little regard for the authority of the president, the Congress, and the states. They display even less interest in the will of the people."

 

McCain's comments fall squarely within the conservative tradition of arguing that judges (particularly those appointed by Democrats) have taken to circumventing the legislative process (and the checks and balances system), by using judicial rulings to make policy and pursue liberal political objectives from the bench. McCain is no doubt interested in shoring up conservative support for the general election, and judicial appointments will need to be a central component of his strategy. These new statements reflect a rhetorical shift to the right by McCain, likely motivated by the fact that some conservatives have been suspicious of his commitment to the issue, ever since he joined the Gang of 14 judicial appointment agreement brokered in the Senate in 2005.

 

With a few Supreme Court justices at or near retirement, and other judicial vacancies remaining for the next president to fill, we will certainly hear a lot more about this issue on the campaign trail in the coming months. I expect that the nominees will draw some very sharp ideological distinctions on the types of judges they would be willing to elevate to the federal bench. If McCain’s rhetoric on Tuesday is any indication, the issue could prove to be one of the real political flashpoints of the general election.

One of the main arguments made by those pressing for an early end to the nomination battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is that the intra-party nastiness between the two candidates has unintentionally provided Republicans with a wealth of negative talking points for use against the Democratic nominee in the general election. I have already noted that I do not find this argument sufficiently persuasive to convince me that the full primary schedule should be truncated, and that is still the case.

 

I have based my skepticism of this argument on the idea that regardless of what happens in the Democratic contest, the McCain campaign and Republican Party are fully capable of conducting their own opposition research, with a thoroughness that would likely uncover all or most of these trouble spots for the general election anyway. Sure enough, we now learn that the Republican National Committee already possesses extensive opposition research dossiers on both Clinton and Obama. And, I am sure that the Democratic National Committee’s file on McCain is just as thick.

For political scientists used to candidate momentum as an important tool for predicting the likely outcome of a presidential nomination battle, this election cycle has been quite a rollercoaster ride. Back in February, I wrote several posts on the question of why momentum has not been particularly helpful for understanding the dynamics of the nomination battle between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. If you are so inclined, you can track back through them all, starting with the links in this post from February. At the time I wrote it, Obama had just completed a string of 10 consecutive double-digit primary and caucus victories, and political observers were suggesting for the first time that a sense of candidate momentum was driving the presidential race toward its conclusion. That was until Texas, Ohio and Pennsylvania brought things to a screeching halt for Obama.

 

Now we’ve just completed a particularly intense two-week period in which Hillary Clinton finally seemed to be building momentum of her own, as Obama, dogged by lackluster campaigning and a high-profile series of campaign controversies and missteps, struggled to stabilize his candidacy. Yet, what a difference twenty-four hours makes, as momentum-based expectations were once again turned upside down by voters in yesterday’s two primary states. Just as momentum failed to carry Obama in March, so too did it fail to work its magic for Clinton in North Carolina and Indiana. Her candidacy is instead once again seriously in jeopardy, and Obama seems re-energized and is increasingly looking like the presumptive Democratic nominee. So, while we have seen some features of a classic momentum-driven campaign on occasion over the past five months, it has mainly served to confound the expectations of those very same political observers (myself included) who have relied on its predictive power in so many previous election cycles.

In case your cable news marathon tonight leaves you still wanting more analysis, I’ll be doing a North Carolina and Indiana wrap-up tomorrow morning on New Hampshire Public Radio’s The Exchange. You can hear the show live (lower left) at 9 AM, or listen to it later.

I will be interested to see if tomorrow’s exit polls in North Carolina and Indiana can shed any light on whether the current gas tax holiday debate between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama is having an impact on voter decision-making in those states. It is one of the very few issues in this election cycle for which the two candidates have adopted such distinctly oppositional policy positions. Given how critical a concern gas prices have become, the conflict over this tax relief issue (Clinton, pro and Obama, con) just may provide a nice little (albeit rough) test of whether voters sometimes choose candidates based on their issue positions, rather than on other personal criteria.

 

I raise this question because last fall I wrote at length about how, despite all the talk of the importance of candidate issue positions leading into the early primaries and caucuses, voters typically make their selections based on more intuitive and emotional criteria, rather than on issue-oriented responses to the candidates. This is particularly true during the primaries, when there are usually few real policy differences between candidates of the same party. This gas tax relief debate has turned out to be an unusually high profile exception to that rule, and may provide some interesting insights into the primary voter calculus.

If Barack Obama must contend with the Rev. Wright controversy for the foreseeable future, then for John McCain it is his 100 years comments on American troop presence in Iraq that will surely follow him into the general election. As McCain’s reaction in Denver today underscores, Democrats are framing his original remarks quite effectively, in a way that is clearly getting under his skin. Tomorrow, it will be exactly four months since McCain made those off-the-cuff comments in Derry, New Hampshire, and I don’t anticipate that his Democratic opponents will stop using the words against him anytime soon. Just as voters must assess the significance of Obama and Wright for the future of presidential governance, it remains for them to decide if McCain’s remarks have been misinterpreted and whether Democrats, in endlessly replaying them, are unfairly characterizing his overarching vision for Iraq.

In yesterday’s post, I concluded that Barack Obama will have to deal with the Rev. Wright controversy in the general election, even if the intensity of the current flare-up dissipates over the next few months. In particular, he will have to contend with the question of why it has taken him 20 years to finally break with the Reverend. Writing in today’s Washington Post, David Broder takes an initial stab at answering this question, and Obama, himself, seems to grapple with it in an interview with the Today Show’s Meredith Vieira. It seems to me that if this critical question is left to linger, Republican opponents will use it to stoke the controversy again this fall. So, the sooner Obama paints a plausible backstory for this two-decade period, the better his chances of not getting sidetracked yet again as the Democratic nominee.

The amount of media coverage on Barack Obama and Rev. Wright in the past few days has been absolutely mind-boggling, so I am hesitant to add to the flood of commentary that is already out there. But I will say briefly that anything Obama can do to bring this story arc to a close will help his campaign, and he seemed to finally realize as much in his rebuke of Wright yesterday. While Obama’s denunciation risks engendering hard feelings among some in the African-American community, the entire episode had become a dangerous distraction to his candidacy at a rather fragile moment in his campaign.

 

I have written in previous posts that Obama’s association with Rev. Wright would be an issue in the general election.  I still think this is likely, even if yesterday's developments cause the controversy to recede a bit over the summer months.  Republicans will wonder why it has taken Obama 20 years to reach a point where he finds himself breaking with Wright, and they will question whether he is simply doing so as an opportunistic politician in the middle of a closely-contested presidential race. Even so, the more heat that Obama can dissipate now, the less likely he is to get burned by a flare-up of the controversy in the general election.

 

Update:  I am pleased to note that I came up with the title of this post several hours before it was also used for a segment on MSNBC's Countdown this evening.

While I was away from the website for a few days, the latest Clinton conspiracy theory came into full bloom, during the weekend news cycle. This is the idea that the Clintons, realizing that they cannot catch Barack Obama for the nomination this time around, have decided to weaken him as the Democratic nominee. In doing so, their hope is that he will lose to John McCain in November, thereby establishing Hillary Clinton as the presumptive nominee in 2012. I initially dismissed the idea out-of-hand, but an old friend suggested to me that the Clintons are sealed in a political bubble, completely focused on devising a strategic path back to the White House, and quite possibly may view this as a realistic Plan B should Obama be just out of reach in the primaries.

 

For the sake of argument, if we go with the idea that this strategy has at least crossed their minds, let me say a few words about why it would not be a workable plan. It has been my sense for a long time now that presidential candidates get one really good run at their party’s nomination. The speed and brutality of the news cycle, the length of the campaign, and the exhaustive familiarity it breeds, take the polish off of most candidates after a single go-round. That is why John Edwards couldn’t make it this year. It is also why John Kerry decided to not even try running again. Take a look at a candidate like Dennis Kucinich. While he has never been in serious contention for the nomination, most political observers would agree that his 2004 campaign was much sharper and effective than its 2008 incarnation. John McCain is a bit of an exception to this rule, but keep in mind that his second run comes eight years after his first attempt, not four. There is something about running in successive electoral cycles that makes voters weary of a particular candidate, and Clinton would be no exception.

 

So, while we may never know for sure whether the Clintons truly believe that this 2012 strategy is a workable alternative, in practice I don’t see it eventually securing Hillary Clinton the nomination. Should the Democrats lose the White House again in 2008, there will likely be a new constellation of fresh faces just as eager as some Democrats currently are to move beyond a Clinton dynasty. In any event, the residual anger among many voters for the Clintons’ role in weakening Obama would certainly seal Hillary Clinton’s fate.

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