Academics vs. Jacksonians: A Flawed Analysis

Michael Barone resuscitates the Jefferson-Jackson divide in the Democratic party and calls it the Academic-Jacksonian divide. He then uses it to explain the respective appeals of Obama and Clinton. His article has a lot of other stuff in it -- a not so illuminating (translation: eye-glazing) analysis of all the Democratic primaries and caucuses to date. Skip that part. Josh Marshall has a better analysis and it's on video (see below).

Barone's analysis is, well, flawed. First of all, he lost me right from the git-go with this:

I was struck by the narrow geographic base of Barack Obama's candidacy. In state after state, he has carried only a few counties—though, to be sure, in many cases counties with large populations.

So shit Sherlock. His perspective reminds me of those stupid red-blue maps that Republicans were posting after the 2004 election where they red and blue counties on a map. Of course, nearly the entire map was red with a few specks of blue. This was supposed to show that Republicans were overwhelmingly dominant in the election. But that's just silly: one huge county in Wyoming has two people in it who vote for Bush and so you color that huge swath of territory red. Another small county in Michigan goes overwhelmingly for Kerry and you get -- a tiny speck of blue on the map, even though the population is 1000 time bigger than the Wyoming county.

But then you knew that, right? You knew that the Democrats generally did better in the urban areas and the Republicans generally did better in the rural and exurban areas. The suburbs are a toss-up.

The other thing about the academic-Jacksonian microtrend is that it presents a false choice: that you are either for academic pursuits or you are a fierce patriot. I don't know about you, but I hear a dog-whistle: You are either a fighter or an appeaser. Sorry, that's crap.

History shows us that if you choose war (as opposed to having it thrust upon you) you're implicitly admitting failure: you've failed to find a way out. And the further you go in, the harder it is to come out.

So, I wouldn't be so quick to elevate warmaking into some noble pursuit, some permutation of patriotism. Just because you come from a long line of soldiers doesn't make you a patriot or qualify you to become president.

No, I like Josh Marshall's analysis much better. Marshall, one of the blogosphere's best and brightest observers, has an excellent rundown of the role of race in Obama's primary victories -- specifically how (and why) he does really well in states with either no black population (e.g., Iowa) or a very high black population (e.g., Louisiana). The in-between states like Ohio, not so much.

Marshall presents a couple of analyses that look at the data and come to a couple of seemingly different conclusions, although maybe the analyses have more in common that it might at first appear.

I know the idea of poring over data makes your eyes glaze over, but it is a video and he makes it pretty easy to digest. I strongly suggest you check it out.