Shots in the Dark

Once again, white voters making less than $50k voted for Hillary by a considerable margin in Kentucky, as they did in West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere. Are they racist, or just stupid?

(Kidding.)

But of course the question of whether whites, and particularly lower-income whites, will vote for a black person for president is relevant to this campaign, and so pollsters have been putting to voters this question:

In deciding your vote for president today, was the race of the candidate the single most important factor, one of several important factors, or not an important factor?

According to the Washington Post, about 34,000 Democrats so far have answered the question, and…

6 percent of respondents said race was the most important factor; 13 percent said race was one of several important factors; and everyone else said it was not important at all.

But what does that mean? After all, race could be an affirmative factor in influencing someone’s vote.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem that way.

Among whites who said race was an important factor, about 65 percent voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and 31 percent for Obama. In West Virginia, 84 percent of those whites voted for Clinton; in Mississippi, 81 percent; and in Arkansas, 80 percent.

“What I take away from that is that whites who acknowledge race as being an important factor in their vote were more inclined to vote for Clinton than Obama,” [AP polling director] Mokrzycki said. “You can read into that what you will.”

By contrast, 61% of whites in Vermont who said that race was an important factor in their vote…voted for Obama. (I’ve always liked Vermont.)

A relevant question, I think, is to what extent Hillary has stoked this racism by repeatedly (along with Bill) playing the race card.

Is she George Wallace in a pantsuit?

“I’m going to keep making our case until we have a nominee, whoever she may be.”

—Hillary Clinton, last night

Showing particular candor, John McCain wishes Ted Kennedy the best and describes him as “the single most effective member of the Senate.”
Well. That is immensely decent of him, and good for him for saying so. But it’s not going to endear McCain much to conservative Republicans, who already don’t trust him.

Also, in the video on CNN.com, you really get to see how dramatic McCain’s cancer scar is. As Tim Noah points out in Slate today, that’s going to be hard to hide on HDTV.

And finally, I find Robert Byrd’s tearful statement, read with his head starting straight down, powerful and moving. “Ted…Ted…my dear friend. I love you….”

In the end, we are neither Republican nor Democrat, just mortal.

David Warsh also reports something that would be astonishing if true:

A decision to overrule an appointment after an ad hoc proceeding isn’t unheard of, Harvard veterans say; it’s part of the president’s job (or at least it used to be: one rumor has it that Faust has sought to end the traditional presidential involvement in all ad hocs; it is possible she delegated the decision). But neither does it happen often, for such decisions inevitably are embarrassing to all concerned. Their after-effects linger for many years. Initial efforts uncovered no one in Cambridge willing to talk frankly about the affair. “They screwed up very badly,” said one well-regarded and presumably well-informed senior figure.

Emphasis added.

I find that rumor hard to believe. What president would voluntarily give up a) the ability to maintain the high quality of the faculty as she sees it and b) that much power?

Such an abdication of the president’s traditional role would be bizarre. The power to have the final say on tenure decisions takes an enormous amount of time, but it’s one of the things that makes the Harvard presidency distinctive, and it is truly one of the relatively few arrows in the president’s quiver. Why disarm voluntarily?

The episode is likely to be seen as being profoundly embarrassing to Harvard – a red flag to those who consider it a haven for misogynists, and a warning to precisely those outsiders whom it says it is eager to attract.

Mr. Warsh obviously has strong feelings about the episode. Anyone know any details to confirm or complement or rebut them?

David Warsh reports on his blog that Drew Faust has nixed a tenure offer to Christina Romer, an economist at U-Cal Berkeley.

The Harvard offer to her, and a Kennedy School offer to her husband, a prominent macroeconomist, had been widely reported in the profession and, at Berkeley, greatly feared. The pair had been instrumental in putting the graduate program there back on its feet, after their arrival from Princeton in the early 1990s. Because each has an aging parent in Massachusetts, and because two of their three children will be attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the fall, the Harvard offer was viewed as being, as one colleague put it, “less of a bullet than a small nuclear device” aimed at Berkeley macro.

Given the difficulty Harvard has had hiring female professors – its treatment of women was a proximate cause for the resignation of president Lawrence Summers in 2006 – the decision to reject the offer came as a shock. Mrs. Romer was to have replaced retiring economic historian Jeffrey Williamson. Is the Harvard department, generally considered to be the best in the world, stupid for having voted its offer? Is the profession foolish for having elevated Mrs. Romer to its upper ranks? Faust’s decision is completely unexplained. Nor is it likely to be, at least by her.

Perhaps it will be here?

I’m sorry to hear this news of Ted Kennedy: He has a malignant brain tumor.

Are the Yankees through for the season? Holy cow, it could be possible.

In the NY Sun, Steven Goldman writes…In both 2005 and 2007, the team stubbornly stood pat and rallied to make the playoffs. This season, though, the odds seem longer, and the long-term implications of trying to hang in the race are more damaging.

As Goldman runs down the Yankee lineup, things look pretty bleak—and pretty old.

Jason Giambi is hitting .191 over the last year. Andy Pettitte and Bobby Abreu are 35 and their performance is declining. Mike Mussina is 40 and rarely goes more than five innings. Johnny Damon and Hideki Matsui are both around 35. Jorge Posada’s around there too—older, even, I think. Even Derek Jeter is getting on; Yankee fans can’t count on him to be productive forever.

And Jon Lester threw a no-hitter last night. Argh. These are the salad days for Red Sox fans…

Is it time for the Yankees to throw in the towel on the season and start rebuilding? Not quite. (And their options would be limited anyway.) But it’s getting there.

…that she’s making a fool of herself?

She’s now saying that the Democratic campaign is “nowhere near over,” despite abundant evidence to the contrary.

Clinton, with few options left to claim the nomination, repeated her assertion yesterday that she leads in the popular vote - a calculation only possible if Obama’s victories in caucuses are discounted and if the votes are included from Florida and Michigan.

And, as Andrew Sullivan points out but the Boston Globe and the New York Times do not, even then Clinton only leads in the popular vote if you count her votes from Michigan and you don’t count Obama’s.

But why go that far? Those states’ votes shouldn’t be counted anyway, and Obama today will almost surely win enough delegates to give him a majority.

Hillary Clinton reminds me of Carrie White: First she wants to burn down the high school and kill all her classmates. Then she wants to thrust her hand out from the grave to pull the survivors down with her…..

Economist James D. Miller makes it on InsideHigherEd.com.

A tax on elite colleges would reduce inequality. Students who attend top schools have vastly higher lifetime incomes than other Americans do. And even if the tax reduced financial aid and so increased student borrowing, it would still reduce inequality because those who graduate from elite schools with large debts are much better off financially than are their peers who do not attend college.

That strikes me as a wildly unconvincing reason to tax a non-profit. Then again, the question is really whether Harvard should still be considered a non-profit institution…..

Woe are the Yankees?

Whichever. As a poster below kindly points out, the Yankees stink. They just got swept by the Mets, for chrissakes.

As the terrific Yankee blog RiverAveBlues points out, there’s so much that’s gone wrong with the Yankees: They’re not hitting lefty-pitching, Andy Pettitte has been crummy, no A-Rod, no Jorge……

It’s all too depressing. Even for Red Sox fans, it must be depressing.

Actually, I take that back. If the situation were reversed and the Yankees were in first and the Red Sox were in last, I’d probably be pretty happy about it……