Political Animal‘s Neil Sinhababu spotlights Nick Beaudrot’s Cogitamus posts featuring demographic analysis for assessing Obama’s perfomance in key GOP-held districts and Dems’ chances for winning those districts in November, both open seats and those with incumbents running. Beaudrot has confidence in Obama’s coattails and sees more than two dozen Dem pick-ups as a good bet. As Sinhababu explains of Beaudrot’s methodology:

The thinking is that demographics predict Obama’s performance…and Obama’s performance serves as a rough proxy for how Democrats will do this time around. It’s a neat way to identify races that may become unexpectedly competitive with Obama at the top of the ticket.
So if you’re represented by a Republican in the House, take a look at the spreadsheets (embedded into the page by the magic of Google Docs) and take a look at how the demographics project Obama’s performance, and how winnable your district is. We’ve won three straight special elections in places where Democrats don’t usually win, so it’s a good year to go after the local GOP congressman.

A lot of assumptions undergird Beaudrot’s model, but they are not out of line with recent polls. This could be a helpful tool for DNC/DCCC resources allocation.

Trial heats with prospective veeps probably don’t mean too much at this stage. But just for fun, check out SurveyUSA‘s horserace-with-various-veeps chart for swing-state Ohio (flagged by leftcoaster Steve Soto). The chart’s list is a little too short — OH Gov. Ted Stickland is not on it, maybe because he has sort of dissed the idea, albeit with a good sense of humor. But one former Dem candidate smokes the admittedly limited competition. NYT pundit David Brooks, on the other hand, would not be pleased by the performance of one of his GOP shortlisters, MN Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

Each Memorial Day, you hear a lot of earnest and sometimes angry talk about the debasement of this holiday into a mere long weekend devoted to beaches, barbecues, sporting events, and celebration of the onset of of the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer. (Indeed, at church yesterday I listened to a sermon dedicated to this very theme).
But if you listen carefully to these complaints, there are two very distinct ideas about the “true meaning” of Memorial Day that emerge (try googling “true meaning Memorial Day” and you’ll see what I mean). The first is about remembering the dead, most generally, and more specifically recalling in somber detail the sacrifices of those who died in the service of our country. The second is about honoring that service by exalting its purpose, making Memorial Day a patriotic holiday dedicated to retroactive and prospective dedication of Americans to the justice and selflessness associated with this country at war.
This second idea is inevitably political, particularly at a time when young Americans are being exposed to death each day in a very unpopular “war of choice.” Sure, there are some antiwar folk who encourage an examination of patriotic ideology on days like Memorial Day in the hopes that America will “live up” to the principles it proclaims. But far more common are conservative excoriations of those who out of malice or ignorance fail to endorse the unique and universal benevolence that characterizes each resort to arms by the United States.
Consider this excerpt from a long Memorial Day piece at National Review Online by Mackubin Thomas Owens:

[W]hile the individual soldier may focus on the particulars of combat, Memorial Day permits us to enlarge the individual soldier’s view, giving broader meaning to the sacrifice that was accepted of some but offered by all, not only acknowledging and remembering the sacrifice, but validating it.
In the history of the world, many good soldiers have died bravely and honorably for bad or unjust causes. Americans are fortunate in that we have been given a way of avoiding this situation by linking the sacrifice of our soldiers to the meaning of the nation. At the dedication of the cemetery at Gettysburg four months after the battle, President Abraham Lincoln fleshed out the understanding of what he called in his First Inaugural Address, the “mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land.”
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address gives universal meaning to the particular deaths that occurred on that hallowed ground, thus allowing us to understand Memorial Day in the light of the Fourth of July, to comprehend the honorable end of the soldiers in the light of the glorious beginning and purpose of the nation. The deaths of the soldiers at Gettysburg, of those who died during the Civil War as a whole, and indeed of those who have fallen in all the wars of America, are validated by reference to the nation and its founding principles as articulated in the Declaration of Independence.

According to this point of view, you can’t honor fallen servicemen and servicewomen without honoring the specific and general causes for which they were thrown into battle. And it’s no surprise that those who maintain this point of view also believe that you can’t “support the troops” in Iraq without supporting the justice and necessity of the war itself, and its past and present conduct by the current administration in Washington.
This is an understandable if very dangerous emotion. No one is happy to acknowledge the possibility that they, or their loved ones, or for that matter, their fellow-citizens, are walking in the valley of the shadow of death “in vain” (as Lincoln put it in the Gettysburg Address) or “for a mistake” (as John Kerry put it in his Senate testimony for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War). Owens is a Vietnam Vet, and he makes plain his opinion that the dishonoring of American war dead began with the anti-Vietnam War movement:

The posture Americans took toward Memorial Day started to go awry with Vietnam. The press, if not the American people, began to treat soldiers as moral monsters, victims, or both. The “dysfunctional Vietnam vet” became a staple of popular culture. Despite the fact that atrocities were rare, My Lai came to symbolize the entire war. Thanks to the press’s preoccupation with the anomaly of My Lai, Lt. William Calley became the poster boy for Vietnam. The honorable and heroic performance of the vast majority of those who served in Vietnam went largely unrecognized.

Owens’ citation of My Lai and Calley is interesting. I don’t know how Calley was regarded by his former brothers-in-arms fighting in Vietnam, but in Georgia, where I was growing up at the time, he was turned into a hero–a “poster boy for Vietnam” among war supporters. “Ralleys for Calley” were held all over the state (and the country). After Richard Nixon commuted Calley’s sentence for violating military law, he adopted Columbus, Georgia, as his new home town, and was soon appearing in ads for a car dealer. Sure, some Calley supporters considered him a “scapegoat” who was being punished for the sins of higher-ups (the ex post facto rationalization that Jimmy Carter offered for his pronouncement encouraging Georgians to turn on their headlights for a day to show support for the convicted mass murderer). But what I heard most often was a very different conviction: Calley was an honorable soldier doing the dirty work that most Americans didn’t want to think about, in a war against a savage opponent who deployed women and children to kill GIs–a war that all Americans were honor-bound to support in its most horrifying moments. That was certainly the sentiment conveyed by the 1971 pop song “The Battle Hymn of Lieutenant Calley,” which won vast radio airplay and sold 300,000 copies in the three days after its release:

While we’re fighting in the jungles they were marching in the street
While we’re dying in the rice fields they were helping our defeat
While we’re facing V.C. bullets they were sounding a retreat–
as we go marching on….
When I reach my final campground in that land beyond the sun
And the great commander asks me, “Did you fight or did you run?”
I’ll stand both straight and tall stripped of medals, rank and gun
And this is what I’ll say:
Sir, I followed all my orders and I did the best I could
It’s hard to judge the enemy and hard to tell the good
Yet there’s not a man among us would not have understood

With all due respect to Mackubin Thomas Owens, this is the moral hazard invited by those who insist all of America’s wars have been sacrifices on the altar of freedom and democracy, or who treat dissenters against war policies as unpatriotic. Was “the press” really more responsible for the mixed legacy of the Vietnam War than an administration that cynically kept the war going for political purposes years after Richard Nixon had privately admitted it was lost?
And in truth, the necessity of honoring the troops while denying the perfect justice of The Cause didn’t begin with Vietnam. As Owen notes at the very beginning of his article, Memorial Day (originally Decoration Day) began as a partisan commemoration in the northern states of the sacrifices made by Union troops in suppression of “the late rebellion” (i.e., the Confederacy). That’s why a parallel system of Confederate Memorial Days quickly developed in the South, which, following Owens’ own logic, were devoted more to celebration of the Lost Cause than to the individual sacrifices of Confederate troops and their families. Well into my own lifetime, Confederal Memorial Day was the occasion for an annual exercise in regional defiance, self-pity and rationalization, which whitewashed “the rebellion” as being “about” states rights, the agrarian lifestyle, neoclassical culture, the Cavalier tradition–indeed, everything other than human bondage and the refusal to even coexist with Americans who wanted to prevent its extension to new territories.
So put me firmly in that first camp of those who feel strongly that Memorial Day should be a day of remembrance devoted to respectful contemplation of sacrifice in national service, not a political holiday aimed at national self-congratulation or the vengeful settling of scores with those who fail to “support the troops” by supporting the policies of men like Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. In this era of an all-volunteer military and of “preemptive wars” that most of us follow on television, it is very important for those of us who haven’t risked death or injury to take some time to understand the horrors of war–the fear not just of death but of leaving families behind to fend for themselves, the randomness of the Grim Reaper in choosing his victims in modern warfare, and the courage of troops who not only defy death, but the temptations of indiscriminate total war to which William Calley (for whatever reason) succumbed. I do agree with Owens that all Americans should acknowledge and take pride in the distinguished traditions that have led many millions of Americans in uniform to increase their own odds of death or defeat by observing limitations on the scope of violence in war. But that’s all the more reason that we should resist the idea of extending to warmakers the Memorial Day remembrances we owe to warriors.
For our much-blessed country, war is occasionally necessary, sometimes preferable to the alternatives, but usually represents a failure of statecraft and the structures of peace, stability and collective security that American men and women in uniform have in recent decades defended as much as the homeland itself. On Memorial Day, we should be reminded not only of the wealth and leisure and safety we owe to those who served, but also of the terrible price that some Americans have paid for our occasional failure to give our brave troops the leadership they deserve.

A pet peeve of mine is the tendency of some political observers to dismiss adverse public opinion data as “meaningless” because it’s not reliably predictive. Recently I attended a political panel in which two speakers were harping on primary exit poll numbers about potential “white-working-class” defections to John McCain if Obama is the nominee, and also stressing the Jeremiah Wright saga as a huge general-election problem for Obama. I asked them how they squared this belief with general election polls showing (1) Obama generally running ahead of McCain; (2) Obama generally running even or close with McCain among white voters; and (3) little evidence that voters cared that much about Wright. Both speakers responded by saying that general election polls this far out from November were “meaningless.”
This point of view is even more prevelent when it comes to state-by-state general election polls. That’s why I was interested in Brendan Nyan’s recent post summarizing the research on state-by-state polls in 2004, which suggested they are not precise when it comes to predicting close states, but are otherwise pretty much spot-on in terms of broader results.
And that, folks, means they are not “meaningless.”

This morning’s most important read is Sen. Joe Biden’s rejoinder to Sen. Joe Lieberman’s Wall Street Journal op-ed on Wednesday claming that Democrats have abandoned their own foreign policy legacy.
Biden gets off to a roaring start with this line:

Sen. Lieberman is right: 9/11 was a pivotal moment. History will judge Mr. Bush’s reaction less for the mistakes he made than for the opportunities he squandered.

But much of his column focuses on the Bush-McCain-Lieberman attack on Barack Obama for his willingness to negotiate with countries like Iran. This no-talk posture, says Biden, is inconsistent not only with the Democratic foreign policy tradition, but with that of Republican presidents:

Sen. Obama is right that the U.S. should be willing to engage Iran on its nuclear program without “preconditions” – i.e. without insisting that Iran first freeze the program, which is the very subject of any negotiations. He has been clear that he would not become personally involved until the necessary preparations had been made and unless he was convinced his engagement would advance our interests.
President Nixon didn’t demand that China end military support to the Vietnamese killing Americans before meeting with Mao. President Reagan didn’t insist that the Soviets freeze their nuclear arsenal before sitting down with Mikhail Gorbachev. Even George W. Bush – whose initial disengagement allowed dangers to proliferate – didn’t demand that Libya relinquish its nuclear program, that North Korea give up its plutonium, or even that Iran stop aiding those attacking our soldiers in Iraq before authorizing talks.
The net effect of demanding preconditions that Iran rejects is this: We get no results and Iran gets closer to the bomb.

Biden clearly isn’t inclined to concede national security issues to the GOP in this election, and change the subject to the economy or other “Democratic issues.” Let’s hope this is an attitude that all Democrats share.

The Clinton campaign has been making a case that she has done better than Obama in primaries and head-to-head vs. McCain polls in “swing states.” It’s a credible argument, as far as it goes, although “swing states” can be a pretty fluid designation. I was wondering if it might be worthwhile to take a look at a more permanent designation — the ten largest electoral vote states — to see which Dem does better vs. McCain, using the most recent Rasmussen Polls (conveniently-presented at Pollster.com). I won’t compare primary results here, since some are not so recent.
First, there is a three-way tie between GA, NJ and NC for 9th rank in e.v.’s, so we’ll look at recent poll averages among LV’s in “the big 11”, in order (electoral votes in parens):

CA (55) Clinton 54, McCain 35; Obama 52, McCain 38
TX (34) C 43, M 49; O 43, M 48
NY (31) C 60, M 31; O 52, M 35
FL (27) C 47, M 41; O 40, M 50
IL (21) No recent Rasmussen data, but Obama has an 18 point advantage over HRC in SurveyUSA’s Feb. poll.
PA (21) C 47, M 42; O 43, M 44
OH (20) C 50, M 43; O 44, M 45
MI (17) C 44, M 44; O 44, M 45
GA (15) C 37, M 48; O 39, M 53
NJ (15) C 42, M 45; O 45, M 46
NC (15) C 40, M 43; O 45, M 48

Clinton does better than Obama against McCain in 7 of the 11 states with the most electoral votes. Obama does better than Clinton against McCain in 3 of the top e.v. states, with no difference in the margin in one state (NC). McCain leads both Dems in 4 states, and beats Obama in 4 more, but loses to Clinton in those 4. The consolation for both Dems, and Obama in particular, is that the margins are often very small/within m.o.e. Both Dems, especially Clinton, have a big edge in the top five e.v. states. Obama does run strong in the mid-ranking and below e.v. states, and in a close election, even the smallest e.v. state could make the difference. Nonetheless, our candidate has to be competitive in the top 10 to win. There is every reason to expect that McCain’s leads will evaporate under the glare of the spotlight when the race narrows to the two nominees, given the stark weakness of his Iraq and economic policies.
It seems fair to infer, based solely on this limited and highly qualified poll data, that Clinton would be the stronger candidate v. McCain in the top e.v. ‘mega-states’, were the general election held today. I suspect that poll averaging would reveal something similar. However this does not take into account, like Clinton’s ‘electability’ argument, that voters may turn on her in decisive numbers if Obama is denied the nomination after complying with all of the rules fair and square and winning a majority of both the popular vote and the non-supers. Still, I can’t yet blame her for hanging in there and pumping up her creds, assuming she will campaign actively for Obama after the delegates vote and he clinches the nomination. There is also a counter-intuitive argument that her refusal to quit before the convention is actually a good thing for Obama in November because his chances of winning over her supporters are better if it’s clear that she had — and took — every opportunity.

It’s been pretty lonely at the Unity Ticket bar lately, as Armando of TalkLeft has noted. Sure, a reported 60% of rank-and-file Democrats like the idea of an Obama-Clinton ticket, but among the chattering classes, and particularly pro-Obama bloggers, the idea is often denounced with an unusual vehemence as stupid, wrong, stupid, insulting, stupid, suicidal, and stupid. Even in all the “What Does Hillary Want?” stories bouncing around the MSM the last week or two, we typically read that of course, Obama can’t’ pick HRC, but maybe he should think about placating her supporters by going with somebody like Ted Strickland or Evan Bayh.
But now comes the estimable Chris Bowers of OpenLeft, whose commitment to a post-Clintonian progressive Democratic Party can’t much be doubted, saying he’s concluded the Unity Ticket is a good idea. Why?Because, he suggests, a sizable general election win is the key to the kind of “realigning election” that could move the Democratic Party to the left (by making its legislative goals less dependent on Blue Dog types), and combining the electoral strengths of Obama and Clinton is the best (if hardly certain) way to produce a big victory.
Chris’ argument (or my own, for that matter) for the Unity Ticket doesn’t deal with certain threshold problems with the idea, such as possible personal friction between Obama and Clinton, the What To Do With Bill issue, and all sorts of questions about how HRC walks herself back from some of the things she’s said about Obama this year. If these problems can’t be resolved, then we might as well forget about it. But there is zero consensus in the Obama Camp or elsewhere about an alternative idea for strengthening the ticket or healing the very real divisions created by the primary competition. Those with different ideas need to talk to each other and begin developing some agreement, instead of angrily dismissing the Obama-Clinton option as stupid.

Whatever you think of Hillary Clinton’s recent appropriation of Florida 2000 rhetoric (“Every Vote Must Count”) as part of her argument for ratifying that state and Michigan’s primaries, you’ve got to admire her timing. Seems like every cable news show I watched last night or this morning alternated between reports about her speechifying on the subject with hype about Sunday’s HBO movie, The Recount, often with live interviews with actor Kevin Spacey, who plays Gore aide Ron Klain in the flick. If this keeps up another couple of days, some viewers may tune in on Sunday expecting HRC to do a cameo.

I realize that criticizing Sen. Joe Lieberman’s recent behavior is like shooting fish in a barrel, but his latest outrage, an op-ed published today in the Wall Street Journal, really does demand some attention, if only because the man remains a member of the Democratic Senate Caucus, and could wind up with an important job if John McCain’s elected president.
You can read the piece yourself, but its basic thrust is that somehow, between 9/11 and today, the entire Democratic Party, with the exception of Lieberman himself, has abandoned its foreign policy legacy and surrendered to a horde of America-hating leftists. He hasn’t changed at all, he says; everybody else has.
I would recommend that Sen. Lieberman talk to a psychologist about the implications of thinking that he exclusively represents a tradition that many millions of other people define differently. Perhaps the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, and perhaps Joe Lieberman is not the only true Democrat in America.
Until recently, I thought the saddest spectacle I had seen in politics was Zell Miller’s willingness to let himself be so thoroughly used by people who had nothing but contempt for him and everything he had ever stood for in public life. This is worse, if only because of the contrast between Miller’s extended stormy relationship with the national Democratic Party, and the honor that party bestowed on Lieberman less than eight years ago. After he visits the psychologist, Sen. Lieberman might want to take a long look at Miller’s post-apostasy political career. Last time I saw his name in the papers, in the autumn of 2006, Miller was speaking at the gala launch of a Pennsylvania group called Democrats for Santorum. In other words, he was pretty much just talking to himself.
Joe Lieberman’s within his rights to say what he thinks and support whomever he wants to support for president. But he really needs to stop pretending he speaks for Democrats, or for Democratic traditions. To be sure, Lieberman’s value to McCain and his other new Republican buddies would drop dramatically if he dropped the “D” from his title altogether. But honor ought to account for something, even in politics, and next time Lieberman is inclined to call his former colleagues and former supporters anti-American extremists, he should admit he’s not the still point in a turning world.

My home state of Georgia has contributed more than its share of interesting personalities to the political life of this country, but none was more unlikely than Hamilton Jordan, who died yesterday at the age of 63. In one amazing decade from 1966 to 1976, Jordan started as the driver for a long-shot gubernatorial candidate and eventually engineered a successful presidential campaign, before becoming White House chief of staff at the tender age of 32.
It’s often forgotten that Jimmy Carter’s 1976 presidential bid was one of the most improbable victories in U.S. political history, based in no small part on a mind-bending coalition of African-Americans, evangelical Protestants, and former Wallace supporters. The campaign’s blueprint was very much Ham Jordan’s work.
Like Carter, Jordan didn’t fare as well in the White House as in its pursuit, and like Carter, his later life took some unexpected turns. Afflicted with three different kinds of cancer, Jordan devoted much of his time to work as an advocate and philanthropist for children with cancer and diabetes.
I didn’t really know Jordan, beyond brief encounters when I served as a low-level policy advisor to his unsuccessful 1986 Senate campaign. But those who did know him described him as tough, canny, and completely unpretentious, in the best Georgia tradition. After a turbulent and remarkable life, may he rest in peace.