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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: November 2007

Howlers on List of ‘100 Most Influential’ Cons & Libs

The U.K.’s Daily Telegraph has been running a sort of political strip-tease during the last week, each day unveiling 20 names on two 100-name lists: “The Most Influential U.S. Conservatives” and “The Most Influential U.S. Liberals.” The names are all ranked with a couple of paragraphs, written (and ranked) by Tony Harnden, explaining why each individual is so influential, and the two lists are completed with today’s release of the top 20 of each set of rankings.
Readers may be interested in some of the choices and descriptions of their influence, but there is a lot to argue with, as well. For example, the top five conservatives in order are Rudy Giuliani; General David Petraeus; Matt Drudge; Newt Gingrich; and Rush Limbaugh. For the liberals, the top five are, in order: Bill Clinton; Al Gore; Mark Penn; Hillary Clinton; and Nancy Pelosi.
There are quite a few howlers on both lists. The best howler on the top 100 conservatives has to be Chuck Norris, ranking 71st, ahead of Charles Krauthammer (77th); Pat Buchanan (80th); Bill O’Reilly (82nd); Peggy Noonan (83rd); Ann Coulter (84th); Clarence Thomas(85th); Michelle Malkin (93rd); and Henry Kissinger (95th). Of the top 100 liberals, a good howler is ranking Barbara Streisand 77th, ahead of Robert Borosage (78th); Howard Dean (84th); Ted Kennedy (85th); and Bob Shrum (93rd). Joe Lieberman makes both lists.
The value in both lists for political strategy is the identifying of influential behind-the-scenes-types and the descriptions of their influence. The rankings, however, are highly subjective, impressionistic and generally useless for anything besides water-cooler chat.


Edwards Goes Airborne in Iowa

Long after his leading rivals “went up,” and well after his early lead in Iowa began to dissipate, John Edwards is now running his first television ad in that state. Given his emphasis on national security issues in his efforts to distinguish himself from Hillary Clinton in other venues, it’s interesting that this ad totally dwells on Edwards’ (and his wife’s) commitment to “stand up for working people,” and promises to show “spine” without any reference to Iraq, or for that matter, to George W. Bush.
You’d have to guess the ad is aimed at expanding Edwards’ base of labor support in Iowa, and it’s well-timed to take advantage of national pundit sentiment that he’s beginning to win Democratic candidate debates. But it’s still a pretty soft appeal for a guy whose campaign is increasingly focused on the idea that Hillary Clinton represents the corrupt status quo.


Prophets Vs. Neocons

The tension on the Right between conservative evangelical Christians and conservative Jews–particularly those of the Neoconservative variety–is an old phenomenon, most famously exposed by the so-called Neocon-Theocon dispute of 1996, in which a variety of prominent Neocons took sharp exception to Christian Right suggestions that judicial approval of abortion and gay rights might justify a revolutionary stance.
This tension didn’t, of course, prevent Neocons and Theocons from cheerfully cooperating to develop some of George W. Bush’s most disastrous international and domestic policies. But the bad feelings are re-emerging in the context of Rudy Giulani’s presidential campaign, which has drawn conspicuous Neoconservative support while tempting Christian Right leaders to threaten a third-party run if Rudy is the GOP nominee.
Interestingly enough, the most direct expression of the Neocon-Theocon dispute over Giuliani comes from a Jewish writer, David Klinghoffer, who has penned a National Review article accusing Rudy’s conservative Jewish supporters of elevating the Islamic terrorist over domestic moral-issues considerations in a way that is unfaithful to the Jewish tradition.
Klinghoffer performs this provocative bit of Neocon-baiting by appealing to the example of the Jewish prophets revered by both Christian and Jewish conservatives. As he notes quite cogently, the Prophets typically warned Jews that faithfulness to divine commandments was the best, and indeed the only, defense against foreign threats to Israel, and often treated such threats as God’s punishment for wickedness (though Klinghoffer naturally doesn’t mention it, this was the biblical basis for the infamous reaction of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson to 9/11 as retribution for America’s tolerance of abortion and homosexuality).
You certainly don’t have to agree with Klinghoffer to admire his savage use of the prophetic example to skewer the Neocon obsession with the Clash of Civilizations:

Consider Jeremiah, about whose life we know more (from his own writing), than any of his prophetic colleagues. He lived through the sacking of Jerusalem and the leading away to captivity of her people by the empire of Babylon.
In the run-up to this tragedy, was he out banging the drum for a tough anti-Babylonian stance, sponsoring a “Babylo-Fascist Awareness Week” a-la-David Horowitz? No. On the contrary, he was accused of treason by the war party among his fellow Jews. He warned that, in the context of Israel’s corrupt moral culture, it was useless to resist Babylon.
He taught that purifying the culture was the real priority, of which the defense against Babylon was merely a secondary expression.

If and when Rudy Giuliani gets really close to nailing down the Republican presidential nomination, I suspect we will hear echoes of Klinghoffer’s argument from elements of the Christian Right. They may hate and fear Islam, but their deepest hatred is reserved for America’s “holocaust” (to use Mike Huckabee’s recent term) of abortion and its alleged assaults on the family and people of faith.


Clinton’s Surprising Advantages

There’s plenty of interesting stuff in the latest Pew Research Center national political survey, and I’ll probably write about it some more later. But one set of findings that fairly jumped off the page involved the internal dynamics of Hillary Clinton’s 51-43 lead over Rudy Giuliani in a hypothetical general election matchup.
Pew compared the two candidates’ support levels in a variety of demographic categories to those of John Kerry and George W. Bush in 2004. And there were some surprises about where HRC is currently doing better than Kerry.
The categories in which HRC’s advantage over Kerry as measured by total percentage of the two-party vote is highest are these: Southern voters (+13); voters believing the invasion of Iraq was the right decision (+12); and white evangelical Protestant voters (+11). She also bests Kerry by 9% among those reporting weekly church attendance, and by 7% among self-identified Republicans (as opposed to no advantage among independents and a drop of 2% among self-identified Democrats).
These aren’t the only categories where the HRC does much better against Giuliani than Kerry did against Bush. Others include voters with no college education (+10); voters in both the top and bottom income categories (+8 for each); and least surprisingly, women (+8). But they certainly don’t comport with the stereotype that HRC is a candidate whose entire appeal is to rank-and-file Democrats.
There are two ways to look at findings like these. One is to suggest that preconceptions aside, HRC is fully capable of harvesting votes from pro-Republican segments of the electorate who are souring on the GOP, and even its strongest current candidate, Giuliani. The other is to dismiss Clinton’s surprisingly positive showing in such segments as an ephemeral phenomenon that would vanish in the course of a highly polarizing general election campaign.
Standing back from all the numbers for a moment, the most astonishing–perhaps even incredible–finding in the Pew poll is that the South is HRC’s strongest region in a contest with Giuliani. No one really thinks she or any other Democrat would come close to winning the region, or winning more than a handful of states, barring a blowout. But even if the findings are off significantly, they certainly aren’t consistent with the widely held view that HRC would be a down-ballot disaster for Democrats in the South. And they are in fact reinforced by a variety of single-state general election polls (particularly those conducted by SurveyUSA) that show HRC running as well as any other Democrat in most southern states, and running ahead of Republican candidates in several.


Tempering Dem Euphoria

Things are going extremely well for the Democrats. Lest we get too overconfident, however, here’s a pair of articles to temper Democratic euphoria: Don Frederick’s Top of the Ticket article “A daunting reality for House Democrats” at the L.A. Times notes:

60 Democrats are running in House districts carried by President Bush in 2004; only eight Republicans are running in districts carried by his Democratic opponent, John Kerry.

Frederick flags another article in the Politico “The angry voter: Bad news for Dems” by John F. Harris and Jim VandeHei, in which the authors riff on sour attitudes toward congress as a potential problem for Dems:

From the Democratic perspective, there is definitely a case to be made for alarm. It is based on the history of recent decades that shows whenever voters get this unhappy, unpredictable things can happen.

They also quote TDS co-editor Stan Greenberg: “We’ve never seen people as angry and frustrated as they are now, … even more than in ’92.” But Greenberg adds,

It’s certainly true that people are disgruntled with Congress and lukewarm about the Democrats in general…However modest Democrats’ numbers are, Republicans’ numbers are much worse and dropping…The main story is Republicans are seen as backing the Iraq war, backing Bush and blocking change.

The Politico article also cites a Mark Mellman poll showing Congressional Dems have a favorable rating of 48 percent, with 44 percent unfavorable, compared to 32 favorable for congresional Republicans, with 62 percent unfavorable.
Hardly a case for “alarm.” Cautious confidence would be more like it.