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Where is Obama’s big speech on sexism?

I can’t write much at the moment – exams – but it just occurred to me to ask:  Where is Obama’s big speech on sexism?

Why didn’t he give a month ago?  In particular, why didn’t he give it before the DNC made their decision on Florida and Michigan?  Giving it after Hillary bows out will look like what it will be – a naked political attempt to convince her most ardent supporters to turn up on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of November.  If he’d given it two months ago, it would have had at least a chance of being seen as an honest, even gracious attempt to reach out to the Hillary-voters and convince them that he believes in fighting all forms of bigotry.

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Why won’t the government of Burma (Myanmar) let aid in?

My sister (in law) wondered why the government, if you can call it that, of Burma (Myanmar) isn’t letting foreign aid into the country after Cyclone Narqis (that’s a hurricane to any North Americans in the audience) ripped through the country earlier this month. My quick-and-dirty response:

  • They’re arseholes. These are generally not nice people and caring about their citizens is, well, not all that important to them.
  • Like North Korea, Zimbabwe and other pariah states, they have an overdeveloped sense of paranoia, believing that any representative of any foreign power will necessarily be seeking to topple them.
  • They’re crazy. And I do mean loopy. The current site of the capital was chosen by astrologers. The people in charge believe in magic.
  • Even if they weren’t crazy arseholes with overdeveloped senses of paranoia, they’re a developing country and it’s The West that’s offering to help. That’s the same West that a couple of months ago was calling them bad names for beating a few (thousand) monks. They don’t like us and even if they need our help, that we offer it appears arrogant to them.

Update:
And of course …

  • Even if they weren’t crazy, paranoid arseholes who resent the West, there’s always an underlying shame in asking for help.  It’s almost always seen by somebody, either the giver, the receiver or a looker-on, as symbolic of weakness.
  • What Adam said.
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Four techniques of public policy

Suppose you have a situation where individual choices are suboptimal, both for that individual and for the group as a whole.  Exactly why the individual makes suboptimal choices isn’t immediately relevant for the moment.  It seems to me, that there are four broad approaches to “solving” this problem: a) an engineering approach; b) a government mandate; c) economic incentives; and d) a psychological approach.  The four approaches are not mutual exclusive and can even overlap, but they each bring a different mindset to the problem.  All four approaches can be taken to an absurd extreme.

To explain each of the four, an (admittedly pretty graphic) example may be useful.  Men seem, in general, to have a habit of spillage at public urinals – pee goes on the floor instead of the urinal.  This induces both private costs (increased health risks and the ‘ick’ factor of negotiating another guy’s floor-pee) and public costs (increase cleaning costs).

  • An engineering approach would be to design a better urinal to minimise spash-back.  An extreme engineering approach would not only do this, but also include sensors to detect when urine falls outside the catchment area and then activate an automatic (i.e. robotic) cleaning system.
  • A government mandate would make it illegal to spill your pee on the floor.  How extreme this is would depend on the enforcement mechanism.  A light-handed approach would pass the law and then do nothing to enforce it, similar to jay-walking.  A heavy-handed approach would hire a cop to occasionally watch men pee and arrest them if they spill, similar to most countries’ drug policy.  An extreme approach would have a government agent hold your penis to make sure that you don’t spill, similar to the Australian government’s enforcement of mandatory superannuation.
  • An economic incentive would impose a fine on men for spilling and/or give them a bonus payment for not spilling.  How extreme this measure is would depend on the size of the fine or the bonus.  Because this also has a need for enforcement (government-implemented or government-guaranteed), this can be thought of as a market-oriented government approach.
  • A psychological approach would seek to reframe the issue to influence the way that men make their choices.  For the urinal, it could be to make use of the fact that if you paint a fly in the urinal at the spot that minimises splash-back, the visual cue will cause men to aim at it and overall spillage will fall.  My mother did something similar when I was a kid.  She had five teenage boys living under her roof and not even making us clean the toilet seemed to stop the mess, so she put a ping-pong ball in the toilet (because it’s so light, it won’t flush down) and told us to aim at it.

So what’s my point?  Just this:  most people tend to focus on just one of the four approaches and think that it is the best way to solve every problem, when the truth is that different problems call for different responses and that the best strategy will usually employ several approaches.  In the case of spilling urine, the best strategy is probably a combination of an engineering and psychology, but in others a different combination may be optimal.  Don’t always think that your favourate approach is the best or only one.

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*sigh* (Zimbabwe)

This is from The Independent. It’s a fairly short article, so I’ll include it in full (all emphasis is mine):

Chinese troops have been seen on the streets of Zimbabwe’s third largest city, Mutare, according to local witnesses. They were seen patrolling with Zimbabwean soldiers before and during Tuesday’s ill-fated general strike called by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

Earlier, 10 Chinese soldiers armed with pistols checked in at the city’s Holiday Inn along with 70 Zimbabwean troops.

One eyewitness, who asked not to be named, said: “We’ve never seen Chinese soldiers in full regalia on our streets before. The entire delegation took 80 rooms from the hotel, 10 for the Chinese and 70 for Zimbabwean soldiers.”

Officially, the Chinese were visiting strategic locations such as border posts, key companies and state institutions, he said. But it is unclear why they were patrolling at such a sensitive time. They were supposed to stay five days, but left after three to travel to Masvingo, in the south.

China’s support for President Mugabe’s regime has been highlighted by the arrival in South Africa of a ship carrying a large cache of weapons destined for Zimbabwe’s armed forces. Dock workers in Durban refused to unload it.

The 300,000-strong South African Transport and Allied Workers Union (Satawu) said it would be “grossly irresponsible” to touch the cargo of ammunition, grenades and mortar rounds on board the Chinese ship An Yue Jiang anchored outside the port.

A Satawu spokesman Randall Howard said: “Our members employed at Durban container terminal will not unload this cargo, neither will any of our members in the truck-driving sector move this cargo by road. South Africa cannot be seen to be facilitating the flow of weapons into Zimbabwe at a time where there is a political dispute and a volatile situation between Zanu-PF and the MDC.”

Three million rounds of AK-47 ammunition, 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades and more than 3,000 mortar rounds and mortar tubes are among the cargo on the Chinese ship, according to copies of the inventory published by a South African newspaper.

According to Beeld, the documentation for the shipment was completed on 1 April, three days after the presidential vote.

Zimbabwe and China have close military ties. Three years ago, Mr Mugabe signed extensive trade pacts with the Chinese as part of the “Look East” policy forced on him by his ostracising by Western governments over human rights abuses. The deal gave the Chinese mineral and trade concessions in exchange for economic help.

The shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague called on David Miliband to demand a cessation of arms shipments.

A South African government spokesman Themba Maseko said it would be difficult to stop the shipment.

*sigh*

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Non-geographic constituencies

The Australian House of Representatives has 150 members for a resident population of 21,268,746 (10 April 2008), or almost 142,000 people per representative. The US House of Representatives has 435 members for a resident population of 303,817,103 (10 April 2008), or almost 670,000 people per representative. The UK House of Commons has 646 members for a resident population of 60,587,000 (mid-2006), or almost 94,000 people per representative. The Canadian House of Commons has 308 members for a resident population of 33,231,725 (10 April 2008), or almost 108,000 people per representative.

Traditionally, which is to say always, the constituency of each representative or member of parliament has been defined geographically. That’s simple enough, but now that communication and identification technology has advanced to where it is today, they no longer need to be.

Members of the various lower houses of parliament/congress are meant to be representatives of their constituents, speaking on their behalf and seeking to act in their best interest. Before anybody mentions it, the Edmund Burke argument, that members of parliament ought to focus on the well-being of the nation as a whole, carries more strength in a unicameral parliament than it does in the constitutional arrangements of Australia, Canada and the USA where an upper-house exists with members sitting for longer terms so as – in principal, at least – to focus more on the issues more than the politics. It also seems to me that within her role as a member of parliament thinking of the good of the nation, a representative has a duty to pass on to the parliament the democratically valid views of her constituents, even if she ultimately votes in another direction.

By having electoral districts be geographically defined, we remove from the people the right to self-organise and they instead become passive receivers of groupings that are set down upon them. Unless you have an independent body to determine electoral boundaries, you therefore run the risk of gerrymandering (although whether that necessary causes polarisation is apparently debatable). Even if gerrymandering does not cause polarisation, the relevance of a geographically-defined groups is becoming less relevant as communication and transportation technologies improve. In a more globalised world where the economic fortunes of people are less tied to those of their neighbours, the issues of concern that people share will be less likely to be spatially concentrated.

My question, then, is this: What if 150,000 Australians were to voluntarily opt out of their resident electoral districts and form a non-geographically defined constituency with their own seat in the House of Representatives?

  • Individuals would only be permitted to be a member of one electoral constituency.
  • Everyone would be a part of a geographic district by default, but could change to a non-geographic grouping if they chose.
  • Even then, people would retain a geographical link to the legislature through the Senate.
  • The election of representatives from non-geographic constituencies would proceed just like any other seat in a general election; all of the various political parties would be free to offer candidates and to campaign in whatever way they saw fit.
  • By coming together around a common topic of concern, constituents guarantee that candidates will need to address that concern in their campaigns and that the winner will truly be their representative in parliament.

The idea isn’t entirely novel. Several countries allow for an expatriate electoral role so that non-resident citizens can still vote. These are usually tied back to a geographic district within the home country, but there’s no reason they have to be.

At a first glance, this might seem like a finely grained version of proportional representation. I guess that to a point it is, but since each constituency would still have elections, all parties would be able to put forward candidates and the decision process within each constituency would still be the same as within geographic districts (preferential voting in Australia, first-past-the-post in the UK and USA), it’s not.

It might also seem like this would just be formalised lobbying. To that I can only say: “Yes. So?” People are entitled to their views and in a democracy those views ought to be granted equal rights to be heard. Lobbyists are treated with such scorn today because they seek to obtain political influence beyond their individual vote. They exist, in part, because people do not have any real connection to their representatives.

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On the fractious diversity of The Left (Updated)

I’m always surprised by “the left” (whatever that is). There seems to be a rolling, tumultuous mix of a thousand competing ideologies, but with people’s individual views overlapping dozens of them. How any broad grouping can possibly house somebody who argues that human trafficking figures are overblown and that many migrant prostututes chose freely to do so, big (p|m)aternalistic governmentalists, anarcho-greenie localists and pro-market World-Bank-supporting developmentalists all under the same umbrella is beyond me.

I read today in the Economist that Dilma Rousseff, a Brazilian politician who is currently chief-of-staff to President Lula in one of the most financially conservative, rightward-looking “left” governments of South America, was once a Trotskyist. The Wikipedia entry on her is clearly a highly-biased stub, but alleges (without evidence) that in the late 60s and early 70s, she was a member of a revolutionary guerilla group bent on taking Brazil down the route of outright communism. I might be completely wrong, but I think that you just don’t see that sort of change in extremes of position in “the right”, or if it does happen, it does so much, much less frequently.

To some extent, it seems that one of the key differences between the left and the right isn’t so much about ideology (although there is that) but about the practicalities of how to achieve their respective goals. Those on the left seem, on the whole, to prefer to stay in the stratosphere of broad, sweeping statements of ideological policy, while those on the right seem more likely to focus on the particular details of change. It’s a gross exaggeration to be sure, but I imagine that 80% of those on the left are more interested in where we ought to be than in how we can get there and that a further 10% seem to think that the only way to get there is in a single step by revolution.

Here’s a snippet from a recent interview of Karl Rove by GQ magazine:

What’s the biggest misconception about your role in the Bush White House?
That it was all about politics.

If that’s the misconception, what’s the overlooked truth?
Look, I’m a policy geek. What I’ve most enjoyed about my job was the substantive policy discussions. Being able to dig in deeply and, you know, learn about something, ask questions, listen to smart people, and form a judgment [sic] about something that was from a policy perspective.

The lefties may not believe him when he says that (e.g. Kevin Drum), but I’m inclined to agree more with Matthew Yglesis:

I don’t know about Rove in particular, but I’ve been consistently surprised since moving to DC of the extent to which the true policy geeks and the utterly cynical political operatives often really are the same people. These are the folks who while away their days ginning up dozens of bite-sized policy initiatives and selling them around to politicians. They’re the ones who give you your targeted tax credits, and they’re also the ones who are helping lobbyists sneak little tidbits [sic] in here and there. Hard-core ideologues often don’t care that much about the details, because geeking out over the details means you’re talking about incremental change.

Update:

Adam points out my literary ignorance (again) by asking if I’ve read “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” (Foyles, Amazon) by Milan Kundera.  Of course I haven’t, but Adam is kind enough to send me some quotes that go along with what I’m saying:

How nice it was to celebrate something, demand something, protest against something; to be out in the open, to be with others. […] He saw the marching, shouting crowd as the image of Europe and its history. Europe was the Grand March. The march from revolution to revolution, from struggle to struggle, ever onward.

[… chapters later …]

The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies. The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

[…]

What makes a leftist a leftist is not this or that theory but his ability to integrate any theory into the kitsch called the Grand March.

*sigh*

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Should the World Bank promote human rights?

Victoria Stodden (blog, Harvard page) has an interesting post up on her own blog and that of the Internet & Democracy Group at Harvard based on a recent talk given by Galit Sarfaty on “why no mandate for human rights has been incorporated into the organizational culture at the Bank.”:

She sees the reason as resulting from a clash in ideology between the human rights people, which are largely the lawyers, and economists. Economists dominate the bank, hold most powerful positions, and have a unique and prestigious research group[, while] lawyers are seen as technocrats that aren’t directly involved in projects. The legal department has a culture of secrecy because of this.

Okay, that’s probably true. My question, though, is not over how to get the World Bank to promote human rights but whether they ought to in the first place.

[Sarfaty] suggests three reasons she expects the World Bank to have implemented a human rights policy:

1) peer institutions like UNICEF, UNDP, DFID, have one,
2) the Bank is subject to external pressure by NGOs and internal pressure from employees,
3) even banks in the private sector have human rights frameworks. ICS (the World Bank commercial banking arm) has a human rights framework based on risk management.

These don’t seem like valid reasons to me, as they in essence argue that the World Bank should do something because other organisations are already doing it (the obvious omission is any mention of the IMF). There is also an important difference between merely having a stated policy on human rights and attaching human rights-related conditions to World Bank assistance. I’ll assume that Sarfaty and Stodden are speaking of the latter.

I suspect that this conflict turns on differences of opinion over what “development” actually is and which aspects of development each international organisation ought to seek to promote. It is a truism that nations can develop in a variety of different ways, including economically (both in aggregate and in distribution), socially, politically, educationally, or in public health.

The classic view of the World Bank Group is that its purpose is to promote and assist in economic development. Traditionally, which is to say up to and including much of the 1980s, it focused on aggregate economic development, but more recently it has indirectly expanded into distributive aspects of economic development by promoting and supporting smaller scale, non-infrastructure projects.

It seems to me that while everybody agrees on the importance of educational and public health development, human rights campaigners argue that social and/or political development is at least as important as economic development. Some members of that community go so far as to suggest that improving the social and political lives of people is more important than economic development and that the relative value of economic development has been over played.

I disagree with that last sentence, but I think that few people would disagree with the importance of social and political development in general, although there may some disagreement over what social and political development actually means. To my mind, then, there are two important questions:

a) What are the causal linkages between the different types of development? They clearly all positively reinforce each other, but does one aspect of development have a greater impact on the others?

b) Should a variety of international development bodies each focus on specific aspects of development or should a smaller number of organisations each take a more holistic approach?

I think it’s reasonable to say that the current global system assumes that the answer to (a) is “it’s long been believed that economic development has causal primacy, but this has been recently been brought into question” and that the answer to (b) is “the world cannot agree on the relative importance of each aspect of development, especially since what comprises social and political development is contested, so on a practical level it’s impossible to use a holistic approach.”

The upshot is that we have multilateral organisations to promote different aspects of development separately with the generally perceived legitimacy of each organisation clearly varying with how much international consensus there is on that aspect of development …

  • Economic Development: The World Bank Group
  • Public Health Development: The World Health Organisation, UNICEF
  • Educational Development: UNICEF
  • Social and Political Development: The UN Human Rights Council

… and individual governments pursuing unilateral aid programmes in areas of development where there is a conflict of opinion.

The push for the promotion of human rights to be embedded within the World Bank seems to be a change of tack by human rights campaigners after many years of failing to make headway through the extant organisation(s) created to serve their very goals. To cut to the chase, though, the fact that the UNHCR is lambasted as toothless ultimately originates from the fact that the world cannot agree on which human rights ought to be internationally enforceable. This is not just a difference between the “glorious, freedom-loving” West and the “ignoble, oppressive” (ex-)communist countries or the “ignorant, violent” Muslim nations. There are real differences of opinion between the Western nations, too. There are large differences of opinion between the USA and Europe on workers’ rights, for example. There is no guarantee of freedom of speech in Australia. Britain imposes restrictions on public protests within one kilometre of parliament.

So I’m not sure that attaching various human rights requirements to World Bank development loans will ultimately serve to help the situation. Telling Mozambique that it can’t get assistance to build a new port unless it guarantees the rights of its citizens to protest against the government or imposes upper limits to the length of the working day for the port’s employees is hypocritical preaching. It is, in effect, no different to USAID insisting that aid money will only go to HIV/AIDS charities that promote abstinence above all else.

On the other hand, if the purpose of the World Bank group is to promote economic development, it doesn’t seem entirely stupid to promote at least that subset of social and political development that is generally held to assist in economic development. This is where Sarfaty apparently sees a way of introducing the promotion of human rights in general at the Bank:

She concludes that the goal is to frame human rights issues for economists, rather than playing to the perception that it is a political issue. So the idea is to frame human rights goals for economists: presenting empirical data as to how they advance human development and thus is a relevant issue for the Bank and within its poverty eradication mandate.

Even this would be politically difficult, though. Should the people of Yemen be denied new schools if they are unwilling to guarantee that half the students will be girls? It may also lead to some uncomfortable questions for some human rights campaigners. One of the movement’s defining attributes sometimes seems to be one of an all-or-nothing attitude. How would its supporters feel about a piecemeal adoption of human rights promotion by the Bank if the data suggest that one right assists economic development but another does not?

Update (5 April 2008):

Credit where credit is due:  My views on this are not entirely my own.  They also come from discussions with my wife, Daniela, who is much smarter than me when it comes to this sort of thing.

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An update of my Obama numbers

Taking the data from Real Clear Politics today (14 March), here is an update of how Obama and Clinton have been going in running totals of pledged delegates:

obama-ahead-08-03-14.jpg

As always, when calculating the percentages in the centre column, I’m ignoring pledged delegates that are too close to call and those with John Edwards.

Date Barack Obama: running total Barack Obama: share of pledged delegates Hillary Clinton: running total
3 Jan (IA) 16 51.6% 15
8 Jan (NH) 25 51.0% 24
19 Jan (NV) 38 51.4% 36
26 Jan (SC) 63 56.8% 48
5 Feb (Super Tuesday) 913 50.9% 879
9 Feb (LA, NE, WA, Virgin Is.) 1019 52.2% 934
10 Feb (ME) 1034 52.3% 943
12 Feb (DC, MD, VA, Dem.s Abroad) 1144 53.3% 1004
19 Feb (HI, WI) 1200 53.5% 1041
04 Mar (OH, RI, TX, VT) 1380 52.9% 1227
08 Mar (WY) 1387 53.0% 1232
11 Mar (MS) 1406 53.0% 1246

There are now 566 pledged delegates to fight for (assuming that Florida and Michigan don’t get redone), 26 with John Edwards and 9 that have been voted on but are still too close to call.

The gap in pledged delegates between the candidates is now 160.

I assume that the 35 delegates that are with Edwards or too close to call will be split 50-50 between Obama and Clinton. I actually believe that Obama will get more than half of them (22 of Edwards’ delegates came from states where Obama won) but let’s be generous and say that 18 go to Clinton and 17 to Obama.

That means that Clinton needs to close a gap of 159 with only 566 pledged delegates to come. She needs to win 363 or 64%. To stay in front, Obama only needs to win 204 or 36%.

If Florida and Michigan are redone, then we have 879 delegates to come, from which Clinton would need to win 519 or 59%. To stay in front, Obama would only need to win 361 or 41%. Given its large population of Hispanics, it seems clear that Clinton would do well in Florida, so it’s pretty obvious why she wants these two states back in play.

But is it plausible to think that she can win among pledged delegates? No, not really; not even if Florida and Michigan do get redone.

On the basis of pledged delegates, Clinton has only won 13 out of 46 contests so far. On the basis of popular vote, she has won 14 out of 40; 16 if you include Florida and Michigan (Iowa, Maine, Nevada and Washington haven’t released their popular vote counts).

In those states she won in pledged delegates, Clinton has averaged 57% of the delegates on offer: she got 688 to Obama’s 517.

So in order to win overall among pledged delegates, Clinton needs to win all 12 (if FL and MI are included) remaining contests and do better in every one of them than she has previously in her winning states. If she loses any of them, then she’ll need to absolutely blow Obama out of the water in the rest. I just can’t see this happening.

My past ramblings on this topic: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5]

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Barack Obama will still win the Democratic nomination

There’s my prediction. The idea that Democratic Party super-delegates will side with the winner among pledged delegates has gone mainstream, with Jonathan Altar writing yesterday in Newsweek: “Hillary’s New Math Problem“.

Superdelegates won’t help Clinton if she cannot erase Obama’s lead among pledged delegates, which now stands at roughly 134. Caucus results from Texas aren’t complete, but Clinton will probably net about 10 delegates out of March 4. That’s 10 down, 134 to go. Good luck.

I’ve asked several prominent uncommitted superdelegates if there’s any chance they would reverse the will of Democratic voters. They all say no. It would shatter young people and destroy the party.

I’ve been saying this for a while (here, here, here and here). Altar suggests that if Clinton can at least win the overall popular vote, she might have an argument, but even that’s going to be hard, to say the least. Obama will certainly win a majority of states (he already has), will almost certainly win a majority of pledged delegates and will probably win a majority of the popular vote. There is no way that the super-delegates won’t come down on his side.

As it stands, using the Real Clear Politics figures, 2642 out of 3253 pledged delegates have been decided: there are 611 left to play for, 28 unallocated yet because they’re still too close to call and 26 are with John Edwards. Assuming that the unallocated and Edwards delegates split 50-50, Obama currently has a pledged-delegate lead of 144. To catch up, Clinton needs to win 378 of the remaining 611, or 61.8%. To stay ahead, Obama only needs to win 234 of the 611, or 38.3%. It would take a minor miracle for Obama to lose the pledged-delegate race.

On the popular vote side, it’s a little hard to make a fair comparison. Several states have not released the number of voters, while Michigan and Florida make things complicated. With all of those states ignored, Obama still has a serious, albeit smaller, lead (N.B: popular-vote figures prior to 26 Jan should be taken with a very large grain of salt):

obama-ahead-08-03-06_2.jpg

People looking to a Clinton win in the popular vote are eyeing off her performance in Michigan and Florida, but Obama did no campaigning in these states (he wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan) and for these states to be counted, they will need to be rerun. Florida does have a large Hispanic population, but even if Clinton expands her winning margin there, it probably won’t make up for her losses in Michigan.

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I was right, pretty-much-right and wrong all at once!

The girl’s got spunk. Back on the 20th of Feb, I predicted that while Hillary Clinton would win the popular vote in Ohio and Texas, she would barely win in the pledged delegates from those states. On that basis, I further predicted that Clinton would be written off by the 10th of March, even if she hadn’t conceded yet.

As evidence that you should always quit while you’re ahead, I was right on the first prediction, pretty-much-right on the second and, it would seem, not even close to being right on the third. Clinton won the popular vote in both states (1.46 million vs. 1.36 in Texas, 1.21 vs. 0.98 in Ohio). In the pledged-delegate counts, Clinton currently leads 92-91 in Texas (10 still too close to call) and 74-65 in Ohio (2 still too close to call). My prediction was bang on the money in Texas, but arguably a bit wide of the mark in Ohio. But when it comes to considering the on-going Clinton campaign, nobody is talking about Howard Dean tapping Clinton on the shoulder for a quiet chat now; all talk is about Pennsylvania in six weeks’ time.

That is a remarkable story and not because of the 3am telephone call or Obama’s views on NAFTA (although those certainly helped Clinton), but because of the successful lowering of expectations that the Clinton campaign managed to bring about. Immediately after Wisconsin and Hawaii, all talk was that Clinton needed to win, and win big, in both Texas and Ohio in order to go on. A week ago the talk was that she could justify going on if she won with a wide margin in at least one of them. In the day or two before, the word was that she would push on if she at least one the popular vote in one of the two. That lowering of expectations meant that when she won both popular votes by a solid margin and both delegate counts (albeit by small margins), it looks like a blow-out for her and gives the impression of renewed momentum.

My original observation, that Barack Obama has been in front since day one, still holds true. Using the data at Real Clear Politics, the running totals for pledged delegates have been:

Date Barack Obama: running total Barack Obama: share of pledged delegates Hillary Clinton: running total
3 Jan (IA) 16 51.6% 15
8 Jan (NH) 25 51.0% 24
19 Jan (NV) 38 51.4% 36
26 Jan (SC) 63 56.8% 48
5 Feb (Super Tuesday) 906 50.8% 876
9 Feb (LA, NE, WA, Virgin Is.) 1012 52.1% 931
10 Feb (ME) 1027 52.2% 940
12 Feb (DC, MD, VA, Dem.s Abroad) 1137 53.2% 1001
19 Feb (HI, WI) 1193 53.5% 1038
04 Mar (OH, RI, TX, VT) 1366 52.8% 1222

obama-ahead-08-03-06.jpg