Political analysts are naturally drawn to historical analogies for current political developments. It gives us a chance to show off our knowledge, and of course, the past can be very instructive since many political dynamics are either of continuing relevance or are simply timeless.
There’s been an undercurrent in 2008 of talk about which past presidential election this one most resembles. At The New Republic today, John Judis addresses the most-discussed analogy, 1996. But he then counter-intuitively argues that the analogy, despite the favorable outcome, should not provide much comfort to Democrats, since Barack Obama has nothing like the big lead Bill Clinton had at this point twelve years ago.
As Judis notes, the main reason ’96 keeps coming up is because of the similarities between Bob Dole and John McCain, most notably their age, their personalities, their military records, their constant invocations of the past, and their rather clumsy campaign styles, both as candidates and as managers.
Beyond that, of course, the analogy quickly breaks down. Bill Clinton was an incumbent president running for re-election at a time of peace and growing prosperity. He had just earned the gratitude of the electorate by thwarting the crazier ideas of the Republican majority said electorate had elevated two years earlier, and also neatly disassociated himself from the less popular ideological tendencies of his own party on a variety of fronts, most notably by signing (in the middle of the general election campaign) controversial but very popular welfare reform legislation. He also benefitted from a significant third-party candidacy that split the anti-incumbent vote. Nearly everything about the political climate that year was different from this one.
Finally, the partisan dynamics in 1996 were not nearly as favorable to Clinton as those today favoring Obama. His re-election was more a personal endorsement and a rejection of GOP hegemony than any pro-Democratic trend.
Another analogy you hear (I’ve cited it myself on occasion) is 1980, a big “change” election. While John McCain is not, like Jimmy Carter, an incumbent with a lot of problems, he’s close enough to the actual incumbent and his deeply unpopular views and record to get very contaminated by him. And Barack Obama, like Ronald Reagan, is a candidate whose main challenge seems to be overcoming a relatively low threshold of acceptability by an electorate that wants a party change in the White House. It’s sometimes forgotten that the 1980 race was actually quite close until the last couple of weeks, when Reagan appears to have crossed that threshold and voters broke decisively in his direction (a factor that’s not relevant this year was the interesting phenomenon of a once-powerful third-party candidacy, that of John Anderson, whose shrinking base of support changed during the campaign from center-right to center-left). All in all, 1980 is a very reassuring scenario given Obama’s resources and skills in an even more change-oriented year.
Still another analogy sometimes cited–mainly by Republicans but also by a few panicky Democrats–is 1988, when Ronald Reagan’s successor reversed a huge Democratic lead and trounced Mike Dukakis, who let himself be defined as a cultural elitist with no qualifications to become Commander-in-Chief. While 1988 is an eternal reminder of the power of negative campaigning (when it’s ignored by its target), conditions in the country in 1988 weren’t remotely as troubling for the incumbent party as they are now. And any comparison of Dukakis and Obama as personally appealing political figures doesn’t pass the laugh test.
The analogy that’s scariest for Democrats is 1976. Two years after a major Democratic “wave” election, a Republican candidate who had managed to somewhat distance himself from a vastly unpopular two-term incumbent came very close to beating a charismatic Democratic outsider with a short resume and personal traits and associations that troubled some voters. And in fact, the only thing that saved Jimmy Carter from defeat was his powerful homeboy appeal in the South, where he won the bulk of former Wallace voters, most of whom probably had no business voting for a Democratic presidential candidate.
The economy in 1976 was in deep trouble, and the Republican candidate then didn’t have much of a grip on what to do about it (viz. Ford’s feckless “Whip Inflation Now” campaign). While there was not a war on in 1976, the Vietnam disaster, whose messy and disturbing end occurred on Ford’s watch, was a very recent memory. Ford, like McCain, had a lot of issues with unhappy conservatives; indeed, he nearly lost the nomination to Ronald Reagan, who, unlike McCain’s conservative primary rivals, pretty much sat on his hands during the general election. And while Ford did a good job of presenting himself as a post-Nixon, healing figure, his pardon of Nixon tied him to his predecessor much as McCain has tied himself to so many Bush policies.
Still, Ford nearly won. The main reason to reject the 1976 analogy is that the country was in a period of ideological realignment that gave any Republican candidate strengths that were temporarily obscured by Watergate and the 1974 Democratic landslide. The Ford-Carter race was, after all, preceded and succeeded by Republican landslide wins (followed by two more landslide wins). That doesn’t seem to be the trend-line today. Moreover, Ford did benefit as well as suffer from his incumbency, and Carter had nothing like Barack Obama’s financial resources and trend-setting campaign organization.
I’d be remiss in failing to note that the most popular analogies among conventional political analysts are 2000 and 2004, those razor-close general elections that turned on a variety of factors in specific states, and in the former contest, in the Supreme Court of the United States. So much has changed since 2000 and 2004 that while the outcome may be as close this year as in the recent past, the election dynamics are very different. McCain may be running for “Bush’s third term,” but his campaign persona is different, and few would argue that Obama is just like Al Gore or John Kerry.
All in all, there’s not really any overwhelming evidence that 2008 is actually 1996, 1980, 1988, 976, 2000 or 2004, though I’d argue that 1980 comes closest to reflecting this year’s dynamics, with 1996 being a possible analogy if John McCain continues to act like Bob Dole.
Let’s hope I’m right about that, since either scenario would portend a big Obama win.

If you want a good glimpse at the contortions being undertaken by Iraq War enthusiasts in response to recent political events in that country, look no further than Max Boot’s Washington Post op-ed today.
Retreating somewhat from the Bush/McCain/conservative position of a few days ago that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki didn’t actually say what he said about a timetable for ending the U.S. combat role in his country, Boot moves to a long, acidic attack on Maliki as a slippery pol who’s stabbing his U.S. patrons in the back. He reminds readers that Maliki didn’t support the original U.S. decision to invade Iraq, and horror or horrors, hasn’t embraced the “undeniable” success of the surge, citing other factors as contributing to the recent reduction in violence. That’s two more points on which Maliki appears to agree with Barack Obama, which is probably what’s really bugging Boot.
Americans shouldn’t listen to this treacherous and ungrateful puppet, Boot suggests, but should instead talk to Iraqi military professionals, particularly one who recently said he hoped U.S. combat troops would stick around at least until 2020. He doesn’t come right out and call for a military coup in Iraq, but the suggestion is in the air.
Perhaps realizing that his assault on Maliki and other Iraqi elected leaders is a bit nakedly imperialistic, Boot adds a disclaimer in his last graph: “Of course, if the Iraqi government tells us to leave, we will have to leave.” Nice of him to make this grudging concession to Iraqi sovereignty. But if “the Iraqi government” means whatever military man we can find who’ll support the idea of an endless U.S. troop presence and quasi-occupation of the country, then “sovereignty” becomes a pretty empty concept.

Nestled in a Kathleen Parker column at RealClearPolitics today on Republican vice presidential speculation (the headline was about Bobby Jindal) was this interesting tidbit:

New polling in Michigan by Ayres, McHenry & Associates shows that Romney gives McCain a significant jump — “off the charts,” as someone familiar with the still-unreleased poll described it — and makes him competitive in a state that hasn’t voted Republican since 1988.

This caught my attention because I had just read a short article at The New Republic by FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver suggesting that his analysis showed Michigan and Ohio as the “tipping-point states”–those most likely to decide a very close general election.
Assessments of Romney as a McCain running-mate typically focus on his popularity among conservative elites, his looks and money, and his Mormonism. But no one should forget his family’s very high profile in MI, a state whose primary Romney won in one of the few bright spots for his campaign.
Mitt, of course, is a Michigan native, as is his wife, Ann. His father, George Romney, is remembered nationally (if at all) for his dithering indecision about running for president in 1964 (he ultimately didn’t), and for the “I was brainwashed about Vietnam” gaffe that destroyed his 1968 candidacy before the primaries even began. But he was a popular three-term governor of MI, and before that, president of American Motors. His wife, Lenore, ran for the Senate in 1970.
This sort of homeboy factor may not matter to that many voters, particularly those too young to remember Mitt’s father. Michigan in many ways should be a tough state for McCain: it has large African-American, union, Arab-American and student populations, along with profound economic problems, including a very hard hit from the housing crisis. McCain’s free-trade enthusiasm is anathema to many voters there. Obama has consistently held a modest lead in general-election polling in MI (the latest RealClearPolitics polling average has him up 47-41).
I haven’t seen the poll Parker mentions, but if the Mittster indeed would give McCain a big push in Michigan, it will be very tempting for him to move in that direction, since Romney’s one of the relatively short list of viable candidates that won’t create heartburn among the institutional Right (with the exception of a few Christian Right leaders who don’t like Mormons).
The single biggest problem with a McCain-Romney ticket isn’t Mitt’s religion or the mockery he often attracts from the news media. In a general election campaign in which McCain will apparently focus on accusing Barack Obama of being a callow, slippery flip-flopper, can he really afford a running-mate whom he constantly attacked as a flip-flopper during the nomination contest? I suspect both men would be reminded a lot of that exchange in New Hampshire back in January when Romney did a long, redundant litany about “change,” and McCain smirkingly responded: “I do agree you are the candidate of change.”

To further the exploration of ideas for increasing voter turnout noted in J.P. Green’s TDS post yesterday, check out Harold Meyerson’s American Prospect review article about a new book of interest, “Get Out the Vote: How to Increase Voter Turnout” by Yale poly sci proffs Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber. As Meyerson explains, the authors, who tested numerous GOTV tactics, conclude that personal contact, including door-to-door canvassing, trumps other approaches, when it comes to getting rv’s to cast ballots.

What Green and Gerber have done would seem conceptually obvious–except, no one has done it before. Working with academic colleagues and a range of political and civic groups and campaigns across the nation, they ran more than 100 experiments in elections over the past decade, testing which get-out-the-vote tactics–direct mail, phone banks, door-to-door canvassing, radio and television ads–actually turned out more voters. They designed all manner of GOTV efforts and employed them on groups of randomly selected voters while not employing them on a control group of other randomly selected voters, then checked after the election to see who’d voted and who hadn’t, and whether those results had any correlation to the respective GOTV drives. They worked with nonpartisan good-government groups, with groups trying to mobilize African American, Latino, low-income, or environmentally inclined voters, and occasionally, and, remarkably, with candidates’ campaigns–remarkably, because not many candidates will respond favorably to establishing a control group of voters who don’t get canvassed or phoned or mailed on his or her behalf.
…Green and Gerber are concerned simply and totally with the actual electoral system we have saddled ourselves with, and their goal, as they put it, is to produce a “shopper’s guide” for candidates pondering whether to use robocalls or canvassers. The great question they hurl at the reader in their very first sentence bears no trace of the controversies over postmodernist theory: “What are the most cost-effective ways to increase voter turnout?”
…the sheer number and scale of the experiments they’ve run make Get Out The Vote a signally important tool to campaigners trying to figure out how best to campaign. It is also a signally important challenge to portions of the political- consulting industry, most particularly those consultants whose GOTV campaigns rely on recorded phone calls, paid phone bankers, or typical direct mail.
What Green and Gerber have found, in brief, is that the personal touch matters. “Door-to-door canvassing by friends and neighbors is the gold-standard mobilization tactic,” they write. It’s the contact itself that’s the key: the kind of message that the canvassers delivered–whether they handed voters a position paper or a potholder–in itself had no effect on turnout rates. Phone banks staffed by genuinely enthusiastic and chatty volunteers worked as well.

Gerber and Green’s book undoubtedly has more to say about advertising choices, and sounds like a must-read for GOTV organizers.

As noted in the staff post earlier today, there are rumors that John McCain’s about ready to pull the trigger on his running-mate choice, maybe as early as this week. But as Noam Scheiber of TNR points out, the “window” for Barack Obama’s veep decision is closing too, since there will be only ten days between his return from his overseas trip and the beginning of the media-and-audience-sapping Olympic Games, which will last until the day before the Democratic Convention.
In other words, we will probably know both tickets within the next two weeks, and maybe earlier.
In that connection, HuffPo had a good catch today when it noted, buried in a short, two-day-old New York Times piece, the news that Hillary Clinton was indeed being vetted for the running-mate position, despite recent indications to the contrary.
Nobody knows if that means anything, but it’s interesting that the intense veep speculation of the last couple of months has largely abated precisely at the time when it’s actually appropriate. The earlier talk has, of course, previewed a lot of the likely reaction to this or that choice in this or that party. But the deals are about to go down, and there’s not a lot of confident betting about the results on either ticket. Anticipatory leaks can be expected any time now, but until then, it remains a bit of a dual mystery.

John McCain and his campaign staff aren’t exactly dealing with the enormous publicity surrounding Barack Obama’s overseas tour with good grace. As Elisabeth Bumiller notes in The New York Times, in a dispatch from McCain’s Maine appearance with George H.W. Bush, Team McCain can do little but whine from the sidelines:

“It is what it is,” Mr. McCain said with a hint of exasperation at the side of the first President Bush, who acknowledged that he, for one, was “a little jealous” of all the commotion over Mr. Obama’s trip this week to Europe and the Middle East.
Mr. McCain’s comments were mild compared with the bleak mood and frustration on the part of his advisers, who have taken to referring to Mr. Obama sarcastically as “The One” and railing against the large amount of coverage Mr. Obama is receiving compared with Mr. McCain.
“There is nothing you can do about it,” said an acerbic Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, while standing at the back of a modest crowd assembled to hear Mr. McCain speak at a picnic in South Portland, Me. “ ‘The One’ went to Europe and homage must be paid.”

There’s a rumor going around in conservative circles that McCain will try to regain media attention near the end or immediately after Obama’s trip by announcing his vice presidential choice. Maybe it’s a coincidence or even a diversionary tactic, but he’s also interrupting a battleground-states tour to go to New Orleans for a meeting with LA Gov. Bobby Jindal, the preferred veep choice of a lot of “movement conservative” types.

(Note: This item is cross-posted from the site of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee).
It’s not easy being a first-time candidate running against an incumbent. Especially if you are a Democrat campaigning in Kansas. To be successful, you need to have something going for you — even if that’s just the drive to outwork your opponent every day.
But it really does pay to be smart.
Sean Tevis is an information architect from Olathe, Kansas. He’s running against Rep. Arlen Siegfreid, a deeply conservative Republican (even by Sunflower State standards), and apparently, he’s got polling showing him running three points back.
He’s also a geek.
Faced with the challenge of raising the $26,000 it will take to make this stage of the race competitive, Tevis found a brilliant, clever way to tell his story and in doing so has captured the imagination of a certain part of the Internet.
Writing in the style of xkcd (a web comic read by the geekiest of geeks), Tevis laid out his reasons for running and asked for 3,000 people to contribute $8.34 to his campaign. And then the Internets responded.
His appeal was picked up by BoingBoing — an incredibly popular geek culture blog — and promoted thousands of times by news aggregators Digg and Reddit. All the traffic overwhelmed the servers hosting his website, but the donations kept pouring in.
By 9:30 on Monday morning, 5,298 people had given to his campaign. Previously (as Tevis notes in his comic), no state rep campaign in Kansas had ever attracted even 650 donors, and more remarkable still, Tevis lives in a district where just 6,327 people voted in the last election.
Obviously the specifics of Tevis’; story can’t necessarily be repeated (no way that every candidate will be able to finance her campaign with a clever comic strip), but there’s a whole lot to be said for his creativity.
This is the Internet — a place where leaders can connect with thousands of passionate potential supporters…if the campaign can find a way to stand out.

Excited as all Dems should be by recent reports of dramatic increases in voter registration benefitting our party, it’s time to give serious thought to GOTV strategies to maximize turnout of these new voters on November 4th. Registration percentage is the most reliable predictor of voter turnout — the more voters registered, the higher the turnout. So we have already gained a significant edge, assuming the Republicans don’t produce an equivalent uptick in registering their base in the months ahead. But that doesn’t mean we can’t gain an additional edge with a concerted effort to get more of these new voters to the polls.
We don’t know precisely who these new voters are. But many of the registration campaigns in different states have targeted young voters, particularly college students. Other registration campaigns have targeted African and Latino Americans. The motivated voters in all demographic groups are going to get to the polls without much encouragement. But if previous patterns prevail, as many as 40 percent of the newly-registered voters won’t vote — if nothing is done. In 2004, for example, nearly 60 percent of registered voters went to the polls, according to the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate. If we can increase their turnout/rv ratio up to 70-75 percent, it just might make the difference in a close race.
Many newly registered voters who may not vote on election day have transportation problems. The polls may be too far away and/or they don’t have a car. or they don’t know where the poll is located. Others may be time-challenged — having to pick-up the kids, fix dinner, work late etc. Some may be energy-challenged, just too dog-tired to make the effort.
Early voting can help get around such ‘convenience’ issues, provided the voters are informed about how they can do it with a minimum of hassle. There should be a major push — make that an unprecedented effort — to inform new voters in the 28 states that permit no-excuse absentee voting by mail about early voting opportunities.
The internet is a great medium for reaching many of these voters, especially college students. In a recent Pew poll, 42 percent of young people said they learn about political campaigns from the internet, up from 20 percent in 2004. Internet ad revenues are expected to surpass radio ad revenues for the first time this year, reports Rudy Ruitenberg of Bloomberg.com. Yet, television still rules as a source for political information, and 60 percent of respondents in the Pew poll said they get “most of their election news from TV,” although it’s down from 68 percent in ’04 and ’00.
But television time is expensive, and not all young people or low-income voters have daily access to the internet. Radio may be the most cost-effective medium for reaching newly-registered voters, not only for informing them about early voting opportunities in their communities, but also to motivate them to get to the polls on election day. Radio reaches more than 210 million voting age listeners every week, according to Jeff Haley, president of the Radio Advertising Bureau, and, more so than TV, it reaches voters at useful times — the wake-up alarm, driving to work, at work, at lunch and driving home — pretty much all day, until the polls close.
High as we all are on the power of the internet as a tool for transmitting political information and motivation, a more substantial investment in radio ads could hold the key to victory in November.

My brief posts earlier on the Netroots Nations gathering in Austin this weekend probably caught the mood (particularly the organizers’ efforts to downplay conflicts with Barack Obama) pretty well, but didn’t do justice to the variety of the workshops and panels.
A few highlights:
On Friday afternoon, I attended a panel called “How the Media Learned to Bend Over Backwards to Please the Right.” It featured historian Rick Perlstein, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, and blogger Duncan Black (a.k.a. Atrios), moderated by “Digby” Parton. Perlstein focused on the roots of the MSM fear of looking too “liberal,” citing passages from his new book Nixonland on how political reporters in 1972 would only write about Watergate if they could match the story with trumped-up and petty allegations of McGovern campaign rules violations.
Krugman talked about the very human tendency of political journalists–more thin-skinned than you’d think–to respond to heavy criticism of their “liberal bias,” even if it doesn’t actually exist.
And Black discussed the skewed and self-reinforcing perceptions that sensible Iraq War critics were marginal or even radical.
Refreshingly absent from this discussion were suggestions that the MSM’s drift to the right was attributable to some corporate conspiracy, or to the seductive insularity of Georgetown Cocktail Parties. What came across is that the conservative movement’s relentless efforts over decades to convince journalists that they had to counter-balance their own “liberal” biases paid off handsomely in self-conscious “on the other hand” reporting that sacrificed facts and reasons to a spurious “balance.”
Later on Friday, I also attended a very substantive workshop on “Iraq in Strategic Context” featuring Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent, Ilan Goldenberg and A.J. Rossmiller of the National Security Network, and Matt Yglesias of The Atlantic. This was a wide-ranging discussion of the surge, Iraq’s future, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, and the overall U.S. strategy in the Middle East. The most haunting comment, IMO, was Ilan Goldenberg’s answer to a question about Iraq’s likely trajectory. The best-case scenario, he said, was “Lebanon.” The worst-case scenario was “Sudan.”
On Saturday, most attention was focused on the Nancy Pelosi forum with surprise guest Al Gore. But afterwards, I attended what was billed as a first-of-its-kind public presentation on the Obama’s campaign’s field organization philosophy, past, present and future. It featured deputy campaign manager Steve Hildebrand, New Media director (and former Blue State Digital founder) Joe Rospars, former South Carolina and now Ohio field director Jeremy Byrd, and former Georgia field director and now chief of the Obama Organizing Fellows program Joy Cushman.
The two major thrusts of the presentation were that (1) the Obama field effort is thoroughly based on the candidate’s own community organizing experience (both Byrd and Cushman were professional community organizers before joining the campaign), focused on finding and developing authentic community leaders, not just volunteers for cavassing and phone-banking; and (2) its objectives go beyond the campaign towards creating a 50-state infrastructure for progressive political mobilization in the long haul.
Having watched and listened to this presentation, I have to say this: if, as Obama-skeptics charge, his campaign is “selling Kool-Aid” about its revolutionary methods and goals, its sales staff have clearly drunk the Kool-Aid themselves. They were very convincing. I was particularly impressed by Cushman, who’s in charge of the “fellows” program that’s enlisting the campaign’s most effective primary-season community organizers for the general election and beyond. As she explained, she cut her teeth as an organizer for a right-wing religious group up in rural Maine some years ago (before evolving into progressive, but still faith-based and very local causes), and like Byrd, was attracted to the Obama campaign because of its organizing philosophy as much as for the candidate’s positions or ideology.
The one newsy thing the Obama folk disclosed is that they are building towards a voter registration drive for the week after the convention that will surpass anything of this nature that we’ve seen before.
If, down the road, the Obama campaign abruptly abandons its field program in all but a few very close battleground states, as campaigns before theirs have usually done, and as they could be forced to do in a tight race, then maybe the sort of talk I heard on Saturday can be discounted as a mid-summer-afternoon’s dream. But for the present, I’m sold on their determination to “leave something behind” in communities all over the country, if, for no other reason, to give an Obama administration a base of enduring support.

If the subject weren’t so serious, it would be pretty funny. Reports this weekend that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki had more or less endorsed Barack Obama’s redeployment plan for U.S. combat troops in his country produced all sorts of hysteria in the White House, which is now trying to claim Maliki and Bush are in synch on what’s being called a “time horizon” for withdrawal. Under God knows what kind of pressure from Washington, Maliki’s staff is also trying to suggest that his remarks in an interview with Der Spiegel were mistranslated or misinterpreted. But as The New York Times reports today, Maliki’s redemployment of his own words isn’t going too well:

Diplomats from the United States Embassy in Baghdad spoke to Mr. Maliki’s advisers on Saturday, said an American official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss what he called diplomatic communications. After that, the government’s spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, issued a statement casting doubt on the magazine’s rendering of the interview.
The statement, which was distributed to media organizations by the American military early on Sunday, said Mr. Maliki’s words had been “misunderstood and mistranslated,” but it failed to cite specifics.
“Unfortunately, Der Spiegel was not accurate,” Mr. Dabbagh said Sunday by telephone. “I have the recording of the voice of Mr. Maliki. We even listened to the translation.”
But the interpreter for the interview works for Mr. Maliki’s office, not the magazine. And in an audio recording of Mr. Maliki’s interview that Der Spiegel provided to The New York Times, Mr. Maliki seemed to state a clear affinity for Mr. Obama’s position, bringing it up on his own in an answer to a general question on troop presence.
The following is a direct translation from the Arabic of Mr. Maliki’s comments by The Times: “Obama’s remarks that — if he takes office — in 16 months he would withdraw the forces, we think that this period could increase or decrease a little, but that it could be suitable to end the presence of the forces in Iraq.”
He continued: “Who wants to exit in a quicker way has a better assessment of the situation in Iraq.”

Kinda hard to walk that one back.