Famously, HDRC has a large campaign debt, which she and her husband are demanding Obama help retire. I'm not sure, then, how it is that she would be in a position to offer refunds. In any event, she is asking that money which would otherwise be refunded be contributed towards her 2012 Senate campaign, instead of being used to retire her debt.

It isn't really plausible that HDRC will pay-off her Presidential campaign debts in-full; instead, creditors will receive pennies-on-the-dollar, with the Clintons representing such settlements as-if they are payment in-full. If the Clintons channel monies that could have gone to the repayment of debt instead to her 2012 Senate campaign, then those creditors will in effect have been compelled to contribute towards that Senate campaign.

In a protected entry, an LJ Friend linked to Hey, Obama boys: Back off already! by Rebecca Traister at Salon.com a couple of days ago. She didn't give her own assessment of the article, beyond saying that it was interesting. I've decided to make a few comments on it.

The principal thesis of the article seems to be that a significant source of support for Obama amongst social democratic (progressive) males is really founded in sexism. Now, I've seen plenty of hypocrisy amongst social democrats, but consider that Margaret Thatcher became the leader of the British Conservative Party in 1975 and their Prime Minister in 1979, and served until 1990. Do we really want to even suggest that sexism is going to be more of a determinant amongst Democratic voters in 2008 than it was amongst British Conservative voters in 1975, or than it was amongst Britons more generally in 1979?

There are a few revealing passages in the article that I think merit special attention:

Valenti continued, Because their friends were not being specifically sexist, or saying something that was tangibly misogynistic, they were having a hard time talking about the sexism of it. Valenti confirmed that this Feminine Mystique-y problem that has no name was familiar to her. I spoke to a guy friend who said, You're being ridiculous. I'm not not voting for her because she's a woman; I'm not voting for her because she's a bitch! He could not see the connection between the two things at all. Valenti said he explained away his comment by declaring, I mean a bitch in the sense that she's not good on this or that issue.

People use the word bitch to mean a number of things. But when Hillary's opponents call her a bitch, they don't typically mean that she is tough in a way with a peculiarly significant relationship to her sex (distinctive or inappropriate); they instead mean that she is sanctimonious, hypocritical, and vicious. (If you want a clear sense of these perceptions, then read The Tall Tale of Tuzla by Christopher Hitchens in Slate or the milder A Hillary Clinton Presidency by Carl Bernstein at CNN.)

A couple of paragraphs later,

Valenti continued, I pinpoint sexism for a living. You'd think I'd be able to find an example. And I hate to rely on this hokey notion that there's some woman's way of knowing, and that I just fucking know. But I do. I just know. When it comes to feminism, she continued, so much proof is required to convince someone that sexism exists, even when it's explicit and outrageous. So when it's subdued or subtle, you don't want to talk about it.

Note the epistemology here. She cannot produce any evidence, but she's insisting that the attitude of these men must be sexist. And she acts as if the reluctance of some people to accept even the plainest of evidence is an excuse for making a charge with no evidence. I would suggest that if Ms Valenti perceives a difference of opinion whose cause must be sexism, and she cannot produce evidence of sexism on one side, then perhaps she ought to be looking for it on the other side.

The article is very right about one thing: A great many social democrats — and a great many people who are not social democrats — have developed unreasonable expectations for Obama:

You already see this idealistic longing projected on Obama, Bruch said. People talk about him as a secular messiah who will bring us political salvation. There's no sense of what is plausible.

Unless McCain makes missteps extraordinary even for a Republican, he will win the general election. And the sorts of domestic programmes and foreign policy that Obama has been advocating would bear very bitter fruit, in some cases very quickly, causing the nation to lurch to the political right.

I can offer a few theories as to why Ralph Nader has announced that he will once again run for President.

The first, and that to which I subscribe, is that he takes some sort of perverse pleasure in functioning as a spoiler. Whatever were his intentions in 2000, he was a spoiler for Gore, which resulted in the election of George Walker Bush. Nader had less of a chance to spoil things for the Democrats in 2004, and certainly less of a chance to move the Democratic Party to the political left, but he could and did spoil things for the Green Party, destroying them by running against their candidate. In 2008, Nader doesn't have a good chance of spoiling things for the Democratic nominee, but it's better than were his chances in 2004; McCain is not as loathed by the left as was Bush.

An alternate theory would be that Nader is trying to give Obama some center cred, on the presumption that Obama will indeed be the nominee. Seeking first the nomination of the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton and Obama have each positioned themselves significantly to the left of where the last successful Democratic Presidential nominee, William Jefferson Clinton, did when he was running. McCain is a war-hawk, and a conservative on some issues, but he is a centrist or even to the left of center on other issues. To win the election, the Democratic nominee will have to seem more centrist than presently does Obama or Hillary Clinton. On top of some rhetorical restyling by the candidate, it could help if Nader provided apparent contrast.

Of course, Nader is more likely to function as a spoiler if Hillary Clinton is the nominee, because she has at times been a war-hawk, and there is less expectation that she would withdraw troops aggressively from Iraq than that Obama would do this. So it is possible that Nader has announced when he has in order to further weaken the Clinton campaign. In that case, we have Nader acting as a spoiler of some sort for Clinton (and possibly for the Democratic Party), and positioning himself to make Obama look more centrist should he gain the nomination.