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We got this message on our voicemail from a number that was listed as RESTRICTED. It was an automated message that must have started before it began recording.

We just need to know what email address we can reach you at. The email address we have for you stopped working. So we wanted to ask you to take a quick second to update your address. You can do it over the phone right now. All you have to do is press 1 and fill out your email address. Just press 1. It just takes a second. That way we'll be able to keep you up to date on the great work that MoveOn's 3.2 million members are doing every day to win back the country from radical Republicans. So please just press 1, and thank you for your time and your continued support of MoveOn. And of course this message was paid for by MoveOn.org's political action and was not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

Then the voice changes, and there's a phone number for how to reach them (I assume for when the recording is left on an answering machine or voicemail, and you can't press 1 to get anywhere).

So is this a new tactic or something? Our phone number is associated with only two adults, both members of the Republican Party. No one else has been at this number since 1999. I don't think MoveOn.org even existed back then. (Update: I guess it has.) I'm pretty confident they would count us as radical Republicans. So is there something we actually did that they incompetently assumed would make us prime candidates for giving money to them? Or are they just trying to annoy conservatives by sending them spam phone calls?

I saw this several months ago but didn't get around to linking to it, and I've been spending all my online time looking at the bevy of activity on the Supreme Court blogs, so I wanted to post something that didn't take much time (and I had to drudge the dregs of my potential blogging list to find this). According to Justin Taylor in the above-linked post (there's no citation or link, so I'm taking his word for it), Hillary Clinton seemed to admit in January that she was allowing her supporters to die of exposure at one of her rallies. How so? Well, she said it was so cold that her supporters at the rally were literally freezing to death.

It's so funny that the word 'literally' is one of the most common words used to mean something other than its literal meaning. Here's another example that I love repeating. The great philosopher William Alston told our Christian philosophers' group about a decade ago that he had once heard a football announcer say, "and when he gets down into the red zone, he literally explodes!" I knew football was dangerous, but I didn't know how bad it really was!

What's going on here linguistically is that the word 'literally' is being used as an intensifier rather than to convey its literal meaning. This usage of the word is roughly synonymous to other intensifiers such as 'really', 'truly', and 'completely'. There's nothing linguistically inappropriate about it. Words don't always mean their literal meaning or their usual meaning. What's funny about it is how easy it is to intensify a metaphor by adding the word 'literal' without meaning it literally at all. In this case, it's particularly unfortunate, because if you did take her literally (and she did use the word that might in many cases indicate that you should) she would be admitting to what may well be gross negligence of the sort that could lead to many people's deaths.

I have to agree with Sean Oxendine on this:

But the absolute top of the list is how much the outcome of the race has depended on the ordering of the contests. Imagine, for example, where things would stand if Georgia, Alabama and a few caucus states hadn't moved their dates up to Super Tuesday, but Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas had, in fact, moved up. This race would likely have been over February 3, with calls for Obama to get out reaching the same crescendo that the calls against Hillary are reaching.

Of course, the whole way we got to this position was Obama's magical "ten in a row" during February. But Maryland, DC, Virginia, Wisconsin, Louisiana, Hawai'i, Maine, Washington and Nebraska were all races that he was supposed to win -- and by large margins at that -- with the arguable exception of Wisconsin. Imagine if those races had instead been Indiana, Kentucky, Rhode Island, West Virginia, and a couple of Super Tuesday states (say, MA and TN). The storyline would be completely different.

What a way to pick a President.

This is a criticism of the whole process, not just of how the Democratic primary does things. It's even clearer for the Republican primary. If Florida had been the first GOP state, followed by New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, Giuliani might have been the nominee. If Iowa had been followed by certain key Southern states without New Hampshire in between, Huckabee would have had a real chance. If South Carolina had been first, followed by Tennessee and perhaps Georgia, we might have actually seen Fred Thompson doing well in other states. If Michigan had been before Iowa, Romney would have had enough momentum that he could possibly have done a good deal better, and if more Western states were early on he might have had enough to get the momentum necessary to take states he lost by a large margin.

This process is highly sensitive to small changes in the order of states, and that seems to me to be a very bad thing.

What organization has a weekly death toll more than twice the five-year death toll for American troops in Iraq? Planned Parenthood [ht: Sam].

I don't think it's remotely morally decent to abandon Iraq the way most Americans seem to want to do (and most of the rest of the world wants us to do). Nevertheless, if I had to be a one-issue voter and did share that view, I would have little inclination to prefer the war issue to the abortion issue. Other issues being equal, anti-war pro-lifers will have a very hard case to make if they want to end up supporting the Democratic candidate over John McCain. Other issues aren't equal, of course, but there will have to be an awful lot of very serious issues, all favoring the Democratic side, to overcome this difference (and some people probably do think that). But I've seen people, even commenters on this blog, claiming that pro-life issues are outweighed by the anti-war issue, even claiming that it's more pro-life to support those who approve of the status quo on abortion in order to end the war. I don't know how that view can stand up under these numbers.

Michael Stickings of the Moderate Voice has a very puzzling post. Apparently Hillary Clinton has been participating in an evangelical Bible study group for Congress that encourages Christians to influence those around them for good, including sharing their faith with those who aren't believers. Stickings seems to think this is really disturbing for some reason, and the only sense I can get of why is that he must think this group is a front for a radical, theonomistic agenda. But I don't see any real evidence in anything he links to that it's even close to that. I posted the following comment several days ago:

I'm wondering what the fuss is supposed to be about. This looks like a typical evangelical group. They study the Bible and believe in influencing those around them (and therefore indirectly the world) through personal relationships infused with godliness and what they as Christians believe to be the truth. I realize that some conspiracy theorists associate any language about influencing the world with conspiracies about controlling people through theonomistic enforcement of Christian beliefs on those who reject such teachings, but anyone remotely familiar with evangelicalism should know that this is simply standard salt and light kind of stuff from the Sermon on the Mount. So what is it exactly that Hillary is supposed to explain? She is a Christian. Is it surprising that she wants to live her beliefs rather than pretending they don't influence her life?

As of this writing, there's been no response.

Kevin Drum had a very helpful discussion of the charges the Obama campaign and its surrogates have been leveling against Hillary Clinton. I'm not sure I agree with him in every case, but it's one of the best things I've seen on the subject. Any claim that it's Hillary who's really driving the racial overtones of the Democratic race is just ignoring a lot of what's out there. Some on her side have surely said things intended to be taken in a racially-negative way. But the examples he gives (and see the discussions he links to for arguments why the criticisms are indeed over-the-top) show that it's not simply an example of the Hillary side raising racial issues and the Obama side ignoring them and not making anything of race.

I had to take interest in the first two comments mentioning Geraldine Ferraro, who didn't come up in the post. What interested me most about their appearance is the assumption that that's a genuine case of racism that they must be taking to undermine his whole argument. First of all, if it's genuine racism that doesn't undermine his argument. His point is that many of the accusations of racism are going way too far. One case that is racism doesn't undermine that claim.

Second, I don't think it's fair to describe that as racist. If the same person who says Barack Obama's race has helped raise interest from the media and the Democratic higher-ups to jump-start his campaign also says of herself that the same is true from her being a woman, it strikes me as very unlikely that she's saying the former out of racism but is rather just acknowledging that the Democratic party is more likely to use affirmative action considerations for selecting presidential and vice-presidential candidates, something Democrats aren't generally opposed to and don't generally consider racist. (It's Republicans who are more likely to level that charge.) So why is it racist to point out that affirmative action techniques on that level might put someone in a position to get more attention than they could have gotten otherwise?

[I do realize that some people think Ferraro was saying more. According to them, she was claiming that no one would now support Obama if he weren't black. But I think that's a very unlikely interpretation. It's so radically at odds with the exit polls that I don't know how she could have thought she'd get away with saying something so empirically false.]

Update March 29: Is it racist for Obama to say the things of himself that Ferraro said of him?

In a recent case, the California Supreme Court affirmed a 1955 law that requires teachers to have proper credentials, even if they're homeschooling their own children. Some conservatives are up in arms. But it's important for conservatives to locate their criticism properly.

As far as I can tell, this was a judicially conservative decision. The law in California is that teaching requires certain qualifications. The only question was whether you can find a right in the Constitution to homeschooling, and they concluded not, which is actually a more judicially conservative position. See Eugene Volokh for more details.

Now I'm open to a judicially conservative argument that this case was wrongly decided, but I've been seeing people upset merely because of its being a bad policy decision. Well, don't complain to the court. Complain to the people who wrote the law to begin with (except they're probably dead), and seek to get the law changed. That's the normal process for this kind of thing, and it's not conservative to expect a court to find new rights in the Constitution that conservatives would prefer to have constitutionally guaranteed. This is a case of conservatives expecting judges to enact their policy preferences, which is the very thing conservatives usually complain about and call judicial activism when they see liberals doing the same thing.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Apparently Barack Obama has figured out (it took him a while, at least to say it) that Hillary Clinton's repeated claims that he's not ready to be president are slightly at odds with her suggestion that maybe he could be vice-president. Probably the most crucial role of the vice-president is to take over the responsibilities of the president if the president becomes unable to perform them.

But see her response. So he's not ready now, and therefore the Democrats should nominate her. But maybe he'll be ready by August, so she can float the idea of choosing him as a running mate? That see s to be how she's explaining both statements.

How isn't that an admission that her initial comments are wrongheaded? Well, here's the one path to consistency that I think she can trod. He isn't ready now, and there's no guarantee that he will be in January, so we shouldn't nominate him. Maybe some miracle will occur, and he'll be ready enough by August that he could run on the ticket as VP, so she won't say he's now ready even to be a running mate (not that she's in a position to offer it to him), but she'll float him as a possibility in case the miraculous occurs and he gets all this experience that he doesn't now have.

I suppose that's consistent. It's just a huge stretch.

A lot of people are discussing Barack Obama's recent off-the-cuff remarks about the Bible and same-sex civil unions. I want to delve a little bit into the contrast he draws between the Sermon on the Mount and Romans 1. The gist of his statement is (1) the Sermon on the Mount is more central to Christian faith than an "obscure" passage in Romans, and (2) the Sermon on the Mount should influence our attitudes toward civil unions in some positive way.

1. I don't think Romans 1 is all that obscure. I think he means that it's difficult to interpret, but there actually isn't all that much disagreement among serious biblical commentators who have bothered to connect their exegesis with a serious study of the whole book. Virtually everyone in that category acknowledges that Paul saw male-male and female-female sexual acts as bad and as the consequence of sin, and most recognize that he saw them as immoral. That doesn't count as obscure in my book, even if a few of the details in the passage might be debated. It's certainly no more obscure than the Sermon on the Mount, which has plenty of contested questions.

2. Romans 1 is not the only passage relevant to homosexuality. The Torah expressly forbids the same thing Romans 1 discusses, and it does so in pretty clear terms in two places in Leviticus and by implication in Genesis 19. I think the prophets may refer to it once or twice, too. In any case, just dismissing Romans 1 wouldn't be enough, but he treats it as sufficient.

3. Romans 1 isn't even the only New Testament passage relevant to this issue. Terms used for the passive and active partners in male-male sex appear in a vice list in I Corinthians (and one of those words appears in I Timothy). Jude 7 also assumes the Torah background.

4. What in the Sermon on the Mount does he mean? His argument seems to be that he's more willing to go with a passage he sees as more important over one that's "obscure" (and thus less important?). But what important passage in the Sermon on the Mount does he mean? It has to be a clear enough implication from what Jesus says that it's strong enough to outweigh all these other parts of scripture. Does any part of the Sermon on the Mount have such a clear implication for the issue of civil unions?

Some have suggested that he means the command not to judge, which of course is not a command not to call wrong things wrong, or else the biblical authors would all violate it repeatedly.

Others have put forth the many aspects of the Sermon on the Mount that have to do with loving your neighbor. I wonder if that would be question-begging. Some of the people he is taking issue with do not consider it loving to support same-sex unions, because they see such support as endorsing something immoral and in fact against the well-being of all involved.

The word is out that Senator Barack Obama's judicial advisory team (assuming this report is accurate) takes him to be interested in judicial nominees who come across like John Roberts in person but who would decide cases like Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan. [hat tip: Orin Kerr]

Obviously he doesn't mean they'd come across sounding like a moderate conservative, or it would be hard to get Democrats to support his nominees. He means someone who doesn't have much of a record in terms of ideology but who seems like a well-qualified judge. But he also doesn't mean someone who would be moderated in liberalism the way John Roberts is moderated in his conservatism. Otherwise he wouldn't name Justices Brennan and Marshall, two of the most liberal justices ever on the Supreme Court (by pretty much anyone's standards).

So he wants nominees who are actually extremely liberal but sound moderate. Moderation within judicial liberalism ends up with something like Justice Breyer, the one justice of the four liberals on the Supreme Court who is most likely to vote with the conservatives on constitutional issues of any moment. (Justices Ginsburg and Souter often vote with conservatives on statutory interpretation, but that's only when little of ideological importance is at stake.) Moderation in judicial liberalism does not lead to appointments of judges who will vote the way Justices Marshall and Brennan did.

For political reasons, this strategy does make sense. If you want to replace Justice Stevens, for example, with someone even further to the left, then you better find someone who isn't obviously further to the left, or it would be much harder to confirm them. I'm not going to dispute such a strategy. Both sides in the current environment need nominees who come across the way Roberts did if they want to get anything like a strong confirmation vote. I think McCain would need to be even more conscious of this than a Democratic president would, given the Democratic control of the Senate, but the Senate is still divided enough that the Republicans could present problems for a Democratic nominee if they really want to (and partly because the Gang of 16 was successful, which McCain would then have himself to thank for).

But even if this strategy makes political sense, I think it shows something about Senator Obama. He doesn't say he'd appoint real moderates in order to get them confirmed. He wants real liberals but knows there isn't enough popular support for them to get them through the current Senate. The conservatives I've been reading who are arguing for appointing someone like Roberts in order to get a chance at confirmation are arguing for someone just like Roberts, not someone who sounds like Roberts but actually would vote like Judge Robert Bork. I do worry about whether this counts as deception. But whatever you think about that issues,. this is yet another clear sign that Barack Obama is no moderate, despite the popular view of him. It continues to amaze me how far left of center he is, and yet so many people see him as the sort of person who would be able to break down the gridlock in Congress and get genuine conservatives to work with him on proposals that are anathema to them. I just don't get it.

I had to laugh at the last line of the Emily Bazelon Slate piece I linked to above. The judicial strategy of sounding moderate but turning out to be quite a bit to the left of moderate wouldn't exactly be a new tactic for Senator Obama.

Barack Obama's opposition as an Illinois State Senator to the Born Alive Infant Protection Act has been making the rounds, with a lot of people overstating their case on both sides. Some conservatives are taking this as a sign that Obama thinks infanticide is morally ok, and some liberals are acting as if his approach is what any supporter of keeping abortion legal before viability should say. I'm not sure either is true, but I'm also not sure this reflects well on Obama.

Here is the law. It says that if a baby is born alive, whether by intended delivery or by failed abortion, it is legally a person, a human being, a child, and an individual. It counts as born alive only if it is completely removed from the mother (ignoring an umbilical cord connection, which does not count as a sufficient connection according to this law). Partial-birth abortion is thus not ruled out, because a partial birth is not a complete removal of the fetus. As long as the birth has not fully taken place, this law threatens no actual abortion rights.

Obama's reason for not supporting this ban is not because he thinks it's ok to kill a born fetus. As far as he's said, he does not actually support infanticide (and he didn't vote against the law; he just voted present, although that in itself was part of a strategy devised by Planned Parenthood of Illinois to protect pro-choice politicians from voters seeing how pro-choice they are). For his actual words, see comment 9 here. What he says is that he worries about the logic. Here is what seems to me to be his argument:

1. The Supreme Court has declared laws banning abortion before viability to be unconstitutional.
2. There is no difference between the moral status of a fetus inside its mother before viability and the moral status of a born baby at the same developmental stage.
3. Therefore, banning the killing of a born baby at this stage is morally tantamount to banning abortion at a pre-viability stage. (from 2)
4. Therefore, the law is unconstitutional. (from 1 and 3)

This argument does not amount to supporting infanticide morally. It is merely an argument based on the constitutional issue. According to Supreme Court precedent, this law is unconstitutional, and thus it's pointless to pass it. He gives no moral argument against the ban, just a pragmatic one. So from this speech alone it's impossible to get any clear support for infanticide.

Nevertheless, I think this is a terrible argument. The first premise is clearly true. I would argue that the second is also true. I see no difference in the intrinsic moral status of the fetus merely because it is contained within someone or is separate. However, I don't think 1 and 3 guarantee 4. There's no legal reason why morally inconsistent laws can't occur. You can ban something that's morally equivalent to something else that's unconstitutional to ban, as long as the first thing isn't unconstitutional to ban. But the real problem I have with the argument is his inference from 2 to 3.

The standard pro-choice argument is not that a mother has a right to kill a fetus growing within her. Only the most extreme abortion-choice proponents hold such a view. The standard view is that a woman's right to control her body is morally more important than whatever rights a fetus might have. That argument allows for a fetus to have some sort of moral status such that killing it would be prima facie wrong, even if the bodily rights of the mother outweigh that. What this means is that the standard pro-choice argument does not accord a mother the right to the death of the fetus. If it survives removal, her rights have been satisfied. That means the moral status of the fetus is what kicks in to determine what you should do in such a case, and this law settles that question. It does not threaten the woman's bodily rights, at least not according to the standard justification of abortion rights.

Several people have asked me where I got the information that John McCain has changed his view on stem cell research. His position used to be the same as that of former Senator Bill Frist, who opposes the creation of new stem cell lines except in cases where the embryo is already going to be destroyed. I have defended this position as consistent with pro-life principles about the full moral status of the fetus (and again here in a slightly different context), but many people who are pro-life do not agree. A lot of people think the issue should largely be defused now, however, since the discovery that embryonic-like stem cells can be developed without destroying embryos at all. I was under the impression that McCain was one of them.

I'm pretty sure one of the political blogs I read that usually has very reliable, up-to-date information about candidates had a mention in the last week or so of this change in McCain's view, but I can't remember where. What it said is that McCain had changed his mind in light of this new research and no longer supports research even on embryos that will already be destroyed, citing the new research as evidence that we probably will no longer need to do that to get enough embryos for the research that he still considers necessary. Since I couldn't find where I saw this, I spent some time looking around for recent statements by McCain on the issue. Here's what I came up with.

Gerald Bradley wrote in the National Review on January 18:

McCain has said -- it is true -- that he approved embryo-destructive research in the limited case of so-called "spares"-- those embryos "left-over" after couples have exhausted their interest in IVF. I disagree with him.In face-to-face conversation with McCain I said not only that such research was wrong, but that it would never be limited to "spares." I said that big biotech needed a far larger supply of research subjects than "spares" could provide. McCain asked to continue that conversation, to hear more. Now he realizes that there is no need to exploit "spare" embryos, in light of recent successes with adult cells. And so he has been telling South Carolinians over the last few days.

According to the Catholic News Agency, this was where he stood about a week later:

When he was asked how he reconciled his otherwise solid pro-life voting record with his support for experimentation on "surplus" embryos, Sen. McCain called his decision to back the research "a very agonizing and tough decision".

He continued, saying, "All I can say to you is that I went back and forth, back and forth on it and I came in on one of the toughest decisions I've ever had, in favor of that research. And one reason being very frankly is those embryos will be either discarded or kept in permanent frozen status." The senator, while standing firm on his decision added, "I understand how divisive this is among the pro-life community."

Referring to the recent break through in stem cell research which allows scientists to use skin cells to create stem cells, McCain said that, "I believe that skin stem cell research has every potential very soon of making that discussion academic.... Sam Brownback and others are very encouraged at this latest advance...."

Now I don't see that as necessarily conflicting with Bradley's first-hand report. All it does is give McCain's justification at the time and then his indication that he thinks it was the right decision. It doesn't say if he still holds it, just that he stands firm in his view that it was the right one and that in the future it will be a non-issue. It says nothing about what he thinks we ought to be doing right now. So I don't see how this is inconsistent with what Bradley reports hearing from McCain in person.

But then there's this:

When a woman asked whether promising new methods of stem cell research
would end McCain's support for embryonic stem cell research, he replied
firmly: "I have not changed my position yet."

So now I'm not sure what to think. He very clearly does not think his initial view was wrong at the time he made it, and he pretty obviously thinks that soon it will not be an issue and that we will not end up needing to use "spares" for this research. Bradley's impression was that he now no longer wants to fund use of "spares". He seems not to have fully made that decision at this point, though, unless he's being misquoted or taken out of context (which I wouldn't put past Dana Milbank but certainly wouldn't assume is true).

Whichever is the case, I don't have a problem with McCain's initial view, although I think it would be good if he backed off in the face of this new research. He does seem to be moving in that direction at the very least under the influence of his close friend Senator Sam Brownback. My suspicion is that he's in a transition at the moment. His website account of his view on stem cell research notably does not treat this particular issue at all:

Stem cell research offers tremendous hope for those suffering from a variety of deadly diseases - hope for both cures and life-extending treatments. However, the compassion to relieve suffering and to cure deadly disease cannot erode moral and ethical principles.

For this reason, John McCain opposes the intentional creation of human embryos for research purposes. To that end, Senator McCain voted to ban the practice of "fetal farming," making it a federal crime for researchers to use cells or fetal tissue from an embryo created for research purposes. Furthermore, he voted to ban attempts to use or obtain human cells gestated in animals. Finally, John McCain strongly opposes human cloning and voted to ban the practice, and any related experimentation, under federal law.

As president, John McCain will strongly support funding for promising research programs, including amniotic fluid and adult stem cell research and other types of scientific study that do not involve the use of human embryos.

Where federal funds are used for stem cell research, Senator McCain believes clear lines should be drawn that reflect a refusal to sacrifice moral values and ethical principles for the sake of scientific progress, and that any such research should be subject to strict federal guidelines.

I don't see anything there about using stem cells from embryos about to be destroyed. He says he hasn't changed his view yet, but I think he's probably at least suspended his view until further notice, even if he has not yet adopted Brownback's (while giving every indication that he probably will at some point).

James Dobson continues his crusade against the pro-life cause [hat tip: Justin Taylor]. Now that he can't use Rudy Giuliani's actual pro-choice views to prefer a hardcore pro-choicer to a moderate pro-choicer, he's stuck using John McCain's lukewarm but consistently pro-life views as an excuse to prefer a pro-choice president to a pro-life one. It's a strange way to try to pursue the pro-life agenda if you do everything you can to put into office those who will do everything they can to frustrate that agenda.

What's worse is how badly he misrepresents McCain's views. Here is what he gives as his reasons for preferring a radically pro-choice president to John McCain:

McCain "did not support a Constitutional amendment to protect the institution of marriage".

Well, sure. He doesn't think that's what the Constitution is for. Is it better on pro-life principles to prefer Roe v. Wade staying on as the law of the land for decades or to vote for someone whose opposition to gay marriage isn't going to occur at the constitutional amendment level but rather at the level of mere law? This disagreement isn't about McCain not opposing gay marriage. It's about his not opposing it at the level of a constitutional amendment that never had any chance of passing to begin with. If Dobson thinks that's any reason to vote against him, he's gone off the deep end.

McCain "voted for embryonic stem cell research to kill nascent human beings".

That's a lie. What McCain did is vote for embryonic stem cell research that would use the stem cells from embryos that were already going to be killed one way or the other. There are pro-life people who wrongly think such research would violate pro-life principles. I've tried to argue against that claim. But Dobson could at least present his criticism accurately rather than slandering his fellow pro-lifer who happens to think the moral implications of the pro-life assumption go in a different direction on this one issue.

What's even worse is that McCain no longer even holds this position, something Dobson fails to mention. Isn't that a little bit relevant? A vote for McCain wouldn't support a president who advocates the view Dobson disagrees with, since McCain doesn't support that view. He's become convinced that there are now alternative ways of providing enough stem cells for the research he wants funded without relying on embryos, even ones who are already going to be killed. By not mentioning this extremely important fact, Dobson is misleading those who will reasonably be expected to conclude that McCain still holds this view, and deliberate deception is as bad morally as outright lying, even if the statement is literally true (not that it is; see the immediately previous paragraph).

Update: I've treated McCain's current views on this issue more fully here.

McCain "opposed tax cuts that ended the marriage penalty".

First of all, it's important to recognize that many legislative packages are exactly that: packages. Legislators often vote against a package because of something in it, but it doesn't follow that they voted against it because of whatever particular item in it you happen to pick out as important to you. They may actually approve of that item but not of something else in it. So the fact that McCain voted against a packaged that included ending the marriage penalty doesn't mean he opposes ending the marriage penalty. In fact, his initial vote was in favor of this package, so something else must have been added to change his vote before the final version went through. The removal of the marriage penalty was part of the package he voted for. In fact, he supports exactly the sort of thing Dobson is implicating that he opposes. This is an excellent example of a literally true statement that has a clear implicature of something false, which is tantamount to a lie even if it's not technically false.

McCain "has little regard for freedom of speech".

I assume this has to do with campaign finance. To say that McCain has little regard for free speech is pretty low. He certainly opposes a certain use of money in electoral campaigns, and many conservatives see his views as limiting free speech. It's a little misleading to put it this way, though. What he's saying is that McCain has little regard for one particular use of money that should count as free speech. That would be accurate and precise. Since Dobson counts it as free speech, he could say that McCain has little regard for one particular kind of free speech. That would certainly be accurate on Dobson's view (and I agree with him). But the way he said it makes it sound as if it's free speech in general that McCain has little regard for, and that's at best misleading.

McCain "organized the Gang of 14 to preserve filibusters in judicial hearings".

Was the single purpose of the Gang of 14 to preserve filibusters in judicial hearings? Look again at what both sides of the 14 wanted in their compromise. It's true that the Democrats in the Gang of 14 were in it to preserve the chance to filibuster the nominees they saw as extreme, but the point of the compromise from the GOP side was to get a lot of the nominees the rest of the Democrats saw as extreme confirmed. McCain saw a chance to avoid a filibuster of a number of conservative nominees as long as he could keep some Republicans from removing the filibuster for a much smaller group of nominees that the seven Democrats in the Gang of 14 still wanted to oppose.

As is often the case in a narrowly divided legislative body, McCain was willing to compromise on a few more conservative nominees for the sake of a much larger group of pretty conservative nominees. He thought such a compromise would be better than losing the rights of the minority party to filibuster, something the Republicans in the Senate will probably be glad they will be able to use against the next Democratic president that Dobson is doing his best to have elected this year. I can see how someone might prefer to sacrifice that ability if they think it's wrong to use it to begin with (McCain doesn't) or if they shortsightedly think they'll retain the majority forever (which is pretty dumb), but please don't act as if someone who makes the wrong choice on that is a traitor to conservatism for wanting to get more conservative judges appointed than seemed likely. Keep in mind McCain's motivation. Dobson refuses to do so.

McCain "has a legendary temper and often uses foul and obscene language".

True enough. Is that going to count as a serious criterion from a hardcore pro-life, nearly single-issue voter (as evidenced by his refusal to support Giuliani if he had won the nomination)? I can't see how this should count at all when the serious issues Dobson has against Clinton and Obama are at stake. If abortion is morally equivalent to murder, and the top priority of pro-life voters is to stop the tragic allowance of such evil, how relevant is it that the candidate most likely to be able to do anything about it uses foul language and gets angry pretty easily? If Dobson thinks opposing a foul-mouthed, angry presidential candidate is so all-important that it's worth refusing to do what he can (which is a fair amount given his influence) to prevent a president who will blithely dismiss all concerns for preventing the equivalent of the murder of millions of people, then his moral priorities are seriously screwed up. If abortion is indeed equivalent to murder, then a candidate's language shouldn't make the list of important considerations.

I've been taken to task in the past for criticizing Dobson on this (see the comments here). I'll let those comments stand as my justification for my willingness to do this despite recognizing all that he's done that I appreciate. I will note, though, that this instance seems even worse than the one I was criticizing before, because at least Giuliani really is pro-choice. Dobson is well-meaning, but I can't see how his comments serve the pro-life cause. They seem to me rather to be a betrayal of the very goals he wants to achieve, even more so on this occasion than the last time I took him to task over this.

Since I'll be voting in the Super Tuesday primaries today, I thought I'd look at the two leading GOP candidates on the issues, because I think they've both been misrepresented by the pundits. Judging by the SelectSmart information, here is how they compare on the issues. I'll include some comments on Huckabee as I go to indicate why he's not getting as strong consideration. (Anyone who's been reading this blog for more than a week should know why Ron Paul gets zero consideration.)

On Iraq and general war on terrorism issues, I see no difference of substance. They both support the continued efforts in Iraq and have criticized the Bush Administration in pretty much the same ways as each other. (Huckabee's criticism has been stronger, but his forward policies are similar as far as I can tell.) They may well be different on budget/spending/deficit issues, but there's no easy way to measure that, and their rhetoric is pretty similar (whereas Huckabee seems to be at least a little to the left of both of them, but there is a disconnect between his rhetoric and his record, and it's hard to tell how much has to do with Arkansas-specific issues or things he's changed his mind on and how much has to do with general approach).

It's hard to see a difference between them on issues like marijuana legalization and medical marijuana (Huckabee does clearly oppose decriminalize medical marijuana, but the other two are at least toying with decriminalization). Both have at times favored minimum wage increases, but both have opposed them at times too (and Huckabee seems to be a pragmatist on the issue). Both support vouchers in education (and Huckabee does not).

It's also hard to tell how to compare them on environmental issues. McCain is more environment-friendly than most Republicans, but Romney may well be also. He's certainly more open to the reality of global warming than some Republicans have been (although most who resist making huge changes aren't resisting the premise, just insisting that the reality of global warming isn't the issue).

I see no difference in their current views on stem cells. (McCain at one point supported the use of stem cells from embryos who were already going to be killed, a view I don't think pro-lifers should have a problem with but many wrongly do. But given the strong possibilities with other kinds of stem cell research without killing any embryos, McCain has decided that there's no need to such an approach anymore, and he's now insisting on not supporting any funding for stem cell research that involves developing new lines from embryos that haven't yet been killed. So his position is now the same as Romney's. [Update: See here for more details that I've been able to dig up since writing this post. It's not quite as clear as I'd thought, but what I said here is in the direction of the truth.]

On other pro-life issues, Romney and McCain are pretty much in the same spot. Romney used to be pro-choice on the legal question (but never on the moral question), but he's now fully pro-life. McCain has always been pro-life, but I get the impression it's not an issue he
spends a lot of time getting worked up about. McCain does have a misleading statistic because some pro-life groups consider his campaign finance views to be against their desired methods of promoting their cause. But they're being pretty deceptive by pretending his campaign finance votes are pro-choice votes. On actual pro-life/pro-choice issues, he's consistently voted pro-life. So I see no real difference between these two here on the actual issues.

I never agreed with the argument made by James Dobson, Joe Carter, and others that Hillary Clinton would be preferable to Rudy Giuliani on pro-life grounds. The idea wasn't that she would do things as president that pro-lifers would be happy with. That's clearly false. As pro-choice as Giuliani is, she is much more committed to that cause, and he is at best lukewarm about it while retaining a much more conservative view on judicial matters, which would certainly have some impact on the future of Roe v. Wade.

No, the argument was that having a pro-choice president means (1) the party is pro-choice and (2) that there must be a pro-life party for the pro-life movement to succeed. (1) is shown false because no one thinks the Republican party is the party of guest worker programs and Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court just because President Bush wanted both. It's clear that (2) is also problematic given there was no civil rights party in the mid-1960s; significant numbers of members of both parties opposed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964-1965. Also, significant numbers of members of both parties opposed the Bush plan on immigration (albeit for different reasons). Party support doesn't necessarily go to a president on every issue, and often movements span parties while facing serious opposition from many influential members of both parties. I could easily see something like that happening with a pro-choice Republican president (or a pro-life Democrat if that were to happen).

So the argument at least recognized that Giuliani might be better for pro-life concerns in the short term. The claim was that the movement would be killed long-term by not having a pro-life party. I don't think this kind of argument succeeds, but it's at least honest about the relative positions of the candidates. Compare, now, Ann Coulter's completely ridiculous argument against John McCain. She's not focused completely or even mostly on abortion. This is about general conservatism. Otherwise it sounds on the surface to be a similar argument. Her premises are analogous. John McCain would make the Republican party too liberal, and having a too-liberal GOP would mean GOP goals are sacrificed long-term. But there's a key difference. Even aside from the problems with each premise along the lines of the original Giuliani argument, Coulter makes one claim that's just completely ridiculous about the factual basis of this to begin with. She claims that Hillary Clinton is more conservative than John McCain.

How could anyone possibly think such a thing? If we judge foreign policy by the standard view within each party, McCain is to the left of the GOP on a few issues but mostly with them, and Clinton is to the right of the GOP on a few issues but mostly with them. He favors staying in Iraq and trying to stabilize the situation a lot more, citing the success of the so-called surge as evidence that progress can be made. She's insisting that troop withdrawal needs to begin as soon as she takes the presidency. He thinks we need more troops in Iraq. He's an absolutist against torture (and insistent on calling certain techniques torture that other Republicans are hesitant to describe as torture). But certainly that position isn't a liberal-conservative one. An argument can even be made that it's liberal to soften our resistance to such techniques. It's moral conservatism to oppose them, one might argue. He's also consistently voted to renew Patriot Act and similar provisions, and she's sometimes done so and sometimes not.

On social issues, there's no comparison. She's not at this point endorsing gay marriage, but she didn't want it banned on the federal level. She and McCain both want something like civil unions. He's not to the left of her there. There's no question when it comes to abortion. If she were to become a single-issue candidate, abortion would be it. Her view is as extreme as it gets. She's never been willing to allow any restriction on abortion for any reason. He gets almost full support from right-to-life groups except when the issue is campaign finance. On actual abortion issues, he scores almost perfect on his voting record. His one weakness has been stem cell issues, and his view there was the Bill Frist view that using stem cells from embryos that were already going to be killed would be ok, a view I have defended on pro-life grounds. But McCain doesn't even hold this view anymore. He's since been convinced that there are now alternative methods to pursuing stem cell research with non-embryonic cells so that there's no need even to use the cells from destroyed embryos. In other words, his view is basically the standard GOP view on the issue. [Update: This isn't as clear as I'd thought, but he seems to be moving in that direction. See here for more detail.] Hillary Clinton's is the standard view of her party that we ought to manufacture human embryos in order to destroy them.

On immigration, he's certainly to the left of his party but no moreso than the current president, and no one's arguing that he's to the left of Hillary Clinton. The fact is that her view on the matter is no more conservative than his. I'm not convinced that their views are the same. I suspect she's more to the left on the issue than he is. But I don't see any indication that he's left of her. The same is true of any economic issue I'm aware of. He supports vouchers, and she opposes them. He's left of his party in getting 50% ratings by environmentalist groups, but she gets close to 90%. He supported Medicare prescription drug expansion, but so did she. She doesn't support universal health care anymore, but her plan is no more conservative than what he supports. The Chamber of Commerce gives him a 72% rating and her a 35% rating. He's a free-trader, which is usally seen as a conservative issue. She got 50% support from a free trade group one year and 17% the previous year. She opposes any privatizing of social security. He favors partial privatization. She gets 58% on balanced budget issues. He gets 95%.

On other issues, she generally supports the ACLU (ranging from 60% to 80% over three years), and he generally opposes them. She gets a 100% rating from the Brady Campaign and an F from the NRA. He gets 14% from Brady and a C+ from the NRA.You can look at the comparison yourself here. I think it's pretty clear that he's more conservative than she is on most issues, often considerably so, and even when he's not he's no more liberal than she is. This goes not just for all three major areas (economic, social, and foreign policy) but for all the sub-questions within each area. There's no question that Ann Coulter is either completely unwilling to look at the facts or flat-out lying. McCain has certainly not been my favorite candidate throughout this primary, but I can't see how anyone would think he's to the left of Hillary Clinton even on one issue, never mind as a whole. So those who hate McCain can go ahead and try to present the argument against him in the form of the argument above against Giuliani. I'd still dispute it on the same grounds I gave against the Giuliani version. But it's neither hopelessly ignorant nor insidiously malicious, and Coulter's argument is at least one of those.

Now it's a separate question whether conservatives should vote for McCain in their primaries. I hope to treat that question in a future post (and I especially hope to do so before my own primary next Tuesday). I don't ultimately think conservatives should oppose McCain in the general election even with the more substantial argument analogous to the anti-Giuliani argument, but it seems completely silly to me to oppose him in the general election on the ground that he's more liberal than Hillary Clinton. That claim is utterly ridiculous, and if Ann Coulter had not already lost all my respect this would have finished her off.

For an interesting take on all this talk of Senator Barack Obama transcending race, see this post by Too Sense. One Drop argues that those speaking of Senator Obama transcending race are actually exhibiting a kind of racism. The way some people speak of transcending race, you get the idea that Obama is making headway with white voters because he's somehow risen above the fact that he's black.

I very much appreciate One Drop's affirmation that black people who have "made it", such as Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, are still as black as they ever were and as black as anyone else who is black. Colin Powell, who occupied high positions both in the military and the civilian government, is black. He didn't transcend his race. It's insulting to them and to all black people to speak as if these people did.

I must note that it isn't just white people who think this way. Black people can operate from the same assumption. They don't usually say Colin Powell transcends race, though, as white people operating under this assumption will. They say he's not really black and that he's sold out to the white power structure by his willingness to hold a position in it. It's a pretty negative attitude toward the person, whereas this idea of transcending race is at least on the surface positive. But both come from the same false assumption, that blackness is incompatible with success in a world dominated by white people (and most often white men).

On the other hand, as I commented at One Drop's post, there's something very different that someone might mean by the expression "transcending race". Rather than seeing Obama as somehow beyond his race, as if his race doesn't matter at all, some people (I am convinced) are seeing him as standing for more than the issues that are particularly associated with being black. They see most blacks who have run for president in the past, most notably Al Sharpton, Carol Moseley-Braun, Jesse Jackson, and Shirley Chisholm (but most definitely not Alan Keyes) as being too focused on concerns that are black, in a way that white people who haven't adopted those concerns would be less attracted to their candidacy. In other words, Obama has a wider attraction because he deals with wider issues, and he presents the issues that are specifically related to black people in a way that white people can see that they support them too.

Now there's a different danger with this kind of "transcending race". If it assumes (or gives the impression) that so-called black issues aren't important for non-blacks to be concerned about or that what's bad for blacks isn't bad for everyone, then I think that's bad. It displays a real insensitivity to race issues. But I don't think it's quite as bad as the kind of "transcending race" talk One Drop points to. I'd say that it's a pretty unfortunate feature of the Obama campaign but one that he can do little about at this point (and I suspect wasn't responsible for in the first place). But those who participate in it are perpetuating something racially harmful.

There's actually a third group of people talking about Obama as transcending race who do neither of the above. They see him as transcending race but see that as negative. They're well aware of the fact that, for many, transcending race can be one or both of the above two things. Then they accuse Obama of inappropriately trying to transcend race (or perhaps being used by others to do so) in order to appeal to white people. Those who make this complaint will thus see him as a sort of race traitor. I don't think it's fair to go that far with it, but I do think a lot of the reason why he's got the support he's got from white people is that they see Obama as a safe black. Talking about someone as transcending race in that sense can be perfectly legitimate when it informs us about a real racial dynamic, one that can be dangerous. So it's not clear to me that all talk of transcending race is bad, even if the first kind is very bad and the second is at least unfortunate.

I've been reading through the second edition of D.A. Carson's How Long, O Lord?: Reflections on Suffering and Evil. Last night I came across a passage that I had to read a little differently now than when he first wrote it in his first edition of 1990. Carson was responding to the view that predestination-language in the Bible is basically referring to God knowing ahead of time what people outside his control will do, which takes its start from Romans 8:29's "For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son". Consider his criticism:

This way of wording things, of course, makes the human being the pivotal "decider"; God's decision is not predestination in any meaningful sense, but a kind of ratification-in-advance. Moreover, too little attention is paid to the fact that this text does not speak of foreknowing that such and such will take place, but that God foreknows the person. Many have shown that in Semitic thought "to know" a person can have overtones of intimacy: if a husband "knows" his wife, for instance, he has sexual intercourse with her. For God to "foreknow" certain people, especially in the context of Romans 8:28-30, means (as most serious commentators point out) that God has a personal relationship with the individual in advance. Those whom God foreknows in this sense, he predestines "to be conformed to the likeness of his Son". Besides, it is a strange method that takes a doubtful definition of one occurrence of "foreknowledge" and pits it against the many references in which it is clearly stated that God has chosen his people (e.g., Deut. 4:37-39; 7:6-9; Ps. 4:3; Matt 24:22, 31; Luke 18:7; John 15:16; Acts 13:48; Gal. 4:27, 31; Eph. 1:4-6; 2 Tim. 2:10; 1 Pet. 1:2).

This is part of Carson's longer argument that theological discussions of free will shouldn't first assume a particular meaning of a controversial term (in philosophy, there is no consensus on what counts as freedom) and then read the biblical text in terms of such an account of freedom, particularly if the text itself assumes a different concept of freedom. Three things came to mind as I read this paragraph.

1. Given that this use of "foreknow" is based on the Semitic concept Carson explains (which I think is highly likely if not almost certain), there is an alternative interpretation of this passage as merely corporate. God choose a people and then lets individuals decide if they want to be in it. A lot of Wesleyans and Arminians hold such a view about other passages involving predestination. I find it thoroughly implausible for other reasons, but given its availability and commonness, it's a little strange that this individualist interpretation at odds with the Semitic language persists.

2. This view makes the predestination-language pretty dumb. Why should Paul bother to add it in? If all God is doing is seeing that someone will do something and then agreeing that they will indeed do the thing that he sees them doing in the future, what's the point of saying that he predestines people? If predestining is simply foreknowing, then it's redundant, in fact tautologous. It basically means, "For whom he foreknew that they would do it, he agreed that they would do it." That's not very informative unless you're inclined to think God engages in self-deception. I'm not too fond of interpretations of Paul that make him out to be an idiot.

3. The first sentence struck me as extremely funny given a certain political moment of a couple years ago. Carson doesn't use the exact term "the decider", but by implication he's saying that God is the ultimate decider, and the view he's responding to makes humans the decider. This is pretty much the exact sense of the term the president was using when people made fun of him for calling himself the decider. So a very intelligent professor from Canada with a Ph.D. from a top U.K. institution, one who I note is very particular about his language, can write in a way that pretty much got universally made fun of as dumb Southerner hick language when the president of the United States used it. (Carson does acknowledge something funny about using the term this way by putting it in scare quotes, but the president was speaking extemporaneously, and Carson was not only writing in a prepared way, but it passed through the editorial review process and then did so again when he revised the book five or six years later.)

Ron Paul is indisputably the presidential candidate who most attracts the support of white supremacists, and he has come under a lot of fire recently for not taking a strong enough stand against his racist supporters. What's worried me even more is his inability to show even a minimally decent understanding of what racism even is when he's declared himself not to be a racist.

So it's a bit surprising that Paul is also the Republican candidate with the greatest traction among black voters. Does this mean he'll be a uniter and not a divider?

I wanted to follow up on my post last week Highest-Ranked People With Last Names Ending in A. I was curious what the highest-ranked people of each final letter of the last name would be. I decided to stick with the ceremonial order of precedence referred to in the previous post, and I also limited myself to people who would be of their rank in a way that didn't depend on being in a certain location. That leaves out governors, mayors, and ambassadors in the region where they have authority. Governors do show up lower in the list when not in their state, and I did include them. I got down to the deputy secretaries of executive departments, and I couldn't find lists of former deputy secretaries for a couple departments, so I stopped looking at that point. Three letters remain unknown.

a Associate Justice, Supreme Court
b Speaker of the House
c member of U.S. House of Representatives
d President
e President
f Secretary of Homeland Security
g President
h President
i Secretary of Defense
j
k President
l Vice-President
m Speaker of the House
n President
o Associate Justice, Supreme Court
p Speaker of the House
q
r President
s President
t President
u Secretary of the Treasury
v
w Vice-President
x Vice-President
y President
z Secretary of State

If you know of any high officials for the three remaining letters, go ahead and leave a comment, but I wouldn't be sure it was the highest unless I could see lists of everyone occupying and having occupied all the positions in between them and where I left off. But it would be nice to have a more complete list with people of whom we could say confidently that there's someone for that letter who was at least as high as a certain position.

At some of the race blogs I read, now and then someone comes along and makes a comment about how frequently people with last names ending in A have done something. It's usually said in a sort of way that suggests names ending in A are a good representation of underrepresented groups. With Barack Obama winning the Iowa caucuses, the possibility of a President Obama all of a sudden seemed a lot more viable, and sure enough a comment appeared in the comments here wondering who the highest-ranked person with a last named ending in A might have been.

Even if there are much more precise, and probably more accurate, ways of measuring underrepresented people in government positions, I thought it was an interesting question, so I investigated it. It turns out there aren't that many in the highest positions. One problem, though, is how you measure rank. There is an official measurement of ceremonial rank for matters of state, but there's nothing to that but ceremony. Laura Bush is higher rank in terms of ceremony than Dick Cheney, but she has no official authority in reality. The mayor of a small city outranks the Chief Justice of the United States when in that city, according to this list, and that's surely not a good way to measure rank in the way this commenter meant.

The other problem is that there are three branches of equal rank, and it's hard to compare whether someone of significant authority in one should be over someone of significant authority in another. How do we compare the rank of the president with the rank of the Chief Justice? How do we compare the rank of the Majority Leader of the Senate with the rank of Associate Justices of the Supreme Court? So any answer to the question is going to be a bit messier than the question might at first make it sound, but there are some interesting answers to give.

In the executive branch, you can provide some order. The president, v.p. and then cabinet do seem to have a ranked order (because of the order of succession, although that doesn't really reflect influence: is Homeland Security less influential than Veterans' Affairs?). It turns out the highest rank in the executive branch for someone with a last name ending in A is Attorney General. That person was Joseph McKenna under President McKinley, who later became a Supreme Court Justice. But then I don't know how to rank chiefs of staff, and I think they might have more influence than some cabinet members even if they don't seem as prominent in any official constitutional capacity. Leon Panetta and John Podesta have been chiefs of staff. They do appear in the ceremonial ranking under cabinet secretaries, though.

In the judiciary branch, it's obvious that Chief Justice of the U.S. is the highest position and then the associate justices. McKenna again was the first justice with a last name ending with A, and of course now we've got Antonin Scalia. If you move down a level to appeals court judges, we've had Abner Mikva and Antonin Scalia on the D.C. Circuit. Juan Toruella and Bruce Selya are both current members of the First Circuit. Harold Medina was on the Second Circuit. Emilio Garza is on the Fifth Circuit. The Ninth Circuit has Carlos Bea, Sandra Ikuta, and Wallace Tashima. It previously had the aforementioned Joseph McKenna The Tenth Circuit has Deanell Tacha. The Eleventh Circuit has Joel Dubina. The Federal Circuit has Arthur Gajarsa. I didn't notice any on the Third, Fourth, Sixth, Seventh, or Eighth Circuits.

The legislative branch is harder. The two constitutional roles in the line of succession (Speaker of the House, President Pro Tempore) haven't had anyone with names ending in A. There haven't been any Majority or Minority Leaders, or Majority or Minority Whips ending in A. The only other higher-ranked positions I can think of are committee chairs. I doubt Barack Obama has chaired any major committee (although he may chair a subcommittee), but Daniel Akaka has. Joseph Montoya and Akaka's predecessor, Spark Matsunaga, also held no committee chairships as far as I can tell. In the House, 14 current members have last names ending in A. I'm not going to look through all the former members there or try to figure out who has held committee chairs, but several of them are pretty senior, and at least two are currently ranking members on important committees.

Then it's hard to know how to compare state level to federal level. I didn't look at all the states for governors, but New Mexico was an obvious one to look at, and they've had three, one as far back as a century ago (around Joseph McKenna's time).

Ambassadors might also count as pretty high-ranking. Currently, Cesar Cabrera is ambassador to Seychelles. I don't know of an easy way to look for others without a lot of time-consuming clicking in Wikipedia, but there is at least this one.

If you do go by the ceremonial order of precedence, the highest-ranked among these would be the governors (only in their state) and then ambassadors (while at their posts). If you're not in a state with a governor with a name ending in A (and Spitzer certainly doesn't) and aren't at the post of an ambassador whose last name ends in A (and I'm not in the post of any U.S. ambassador), then the highest-ranking official with a name ending in A is currently none other than Justice Antonin Scalia, by this ceremonial measure. So by that measure, the answer to the question is ironically someone the person asking the question likely despises.

Update: I found some more governors and ambassadors:

Rudolf Perina (ambassador to Armenia)
Sharon E. Villarosa (ambassador to Burma)
Cesar Cabrera (ambassador to Mauritius)
Antonio O. Garza Jr. (ambassador to Mexico)
Preston Lea (governor of DE, 1905-1909)
William Paca (governor of MD, 1782-1785)
Jonas Galusha (governor of VT, 1809-1813)
Joseph Desha (governor of KY, 1824-1828)
Henry L. Fuqua (governor of LA, 1924-1926)
John W. Dana (governor of ME, 1844, 1847-1850)
L. B. Hanna (governor of ND, 1913-1917)
Ezequiel C. de Baca (governor of NM, 1917)
Jerry Apodaca (governor of NM, 1975-1979)
Toney Anaya (governor of NM, 1983-1987)

I have very little to say about the Democratic race. I was happy to see Hillary Clinton pull off a win in New Hampshire, because I think it's unfortunate when the momentum from one race pretty much decides a primary election, as happened with John Kerry in 2004. I also prefer her to Obama both because she would be a much better president and because I think she'd be easier for any GOP candidate to beat in the general election, and I really don't want the Democrats controlling both houses of Congress (which isn't likely to change in 2008) and the White House. When I agree with the Democrats, it's usually on things they can achieve with a Republican president even if a Republican isn't likely to initiate legislation on those issues. When I don't, a Democratic president isn't likely resist them, and even one that might isn't going to resist them enough. I think this would be worse with Barack Obama as president than it would be with Hillary Clinton. So I'm rooting for her to get the nomination for both reasons, but I have no idea what to make of the various theories about why she managed to pull it off in NH, and I'm not going to hazard a guess about where it's going to go in the remaining primaries and caucuses.

I do have some thoughts on the GOP race, though. I want to make one point about what people have been saying about Mitt Romney, and then I wa