It’s been said before, but Truthdig‘s Bill Boyarsky sums the argument up nicely in his Alternet post “Iowa Caucuses: Not the Battle of the Century.” Noting the guestimate of a worker in Dubuque’s Georgia Pacific plant that about 10 percent of the 125 union members at the plant are expected to attend the caucuses, Boyarsky adds:

That is in line with a Des Moines Register poll estimate of 12 percent Republican and 10 percent Democrat attendance at caucuses around the state. That figure is substantially above the numbers for past caucuses reported by Pollster.com: Just 5.5 percent for Democrats in 2004 and 3.9 percent for Republicans in 2000. That is a tiny percentage of the 57,204 people living in Dubuque and the 2,944,062 residing in Iowa. Such a low level of involvement makes me wonder about news accounts that portray this as the battle of the century.

Boyarsky calls the Iowa caucuses “a travesty of the American political system” and describes the whole exercise as “undemocratic, unfair, unrepresentative and overly complicated.” While Boyarsky is stone cold right about the caucuses being unrepresentative of the Iowa electorate as a whole, perhaps the real travesty is the “news accounts” he cites — the MSM media, and even some blogosphere writers hype the Iowa caucuses as the ‘make or break’ event for any number of presidential campaigns. Worse, some of the candidates themselves have affirmed this view.
The good people of Iowa can’t be blamed for enjoying all of the media attention and commerce the caucuses bring — any other state would do the same, given the opportunity. In terms of political strategy, it is true that no candidate who has finished worse than third in Iowa has won the Party’s nomination, as noted in my 12/23 post below. However, the Democratic field is unusually strong this year, and that alone should be a good enough argument for hanging in there for a few more days until New Hampshire, a state whose citizens enjoy confounding pollsters, has its say.

In case it’s not obvious, The Daily Strategist is on a bit of a holiday hiaitus for a day or two, and to tell you the truth, it’s nice to go for an extended period of time without reading polls or pondering the fate that Iowans are planning for the rest of us. I wish everyone a blessed Xmas or holiday season, and a happy New Year.

The Atlanta Journal Constitution‘s Aaron Gould Shenin reports on a bellwether county in Georgia that has picked 28 winners out of 29 contests in primaries since 1996 (The tally includes state-wide, as well as presidential candidates). Muscogee County, which includes the city of Columbus, is diverse, but with a larger proportion of African Americans (about half) than the state as a whole (about 30 percent). The only miss was Muscogee’s pick for state Labor Commish back in ’88. Says Shenin, “If the Democratic candidates for president want to win the Feb. 5 Georgia primary, they best win Muscogee County.”
Scott Martelle has an L.A. Times update on the tenacity of “second tier” presidential candidates Richardson, Biden and Dodd. What keeps them going, you wonder? Martelle quotes Senator Dodd’s answer:

Iowa’s always about expectations. . . On the night of Jan. 3, the results come in, and if all of a sudden I’m in third or fourth place here, you’re going to have two candidates ahead of me whose campaigns may be over with because they failed expectations. . . . So all of a sudden this changes.

Adds Drake University political analyst Dennis Goldford, “The old rule of thumb is that there are three tickets out of Iowa. Nobody who has ever finished worse than third has gotten the nomination.” According to Martelle, Senator Biden will stay if he finishes “a close fourth.”
The article underscores what an outstanding field we have, especially in comparison to the opposition. Might be a good thing for the Democratic Party if one of these guys makes the cut and becomes a serious player on 2/5.
New Republic Senior Editor John Judis and TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira have a WaPo op-ed “Get Ready for a Democratic Era” featuring an informative look at key constituencies now leaning Democratic, including single women, professionals, Independents and white working-class males. They also discuss the growth of the ‘ideopolis’ as an influential Democratic stronghold, nation-wide, and have an optimistic vision for Dems, both short and long-term:

In 2006, the new Democratic coalition — women, professionals and minorities, augmented by disillusioned Reagan Democrats — retook Congress. In 2008, it’s poised to do even better….Republicans, who grew fat and happy during Bush’s first term, anticipating decades of rule, face some lean years ahead.

Teixeira and Judis do wave one flag, noting that the tilt to Dems among key groups “doesn’t necessarily translate into voter registration.” Notwithstanding inadequate voter turnout efforts, they believe Dems can expect “a striking political advantage over the next decade, and perhaps longer.”

Credit Matt Stoller of OpenLeft with one of the best one-liners in recent memory, in a post deriding wildly varying media assessments of the competence of various presidential campaigns: “At best, campaigns are garbage moving in the right direction.” Certainly anyone who thinks about it can remember reading assessments of ultimately disastrous nomination campaigns (e.g., Kennedy 1980 and Dean 2004) as brilliant and irresistable, and of successful nomination campaigns (e.g., Reagan 1980 and Kerry 2004) as disorganized and faction-ridden nightmares. (It’s also worth noting that the two Republican presidential campaigns that seem to be doing well right now, those of Huckabee and McCain, were both written off not long ago as completely inept and hopeless). And a lot of the excessively positive talk about specific campaigns is a function of campaign spin and the endless desire of the chattering classes to identify the Next Big Thing and Next Big Gurus in politics. The truth is, as Stoller suggests, that campaigns are a messy business full of guesswork and unintended consequences.
But I would issue one demurral about the current Democratic contest in Iowa. Best I can tell from talking to people with experience there, the Big Three candidates’ ground-level organizations are all exceptionally well-run by historical standards, benefitting from a lot of prior Caucus experience. But even so, guesswork and such accidents as the weather on January 3 may ultimately determine the outcome by confirming or rejecting the turnout models on which campaigns must inevitably rely.

If readers will allow me a moment of home-state parochialism, I want to note the passing of Tom Murphy, the Democratic Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives for nearly thirty years (1974-2003).
Murphy first emerged as a factor in Georgia politics as House floor leader for the zany segregationist Governor Lester Maddox (whose chief of staff, BTW, was Murphy’s longtime rival Zell Miller), who wound up having a relatively progressive record despite his nutty right-wing rhetoric. As Speaker, Murphy’s career tracked the gradual evolution of the southern Democratic party from its conservative past to its eventual condition as a moderate biracial coalition.
But unlike such former Dixiecrat-types as George Wallace, he never had to apologize for racial demagoguery, and never abandoned the Democratic Party. Indeed, the one great constant of Murphy’s career was an inveterate hostility to the GOP.
Murphy finally lost his power, and his seat, when his once-rural West Georgia district (where most of my mother’s family still lives) became a Republican-trending Atlanta exurb, at about the same time that demographic changes finally flipped Georgia into the Republican column in state as well as national elections.
But Georgia resisted the region-wide GOP trend longer than any other state, electing Democratic governors and controlling the state legislature throughout the post-Civil Rights Act era, right up until 2002. It was no coincidence that this remarkable period in which Georgia Democrats defied the inevitable coincided with the Speakership of Tom Murphy. May he rest in peace.

On the American Prospect site, Mark Schmitt today offers a fascinating analysis on the most fundamental differentiation among the Big Three Democratic presidential candidates:

This is not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track. It’s the first “theory of change” primary I can think of.
Hillary Clinton’s stump speech is built around the speechwriter’s rule of three, applied to theories of change: one candidate believes you achieve change by “demanding” it, another thinks you “hope for it,” while she alone knows that you have to “work for it.”
That’s accurate as a rendering of the candidates’ language: Her message of experience and hard work, Obama’s language of hope and common purpose, Edwards’ insistence that those with power will never give it up willingly.

Schmitt goes on to defend Obama’s own “theory of change,” suggesting that only a “common purpose” approach can build the political capital necessary to defeat conservatives and special interests and deliver real change. But whether you agree with him about Obama or not, Schmitt does nicely define the battleground which the candidates have chosen.

Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball takes a look at the Dems’ House prospects, both specific and general, and provides snapshots of key races. Sabato presents some interesting “leaning” and “likely” House race charts and ventures what we hope is a conservative prediction:

every initial indication suggests that 2008 will be a consolidation election for the Democrats. They may add a few seats, or lose a few, but their majority is unlikely to be threatened…it appears more likely that Democrats will gain seats in the House, thus padding their new majority. How many seats are added, or indeed whether this tentative prediction holds up at all, will depend partly on the identity of the presidential candidates and the coattails they generate..

The Cook Political Report‘s House of Reps guru David Wasserman sees Democrats picking up between two and seven House seats in ’08. MyDD‘s Jonathan Singer guestimates a 10-15 seat pick up. He reasons:

the National Republican Congressional Committee remains mired in debt less than a year out from election day while the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is as flush with cash as it has ever been with a net $29 million in the bank. This magnitude of this feat cannot be overstated…Not only are the Democrats enjoying a real advantage in the money race, the Democrats have also seen a lot more success in recruitment than the Republicans.

Dividing the difference between Singer and Wasserman gives Dems a 8-9 seat pick-up, which is still way short of a working majority without a Dem President. Even more disturbing, if this pick-up percentage applies to the Senate, the Dems’ one-seat Senate majority seems even more fragile, especially with Lieberman cosying up to Republicans. Maybe it’s too much to expect another wave election, but a presidential landslide with coattails ought to be doable in a war-weary nation.

Adding his own rock to the establishment conservative assault on Huckabee, Robert Novak did a column today disclosing that the Rev. Mike has lost some Southern Baptist endorsements because he backed–or at least didn’t oppose–the “liberal” side in the fights for control of the denomination back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Maybe some Baptists do resent that Huckabee wasn’t a foot soldier in the takeover of the SBC by those favoring a centralized drive for dogmatic purity and right-wing political engagement. But calling their opponents “liberals” is highly misleading, sort of like talking about conservative Unitarians based on some intra-denominational fight. Some opponents of the takeover were simply defending Baptist traditions of state convention and congregational autonomy, and hardly any of them could be described as “liberals” in any theological, much less political, sense. So tarring (or from a more progressive perspective, crediting) Huckabee with the L-word in this context is ridiculous, and I suspect the Prince of Darkness is smart enough to know that.

A few days ago, New York Magazine published an article by John Heilemann that, as the title “Huckabuchanan” suggested, explored the parallels between Mike Huckabee’s alleged fusion of social conservatism and economic populo-nationalism with that of Pat Buchanan, who briefly frightened establishment conservatives during his two presidential runs in 1992 and (especially) 1996. I thought of it again today after reading George Will’s jeremiad against Huckabee as representing a complete repudiation of conventional conservatism.
After suggesting the parallel between Preacher Mike and Pitchfork Pat, Heilemann doesn’t completely buy it, noting that much of the “economic populism” attributed to Huckabee is exceptionally vague or primarily rhetorical. He doesn’t go on to note the contrasting precision and detail associated with Buchanan’s economic thinking, but it’s worth remembering that Pat basically called for a revival of Henry Clay’s American System in its entirety. Moreover, you can’t really assess Buchanan’s appeal without mentioning his foreign policy views, which echoed a slightly more recent conservative icon, Robert Taft. Huckabee has occasionally made heterodox noises on foreign policy, but nothing that would remind you of Charles Lindbergh.
It says a lot about the insecurity of contemporary conservatives that Huckabee seems to be scaring them as much as Buchanan did. And I also hope that those Democrats who squint sideways at Huckabee, and setting aside his views on social issues, see him as a congenial “populist” spirit, take a much closer look. He’s like Buchanan in all the wrong ways.

If you are interested in the deeper dynamics of the Democratic presidential contest, I strongly recommend you set aside a half-hour and read Matt Bai’s thumb-sucker for next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, entitled “The Clinton Referendum.”
Much of the material here will be familiar to those who read Bai’s recent book The Argument, which also made ambivalent feelings about Bill Clinton’s legacy the big unstated subtext of intra-Democratic tensions. The new piece updates Bai’s hypothesis by dealing with the specific impact of this issue on 2008 Democratic politics.
The most interesting passage is Bai’s take on how HRC’s rivals have appealed to the semi-submerged anti-Clintonism of Democratic activists, focusing on Edwards’ “culture of corruption” indictment of Clintonian Democrats, Obama’s anti-baby-boomerism, and both candidates’ condemnation of “triangulation.” He goes on to suggest that Edwards and Obama, and all Democrats, have incorporated Clintonian policies and rhetoric quite thoroughly, even if they won’t acknowledge it during a competition with the Big Dog’s wife.
For what it’s worth, I think Bai is oversimplifying the ways in which Edwards and Obama do and don’t reflect a “no vote” in a “Clinton referendum.” Edwards is channeling the purest form of anti-Clintonian Democratic analysis–the argument that Democratic “centrists” deliberately and consciously sold out progressivism for a mess of corporate pottage, treacherously serving as enablers of Bush-era conservatism. That’s why his campaign often comes perilously close to a Naderite plague-on-both-houses message. Obama, meanwhile, has out-Clintoned Hillary in the use of classically Clintonian “third way” themes, even, ironically, in his “turn the page” repudiation of boomerism, which sounds like an updated version of Bill Clinton’s 1992 modernization message (a point made most clearly by Armando at TalkLeft in his reaction to Bai’s piece). (For those really interested in the subject, I did a post back in September that went into considerable detail in comparing the takes on Clintonism–and the old and new anti-Clintonian strains in the party–by Edwards and Obama).
But quibbles aside, I think Bai’s article is important reading. A lot of bloggers seem perpetually irritated at Bai for his strong empathy with Bill Clinton’s self-evaluation as a misunderstood reformer, but they are actually proving his larger point about the very different ideas Democrats have about the pre-Clinton progressive tradition. Bill Clinton looks at a lot of progressive critics of his own legacy (and of his wife’s record and agenda) and sees 1970s-era mossbacks who think progressivism is purely defined by the New Deal-Great Society programs and an unapologetic ethic of entitlement. Those same critics look at Clinton-style politicians and see an embarassingly outmoded and corrupt accomodation of a once-ascendant conservatism. The mutual mistrust often really does resemble that of old hippies and their kids.