News Digest, 2/13/08: Clinton Needs A Breather

Yesterday was a tumultuous day for the Clinton campaign.

The Potomac Primaries were held yesterday, and Obama won all three contests — Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia — by decisive margins. This was pretty much as predicted, but Clinton has been needing a little bit of positive unpredictability this month to head off Obama's momentum in a month filled with contests Clinton is unlikely to do well in.

Interestingly, the wins yesterday give Obama the delegate lead by almost every news organization's count — meaning that Obama may find it a bit more difficult to keep the "I'm the underdog" tenor of his message that he's used recently, even during the virtual delegate tie, when the media is now almost unanimously calling him the frontrunner.

To pile on to the bad news for Clinton, her deputy campaign manager, Mark Henry, resigned yesterday. This also was somewhat expected, as he joined the campaign at the request of Clinton's former campaign manager, Patti Solis Doyle, who recently stepped down as well. But it doesn't present very well in the light of the other negative news that the campaign has seen in the past week or so.

All said and done, however, the next few primaries are more useful to the campaigns for the amount of buzz they'll give than the amount of actual delegates assigned by them. Texas is one of the few big prizes remaining, and the campaigns are kicking preparations here into high gear. Not only are they building up staff and infrastructure in the state, but they have agreed to hold what may be one of few remaining debates here in the state, on February 21.

As bad a news day as Clinton may have had, the economy had it worse. Remember all those pessimistic prognosticators that predicted that the subprime lending problem was not what it seemed? That the problem was simply indicative of a deeper problem in the banking and lending industry, and that there was no way to contain the current subprime crisis and that it would inevitably spread to other sectors of the credit industry? Well, it turns out they were right. Prime delinquencies are now on the rise in mortgages, auto payments, and credit cards. Don't read the linked article if you're already having a bad day — it won't do much to cheer you up. It describes the broad swath of the economy that's seeing hits from the problem.

And, of course, the hit to consumers hurts industries as well, despite the fact that many of the policy initiatives that caused this problem in the first place were pushed hard by those industries. The Washington Post reported yesterday that 74,000 union workers would be offered buyouts or early retirement in light of the $38.7 billion loss they reported for 2007. (Those would be layoffs instead of buyouts if it wasn't for strong unions in the auto industry, in case you need a reminder of why unions help the little guy.) There's one of the reasons that I'm sometimes a bit critical of overly simplistic economic models — they tend to assume that the participants are rational actors, aware to at least some degree of the long-term consequences of their actions. In a corporate universe that values the information from quarterly earnings reports and stock market fluctuations over just about everything else, the "rational actor" assumption is a little too optimistic.

Moving on to more positive topics (for Democrats, anyway), it's pretty much a given that when one thinks of a poster boy for the excesses of K Street lobbyists mucking about in the federal government, one thinks of Jack Abramoff. So when someone like John McCain is running on a platform that includes campaign finance reform and decreased lobbyist influence, just about the last thing he wants to get out is that he received $100,000 in contributions from members of Abramoff's old firm. The TV attack ad basically writes itself.

And contributing editor Patrick McLeod would like you to note that the number of Republicans retiring from the U.S. House is now up to 29. I've thought more than once about putting a running total of Republican defections in a big ticker on our site, but perhaps that's rubbing it in a bit too much.

Other news bits we had yesterday include Karl Rove contradicting himself when it's politically expedient (yes, I know that's not the first time, but it never gets old), the Senate passing telecom immunity from FISA courts much to the consternation of House members who specifically excluded that from their bill, Russia playing hardball on foreign relations and the U.S. missile shield, and national conservative blog Red State is trying to come up with excuses for why progressives have an edge in online media — and isn't being particularly creative about it, either.