At Politico, Alexander Burns has a good basic rundown of the contest for Republican National Committee chairmanship, which will culminate next month.
Current RNC Chairman Mike Duncan is considered the front-runner, partly because of his fundraising ability, and partly because none of the other five candidates has a whole lot of momentum. Burns rates Michigan GOP chief Saul Anuzis, who’s sort of the symbol of blue-state Republicans, and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, as running neck-and-neck in second place. But he agrees with Ed Kilgore’s recent assessment that the entry into the campaign of former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has destabilized the contest–particularly now that Blackwell has formed a “ticket” with another hero of the Cultural Right, national co-chairwoman aspirant Tina Benkiser of Texas.
Ideology isn’t much of a factor in this competition, beyond the suggestions of Steele’s rivals that his (largely repudiated) relationship with the puny but totemic Republican Leadership Council makes him suspect. All the candidates are running as hard-core pro-life conservatives.
As Burns’ account suggests, inside-baseball factors like the relationship of candidates to actual RNC members will likely determine the outcome. Democrats should probably welcome a win by Duncan, which would nicely symbolize the conservative conviction that nothing’s really wrong with the GOP, or by Blackwell, who was famously described by George W. Bush as “a nut.”

I think it’s safe to say that no decision by Barack Obama since his vote for FISA legislation much earlier this year has aroused as much authentic anger among progressives as his invitation to evangelical superstar Rick Warren to provide the invocation at his inauguration next month.
Some of the backlash over Warren reflects broad-based concerns that Obama’s style of religious outreach has, well, overreached by embracing a religious leader who considers homosexuality a sin, evolution a hoax, legalized abortion a holocaust, and “evildoers” like the elected president of Iran a target for a righteous assassination. Sarah Posner has articulated these concerns in a typically thorough piece at The Nation:

Warren represents the absolute worst of the Democrats’ religious outreach, a right-winger masquerading as a do-gooder anointed as the arbiter of what it means to be faithful. Obama’s religious outreach was intended, supposedly, to make religious voters more comfortable with him and feel included in the Democratic Party. But that outreach now has come at the expense of other people’s comfort and inclusion, at an event meant to mark a turning point away from divisive politics.

Damon Linker, known mainly for his aggressive and informed criticism of the Religious Right, offers publicly what I’ve privately heard a fair number of Democrats say in defense or dismissal of the Warren choice:

Obama’s a politician, and the Warren pick is just the latest sign that he’s an exceedingly shrewd one (as Andrew concedes). Warren is beloved by mainstream evangelicals, who have helped him to sell millions of books extolling a fairly anodyne form of American Protestantism. (Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell he is not.) It is in Obama’s interest (and the Democrats’) to peel as many moderate evangelicals away from the GOP as he can. Giving Warren such a prominent (but purely symbolic) place in the inauguration is a politically cost-free way of furthering this partisan agenda.

As Linker’s post indicates, part of the disagreement over this issue reflects deeper disagreements on several points. What is the symbolic value, positive or negative, of Warren’s role in the inauguration? What is the source and significance of Warren’s cult-like celebrity? Is he, as Posner calls him, a “culture warrior wolf” in “sheep’s clothing,” or, as Linker suggests, a purveyor of Oprah-style lifestyle advice that can be separated from his deeper theological and political positions? And who is legitimizing whom here? Is Warren blessing Obama’s progressive agenda, or is Obama blessing Warren’s reactionary views?
All these are legitimate arguments to have, this day or any day, but there’s not much question that what makes this dispute red-hot at present is Warren’s visible role, as a California-based megapreacher, in support of California’s Proposition 8 outlawing gay marriage.
It is abundantly clear that LGBT activists view the passage of Prop 8 as representing the dark underside of what is generally being treated by progressives as a Jubilee event on November 4. That it happened in a state that Barack Obama carried by a huge margin is especially troubling, and is understandably being interpreted as a sign that LGBT folk are being excluded from the Obama coalition. No one should be surprised that Obama’s decision to give an avid Prop 8 supporter a central role in his inauguration–offering, in fact, the blessings of Almighty God to the new presidency–would feel like salt poured into fresh wounds.
But the backlash to the Warren designation illustrates something else about Prop 8 that hasn’t gotten much attention in progressive circles: a real sea-change in LGBT acceptance of half-loaf Democratic commitments to equality. Put aside, if you can, the motives and underlying agenda of the most important Prop 8 proponents, and the lies they told to push the initiative over the line to victory. The actual language of Prop 8–“no” to gay marriage, along with “yes” or at least “maybe” to everything short of that–is highly congruent with the default-drive position of many, and probably a majority, of Democratic pols in the very recent past. The Democratic nominee for president in 2004 took this position. So, too, did the 2008 candidate for president often thought of as most “progressive,” John Edwards. And it’s within shouting distance of Obama’s own position, even though he did make clear his own opposition to the initiative. And it’s hard to find a prominent Democratic elected official in culturally conservative parts of the country who hasn’t followed the no-to-gay-marriage, yes-to-domestic-partnerships template, though it’s not so hard to find some who haven’t even gone that far in a progressive direction.
Why is that postion now being deemed so insultingly unacceptable in progressive company? I’d say it’s mainly because Prop 8 overturned established marriage rights that upwards of 20,000 couples joyfully took advantage of during the five-month regime of legalized gay marriage in California. Whereas in previous gay marriage struggles Democrats might be grudgingly forgiven for failing to have the political courage to blaze new trails, Prop 8 represents a (literally) reactionary step back, and in a state that is so often described as a cultural and political trend-shaper. Even as Prop 8 has galvanized the argument that gay marriage should be regarded as a fundamental right indicative of basic equality, not as a negotiable sign of “progress” or “tolerance,” Prop 8 has almost certainly changed, probably forever, the terms on which LGBT folk will participate in the progressive coalition and the Democratic Party, despite the obvious lack of political alternatives.
I think it’s actually a testament to progressive faith in Team Obama’s political acumen that it’s generally assumed he invited this controversy deliberately by paying Rick Warren the honor of a role in his inauguration. But it’s a conflict that will persist after the echoes of Warren’s invocation have long died.

As Democrats look ahead to the challenges that await the Obama administration, one step they should take right away is to completely set aside any further discussion over whether or not the thing that the Bush administration’s PR team named a“ surge” either succeeded or failed. There is, in fact, no specific military strategy that is called a “surge” or that can meaningfully be described as “succeeding”, “failing” or “offering lessons for future conflicts.” Lumped together inside the term “surge” – which is essentially a public relations term and not a military term — are two specific military operations and two distinct military strategies that were actually employed in Iraq in the period from 2007-2008. It is only by looking at those actual operations and strategies that Democrats can draw any lessons for the future.
To begin with, neither of the two actions most directly related to the common-sense meaning of the word “surge” — the increase in the number of troops in 2007 and their deployment to empty houses in central urban locations rather than remote bases – can be properly defined as “military strategies”. They are both specific military operations conducted within the framework of some larger military strategy. As a result, their success, failure or ultimate value can only be determined in relation to that larger strategy
The two broader military strategies that were actually employed during the “surge” were (1) a classic military strategy that the Romans called “divide et impera” (divide and rule) and which was quite frequently employed by the later colonial empires of Spain and Britain and (2) a very specific military doctrine for conducting counterinsurgency warfare – a doctrine developed in 2006 and codified in the military manual FM-3-24- The US Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
The strategy of “divide et impera” — the notion of funding and arming one or several competing groups within a country and balancing them against each other in order to maintain social order — can be found in Julius Caesar’s accounts of his conquest of Gaul and Hernan Cortez’s account of the conquest of Mexico. It reappears frequently in the history of the later Spanish, French and British empires. The sight of an American general in 2007 simultaneously overseeing the funding and support of both the Shia government of Nouri al Maliki and the Sunni “Awakening Councils (while also honoring a tacit truce with the Shia nationalist forces of Muqtada al-Sadr) in order to control a sectarian civil war fits perfectly well within the framework of this long strategic tradition.
At the present time there is little if any serious opposition among Americans to the use of such divide et impera tactics in Iraq or Afghanistan if they can provide viable alternatives to a prolonged, high-casualty anti-guerilla campaign such as the Soviets faced in Afghanistan in the 1980’s. But history shows that these kinds of opportunistic alliances buy only very temporary loyalty. As a July 11, 2008 US News and World report noted, “Afghan Warlords, Formerly Backed by the CIA, Now Turn Their Guns on U.S. Troops”

… two of the most dangerous players [in Afghanistan] are violent Afghan Islamists named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani, according to U.S. officials. In recent weeks, Hekmatyar has called upon Pakistani militants to attack U.S. targets, while the Haqqani network is blamed for three large vehicle bombings, along with the attempted assassination of Karzai in April.
Ironically, these two warlords—currently at the top of America’s list of most wanted men in Afghanistan—were once among America’s most valued allies. In the 1980s, the CIA funneled hundreds of millions of dollars in weapons and ammunition to help them battle the Soviet Army during its occupation of Afghanistan. Hekmatyar, then widely considered by Washington to be a reliable anti-Soviet rebel, was even flown to the United States by the CIA in 1985.

Providing funds and support to local tribal chieftains and warlords is a powerfully attractive alternative to having US troops become bogged down in bitter anti-guerilla warfare, but Democrats should always remember that “divide and rule” strategies also have to be guided by some viable longer term plan and ultimate exit strategy.

Read more…

Michael Tomasky, editor of Guardian America, has a provocative New York Review of Books article, “How Historic a Victory?,” synthesizing lessons from TDS co-editor Ruy Teixeira’s Red, Blue, and Purple America: The Future of Election Demographics and Larry M. Bartels’ Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age
Lots of anger among progressives about Pastor Rick Warren, a prosperity gospel, anti-choice opponent of Gay marriage, being selected for the Inaugural invocation. But one of America’s most fiery social gospel preachers, the Rev. Joseph Lowery, a supporter of same-sex marriage, will get the last word when he delivers his benediction, and dmac’s Firedoglake report puts it in perspective.
Eli Saslow’s WaPo article “Helping to Write History” offers a peek at Obama’s speechwriter Jon Favreau and his team of scribes as they prepare to craft the most important speech of their careers.
Will America’s 20-50 million pot-smokers (US government estimates) get any legal relief during the Obama Administration? Scott Thill has an Alternet riff on the possibility, with a focus on the role of Secretary of Commerce nominee Bill Richardson, an advocate of decriminalization.
Media Matters spanks Politico for complaining about Democrats’ “dynasty politics,” while ignoring Republican Lisa Murkowski’s appointment to the U.S. Senate by her father, Governor Frank Murkowski.
Hotline‘s Jennifer Skalka has a succinct wrap-up on the just-released study of voter turnout in the ’08 election by American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate, noting “sizeable gains in every region of the nation” for the Democratic Party.

As Steve Benen and others have noted this week, it looks like Barack Obama’s cabinet probably won’t include any appointees from the South. (Depending on your definition of the words “cabinet” and “South,” Energy Czar designate Carol Browner, a native of South Florida, might be an exception, though she hasn’t lived there in 16 years).
Interesting, but of questionable relevance, as evidenced by this quote buried deep in a let’s-manufacture-a-grievance story in Politico today:

Gordon Taylor, a former chief of staff to a southern Democratic member, said some Blue Dog Democrats didn’t even realize the gap in geographic diversity until it was pointed out to them.
“The funny thing is, it hasn’t really been an issue,” Taylor said. “People have been so focused on philosophy and ideology that geography hasn’t really come up.”

Same here, I would say.
But there’s nothing that mysterious about it. As Tom Schaller quoted me in Salon today as observing, some of the more likely Obama appointees from the South (e.g., Sam Nunn, Jim Hunt, Artur Davis, Jim Clyburne, Shirley Franklin) took themselves out of the running for one reason or another. Tim Kaine could have probably gotten a cabinet post, but likely decided that he didn’t want to turn Virginia over to his Republican Lieutenant Governor less than a year before the next gubernatorial election there. Max Cleland’s name came up in connection with VA, but he did that same gig more than thirty years ago, and is reportedly having some health problems. Inez Tenenbaum of SC was on some lists for Education Secretary, but Obama chose, wisely I think, to choose a nominee more involved in the big intra-progressive debates over education reform. And John Edwards would have been a lead-pipe cinch for some major appointment if he hadn’t developed some personal issues earlier this year.
In any event, some southerners, from the above list or others, will eventually join Obama’s cabinet. But as I responded in an email to an inquiring friend earlier today, no, I certainly don’t feel like my southern face has been slapped. The best thing Barack Obama can do to build on his relatively strong showing in the South this year is to quickly get things done, and he’s assembled a team well-equipped to do just that.

We are getting close to the end of cabinet nominations for president-elected Obama. In a dual surprise (at least at the time they were first leaked), he’s picked Colorado Senator Ken Salazar to head Interior, and former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack for USDA.
Some observers wonder why Salazar would want to go from being a senator to heading a “second-tier” Cabinet agency, but that may understate the importance of Interior to westerners. The department is, well, something of the regional landlord, and given Salazar’s background (particularly on water issues), it’s probably a good fit. There’s some initial handwringing in Democratic circles about yet another Senate seat coming open prematurely, but given the steady drift towards the Donkey Party by Colorado and the talent vacuum afflicting Republicans in that state (Tom Tancredo is their likeliest Senate candidate!), it shouldn’t be that big a problem.
Vilsack was a surprise if only because he had signaled some time ago that he was not under consideration for a post in the Obama administration. There will be some serious grumbling about Vilsack from the rapidly growing “foodie” movement, if only because of his background in the very lair of Demon Corn, Iowa. But with Tom Harkin standing athwart the Senate Agriculture Committee, the Obamaites may have figured it was better to get a prominent and famously wonky Iowan to fill the post, even if they do plan some sort of major changes at USDA. And the potential Ag Secretary that most speculators expected as of last week, John Salazar, was a no-go for obvious reasons.
In terms of the remaining major posts, there are now reports that California Rep. Xavier Becerra has taken himself out of the running for US Trade Representative on grounds that trade policy didn’t look to be a major Obama priority. Labor could go to any one of a number of labor-friendly wonks or pols, from David Bonior to Mary Beth Maxwell to Jennifer Granholm (from a diversity point of view, there does seem to be a relatively low number of women on board, though that’s not true at the White House staff/subcabinet levels).
But while you never know what will transpire when Obama’s nominations move to the next stage, so far there’s a grand total of one major appointee who looks to be in line for a difficult confirmation process in Congress: Attorney General-designee Eric Holder. And that’s simply because Republicans and some Democrats will enjoy the opportunity to work out some anti-Clinton tensions by rehashing the Mark Rich pardon.

It’s a familiar story by now that a lot of the Republican Senators who led the charge to kill the Big Three Automaker loan package last week happen to represent states with large, non-unionized, foreign-owned auto plants.
But there’s another aspect to this story that’s not very well known outside the South: these foreign-owned auto plants have vastly benefitted from public subsidies as states have competed fiercely to make headlines by landing them.
Mike Lillis provides the pertinent facts in a very useful Washington Independent piece today:

Shelby’s Alabama, for example, secured construction of a Mercedes-Benz plant in 1993 by offering $253 million in state and local tax breaks, worker training and land improvement. For Honda, the state’s sweetener surrounding a 1999 deal to build a mini-van plant was $158 million in similar perks, adding $90 million in enticements when the company expanded the plant three years later. A 2001 deal with Toyota left the company with $29 million in taxpayer gifts.
Alabama is hardly alone. Corker’s Tennessee recently lured Volkswagen to build a manufacturing plant in Chattanooga, offering the German automaker tax breaks, training and land preparation that could total $577 million. In 2005, the state inspired Nissan to relocate its headquarters from southern California by offering $197 million in incentives, including $20 million in utility savings.
In 1992, South Carolina snagged a BMW plant for $150 million in giveaways. In Mississippi in 2003, Nissan was lured with $363 million. In Georgia, a still-under-construction Kia plant received breaks estimated to be $415 million. The list goes on.

If you will allow me a brief tirade based on my own experience in community and economic development work in Georgia back in the 1980s and early 1990s, this is an old, sad story in the South. In dealing with chronic pockets of poverty and unemployment, southern political leaders have eternally faced a choice between long-range efforts to improve educational levels and “quality of life” measurements to attract high-end jobs and stimulate home-grown entrepreneurship, OR short-term efforts to market the region’s weaknesses (cheap labor, exploitable natural resources, hostility to unions and regulation) to individual investors while offering them subsidies that further weaken the public sector. The battle over these two basic strategies has raged across the region for decades, and I’m unhappy to report that the moolight-and-magnolias, come-exploit-us point of view has largely prevailed, particularly, though not exclusively, in states dominated by Republicans.
There’s always been a beggar-thy-neighbor aspect to the corporate welfare game in auto plants, as wily owners up the ante for each plant location or relocation decision. But it’s become acutely evident in the debate over federal subsidies for the Big Three.
But the real outrage for me isn’t so much the hypocrisy of southern Republicans who lead cheers for the despoilation of state treasuries and the abandonment of public priorities in the pursuit of foreign auto plants, even as they self-righteously oppose emergency aid for Detroit. It’s the damage the South has done to itself by choosing the low and fundamentally self-loathing road to economic development.

Jonathan Chait’s “Minnesota Recount Update” in yesterday’s edition of TNR‘s The Plank takes an optimistic view of Al Franken’s prospects. Chait’s analysis concludes “All in all, Franken seems like a pretty strong bet to win.” Chait can get some encouragement from Pat Doyle’s article in today’s Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune, which reports,

The Star Tribune has performed its own analysis of the challenged ballots by relying on a virtual “canvassing board” of more than 26,000 readers who examined at least some of them. There appeared to be widespread consensus that Franken won slightly more disputes than Coleman, enough to theoretically erase the incumbent’s narrow lead by late Monday….According to the analysis, if all of the ballots on which challenges have been withdrawn were awarded to candidates as Ballot Challenge readers awarded them, Franken would hold a 246-vote lead heading into today’s Canvassing Board meeting. The Board will begin resolving some 2,260 remaining challenges at noon, with Franken’s challenges outnumbering Coleman’s by 224. The conclusion is consistent with an analysis done by the Associated Press, which showed that Franken netted enough votes from several thousand easily resolved disputes to erase Coleman’s lead.

It’s still a roller-coaster of a recount, but a little optimism seems justified going into the final phase.

Some of you may remember the skirmishing over the language about abortion in the Democratic platform earlier this year. A straightforward endorsement of abortion rights was combined with a commitment to help reduce the need for abortion. The latter material was widely hailed as a victory by those Democrats–many of them supporters of abortion restrictions–who consider “abortion reduction” the common ground on which pro-choice and pro-life Americans can cooperate.
While it’s always an accomplishment when platform drafters can make everybody happy, the concept of “abortion reduction” by means other than direct restrictions on the legality of abortion is not a universal crowdpleaser, particularly among reproductive rights advocates who view this approach as an unacceptable concession to the assumption that abortion is inherently immoral.
At The American Prospect, Sarah Posner has a solid write-up today on how the platform skirmishing might play itself out during the first year of the Obama administration, with “abortion reduction” legislation sponsored by Democratic Reps. Tim Ryan of OH and Rosa DeLauro of CT being the lightning rod:

Passing a comprehensive bill like Ryan-DeLauro could be complicated not only by the reluctance of reproductive-rights advocates to get behind it but also by the refusal of some Catholic groups, under pressure from church hierarchy, to endorse a bill that includes contraception. Many evangelicals are similarly loathe to endorse contraception, as evidenced by the forced resignation of Richard Cizik, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, after he told National Public Radio’s Fresh Air host Terri Gross that he favored government supplying contraception [note: Cizik also signaled he was becoming more open to gay marriage, which may have been an even bigger deal].

Overshadowing this debate are doubts about the exact position of Barack Obama, who has an impeccable pro-choice voting record but who has also done a lot to encourage “abortion reduction” supporters.