washington, dc

The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Ed Kilgore

Puerto Rico and the Popular Vote

Just as everyone is still struggling to absorb the import of the yesterday’s loud but murky DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee ruling on MI and FL, the votes are largely in for the Puerto Rico primary, which Hillary Clinton won by a bit more than a two-to-one percentage margin, and by roughly 140,00 popular votes.
This outcome will once again create a dialogue-of-the-deaf over the officially meaningless but symbolically significant (at least according to HRC supporters) total popular vote issue. Most pro-HRC counts exclude four Caucus states where raw votes were not officially tabulated, and also give Obama zero votes in MI, where his supporters were forced to vote for “Uncommitted.” Most pro-Obama counts include estimates of the four caucus vote totals and either exclude MI as tainted or give Obama all the “Uncommitted” votes. (Another, by RenaRF at DailyKos, excludes primaries or caucuses in jurisdictions that don’t participate in the general election, denying HRC her PR margin and Obama some small victories elsewhere).
There is no such thing as an “official” popular vote count, since again, it really doesn’t matter in the official nomination process. But with only SD and MT–two small states where Obama is expected to win but not overwhelmingly–still left to vote, it’s reasonably sure that both campaigns will claim a total popular vote victory after Tuesday. The two things no one can deny is that it was, in retrospect, an awfully close race, but one in which Barack Obama will finish with a lead in pledged delegates, and barring some implosion in his general-election standing, the nomination. The general feeling is that he’ll cross the threshold to a total majority of pledged and announced-superdelegate votes by the end of this week.


Democrats and Military Strategy: A Series

This year, as always, Republicans will seek to create and exploit an advantage over Democrats in credibility on national security issues, despite George W. Bush’s terrible foreign policy record and John McCain’s identification with the war in Iraq. One recurring problem is that Democrats sometimes fail to fully engage on national security issues, viewing it as a “Republican issue.” And another is that some Democrats simply don’t feel comfortable talking about the larger issues of defense and military strategy.
Strategic consultant James Vega has written a five-part analysis of the challenges and opportunities for Democrats on military strategy.
Part 1 is entitled: How the Democrats can argue with McCain and the Republicans on military strategy and
win
.
Part 2 is entitled: Iraq is not a “classic counter-insurgency;” it’s a full-blown civil war.
Part 3 is entitled: The surge isn’t “working”, it’s just “postponing” — and in the long run it’s making things worse.
Part 4 is entitled: The Republicans do have a military strategy – it’s called “Divide and Rule”, it takes at least 50 years, requires lots of casualties and – the half-hearted way we’re doing it – almost never works
And part 5 is a summary.


Tomorrow’s Rules Showdown, and After

This morning’s staff post linked to the essential reading all good political junkies should undertake in preparation for tomorrow’s DNC Rules and Bylaws meeting in Washington to resolve the Michigan and Florida delegate issue. Walter Shapiro’s Salon piece on the subject provides a good preview of the likely outcome:

Despite desperate cries from the Hillary Clinton camp to count every delegate from these two outlaw primaries, which she won, the contours of a half-a-loaf deal are already in place, according to Democratic insiders. Key figures on the Rules Committee informally agreed by telephone Wednesday night to seat the entire Florida delegation based on the Jan. 29 primary, but to give them each only half a vote. The same principle would be applied to Michigan, but there are still unresolved complications over how to handle the “Uncommitted” delegates chosen in the Jan. 15 primary in which Barack Obama’s name was not even on the ballot.
Under this 50 percent compromise, the beleaguered Clinton would gain a 28-delegate edge (19 from Florida and nine from Michigan), not counting the half-votes from the 53 superdelegates from the two rogue states. With Obama nearly 200 delegates ahead and the clock nearing midnight for Clinton, the Rules Committee’s verdict is likely only briefly to delay the anointment of a Democratic nominee.

As Shapiro and others note, a legal brief from DNC lawyers suggesting that party rules limit the Rules & Bylaws Committee from seating more than half the MI and FL delegates paved the way for this solution, which also puts Democrats in line with the sanctions meted out to MI and FL by the Republican Party.
The big issue to watch for tomorrow, however, is how the Clinton campaign reacts to the half-a-loaf deal. They’ve certainly shown no overt signs of accepting a compromise, given the demonstrations they are organizing for the meeting, demanding that both states get full delegation votes.
But the situation really does pose a terrible strategic dilemma for HRC. Accepting the deal would only narrow Obama’s delegate lead marginally, but it would ratify the popular vote results for MI and FL. Depending on how caucus states are counted, and pending the results of the last three contests (where HRC’s popular-vote count is in danger of being undermined by a low turnout in Puerto Rico), party-wide acceptance of the MI and FL votes might bolster her cumulative-popular-vote-victory argument. This is about the only weapon she has left with superdelegates (other than electability claims that aren’t strongly supported by general election polls).
Accepting the deal, though, would presumably foreclose the option of an effort through the Credentials Committee prior to and at the Convention to seat all of the MI/FL delegates, which is the only way under current conditions that HRC can get close enough to Obama’s delegate counts to have any chance to deny him the nomination. On the other hand, rejecting the deal and clearly indicating she’s continuing the battle all the way to Denver could produce a negative superdelegate reaction, and perhaps divisions in her own camp.
The underlying reality for quite some time has been that HRC’s slim hopes for victory depend almost entirely on some terrible development for the Obama campaign that makes her largely theoretical electability arguments tangible and urgent. It hasn’t happened, and the primary season is about to end.
Still, there’s a path she could take that would avoid the appearance of a deeply divisive and largely hopeless fight all the way to Denver. She could accept (with misgivings) the MI/FL deal, get through June 3, make her last pitch to superdelegates, suspend (but not abandon) her campaign, and then sit tight and try to pay some bills. If the Obama campaign does somehow implode, and he’s running fifteen or twenty points behind McCain in the weeks before the Convention, HRC could revive her campaign, and the superdelegates could flip en masse to Clinton if they wished. At that point, her popular-vote-victory claims would provide a nice rationalization for repudiation of the putative nominee by a panic-stricken party leadership.
This course of action, and the period of reconciliation it would invite, might also increase the currently low odds of an Obama-Clinton Unity Ticket, if that’s indeed HRC’s goal, as many observers believe.
I have no clue if this reflects the thinking within the Clinton camp. But she’ll have to make up her mind pretty soon, and the brinksmanship reflected in her rhetoric on MI and FL, and her encouragement of a sense of grievance among her supporters, can’t be sustained much longer without serious negative consequences for her own and the party’s political future.


Why McCain Will Probably Get McNasty

Over at The Corner, Ramesh Ponnuru linked to my post yesterday predicting that the McCain campaign would inevitably head to the gutter in an effort to frighten voters about Barack Obama. Ramesh responded:

I will make a prediction of my own: The Democrats are almost certain to treat any campaign that threatens to deprive Obama of the presidency as negative and nasty.

I suspect where he’s going with this is the rejoinder that “comparative” campaigning is entirely legitimate, and that complaints about “negative” campaigning are sometimes efforts to avoid public scrutiny of one’s record or “character.”
Fair enough. But as my post discussed at some length, there are specific reasons that the attack on Obama won’t be some sort of high-minded analytical examination of his voting record or policy platform–or even of his “experience”–but will instead focus on “character” issues that represent little more than an effort to raise invidious fears about Obama’s “otherness.”
I got into this analysis as a meditation on Mark Schmitt’s argument that the only real message left to Republicans this year is an “American identity” appeal that battens on public fears of the unfamiliar. But let me come at this from another angle.
McCain is a candidate with a lot of built-in handicaps in terms of the partisan fundamentals, the mood of the country, and the issues landscape. He also suffers from a palpably unenthusiastic party base, and will be the first Republican presidential candidate in eons to struggle with a financial disadvantage. Against these handicaps, he has to capture the electoral “center” while shoring up his base. And he’s facing a Democratic nominee with his own appeal to the “center,” as measured by tangible support in the primaries and the polls from independents and even some disgruntled Republicans.
There are two ways to “capture the center” in electoral politics. One way is to occupy it with popular and transpartisan policy positions that create the impression that the candidate is bigger than his or her party, and is in alignment with the public’s needs and aspirations. (That, of course, runs the risk of discouraging the party base.) The other way is to push your opponent out of “the center” with attacks on him or her as “extremist,” which has the added benefit of helping to fire up your own base.
It is theoretically possible to campaign both ways. That, in fact, was what Richard Nixon did in 1972, through a series of strategic moves that appealed to various Dem-leaning voter and interest groups, while savaging McGovern as a pacifistic nimrod surrounded by drug legalizers, abortion supporters and welfare rights advocates. Bill Clinton arguably pulled off a milder version of the take-the-center, push-the-other-guy-out strategy in 1996.
Can John McCain really occupy the political center in the course of a long general election campaign? It’s doubtful. His “centrist” reputation is largely the product of a brief moment in his career–his 2000 nomination campaign–and the friends (in the news media) and enemies (in the conservative movement) that moment earned him. He’s spent much of this electoral cycle so far erasing all the positions that once made him look like a “maverick,” engaging in conspicuous love-ins with the high poohbahs of conservative economic and cultural orthodoxy. And it’s very likely that McCain’s long honeymoon with the news media is coming to an end, in part because of clever and systematic Democratic efforts to upbraid the media for the “free ride” they’ve given the Arizonan, and in part because this year’s Democratic nominee, unlike the last two, is not a man the media instinctively dislike (au contraire)
Moreover, McCain’s most distinctive policy position going into the general election is his identification with the idea of “victory” in Iraq. That will continue to be a very hard sell.
So given John McCain’s positioning, and a political and financial landscape which will deny him any breaks, it’s simply hard to deny that his best bet will be to try to push Obama out of the center, which is what conservative opinion outlets and operatives are going to do anyway.
It is also theoretically possible that McCain’s attacks on Obama could be substantive, and focused on policy positions and a Senate voting record that Republicans will describe as “liberal, liberal, liberal” in the grand old fashion of the last three decades. But this may well be the first presidential election in the last three decades where voters would actually prefer a “liberal, liberal, liberal” to anyone tainted with the GOP label.
It will be vastly easier for the McCain campaign to talk about the Rev. Wright, and flag pins, and Michelle Obama’s alleged lack of patriotism, and Obama’s “radical friends,” and under the radar screen, about secret Muslims and interracial families.
Maybe McCain would personally prefer to make his campaign an exchange of views on weighty matters of war and peace and prosperity and values and “reform.” I’m sure Ramesh Ponnuru would prefer that, too. But like it or not, the GOP and its candidate are out of step with the country right now on a wide array of issues, and the GOP “brand” is going to be a huge drag on McCain. It would be naive to think that his campaign won’t exploit the “character” loophole in the general rules of issues-based campaigning to make this election not about policies, but about the unknown, and to many voters frightening, prospect of a country led by this unprecedented politician named Barack Obama. And once McCain starts down this road, he won’t be able to come back.


Jim Webb and the Scots-Irish Vote

This seems to be Jim Webb Week in the political media, in part due to the publication of the Virginia Senator’s new book, A Time To Fight. In my post yesterday reciting the pros and cons of Webb as a potential running-mate for Barack Obama, I mentioned the theory of some that the distinguished historian of the Scots-Irish-American people might help Obama with those Appalachian voters among whom he has famously been trounced by Hillary Clinton in a series of Democratic primaries. This matters because of the political clout of Appalachians in at least four potential general-election battleground states (OH, PA, WV and VA).
I thought it might be useful to examine Webb’s own electoral pull among Appalachian voters in his one electoral contest, his narrow victory over George Allen in 2006. And as I suspected, Webb didn’t do that well among his Scots-Irish lundsmen, winning mainly due to his electoral strength in urban Virginia and the Northern Virginia suburbs.
It’s particularly interesting to compare Webb’s electoral profile in Appalachia to that of the previous two successful Democratic statewide candidates, Mark Warner (a WASPY neoliberal gazillionaire from NoVa), and Tim Kaine (a Catholic civil rights lawyer from Richmond). Here are links to county-by-county maps (with clickable popular vote numbers and percentages) for Warner in 2001, Kaine in 2005, and Webb in 2006.
Webb did a bit better than Kaine in Appalachia, winning five counties to Kaine’s four, and running slightly ahead of him in several other counties. But that differential must be offset by the fact that Kaine was running against a Republican (Jerry “No Relation” Kilgore) whose electoral base was in SW Virginia.
Moreover, Webb’s peformance lagged far behind that of Mark Warner, who (astonishingly) actually carried SW Virginia in a key component of his statewide win over Jim Gilmore (the man he also faces in this year’s Senate contest).
Now personallly, it comes as no surprise to me that Jim Webb’s strong personal identification with the Scots-Irish heritage didn’t pull a lot of votes. The Scots-Irish are probably this country’s least self-conscious identifiable ethnic group. As it happens, my own background is pretty similar to Webb’s, and I can tell you that none of my extended family have any idea that they are Scots-Irish. Yes, in Appalachia proper, a lot of people self-identify as “mountain folk” or even “hillbillies,” but most have little more than a dim idea that many of their ancestors were lowland Scots who spent a century or two doing England’s dirty work in Northern Ireland, before emigrating to America through Pennsylvania and scattering down through the mountain passes southward and westward. And in the vast Scots-Irish diaspora that stretches from the uplands of South Carolina across the continent to central and southern California, those with any self-conscious identity at all are much more likely to think of themselves as “crackers” or “peckerwoods” or “Okies” than as the subjects of Jim Webb’s loving literary attentions.
But what impresses me most about the Virginia electoral numbers above isn’t Jim Webb’s relative weakness in Appalachia, but Mark Warner’s overwhelming strength in a region where he had no natural advantages. Outside Virginia, Warner’s 2001 rural voter coup was almost invariably attributed (with a lot of encouragement from the celebrity redneck strategist Mudcat Sanders) to cultural “cues”‘ like his sponsorship of a NASCAR entry, his bluegrass campaign song, and those “Sportsmen For Warner” signs that sprouted up far off the interstates. As a resident of rural Virginia in 2001, my own very strong impression is that the cultural stuff kept the door open for Warner, but he sealed the deal with a fiscal and economic message that appealed to people who felt left behind by the go-go economy of the 1990s, and ignored by the politicians in Richmond. People, in other words, a lot like those Appalachian voters who are up for grabs in the 2008 presidential election.
What you say to Appalachians, in other words, may matter as much or more than who you are–a lesson taught by Warner, and for that matter, by Hillary Clinton, the Seven-Sisters-Educated feminist daughter of suburban Chicago, who has done pretty well among mountain folk this year. And in the end, that’s good news for Barack Obama, who ought to be able–with or without Jim Webb’s help–to articulate an economic message more appealing to the forgotten people of the uplands than anything John McCain can muster.


McCain and “American Identity”

The always-interesting Mark Schmitt has penned a fine essay for The American Prospect on the intellectual bankruptcy of contemporary conservatism, and the strong likelihood that the Republican Party is about to enter a period of significant decline, until such time as it can generate new ideas and leaders.
Unlike Mark, I haven’t had the time or patience to slog through the raft of recent books on the future of conservatism, so I’ll take his word for it that would-be conservative “reformers” like Ross Douthat, Reihan Salam, David Frum and Mickey Edwards haven’t come up with anything revolutionary, and that Republican politicians and “base” voters aren’t willing to embrace much change in any event.
But Mark makes an observation about the current Republican Party and the McCain campaign that is spot-on and very important: given the discredited nature of such conservative ideological frameworks as supply-side economics and neocon foreign policy, and in the absence of anything that could be described as “McCainism,” the GOP this year is being driven to a primal, bare-bones appeal to “American identity.”

This year the Republican argument is reduced to its barest essence: Americans versus “pluribus,” unprotected by the politeness of issues or safer symbolism. Hence McCain’s slogan, the politics of the flag pin, the e-mails charging that Obama doesn’t salute the flag, and the attempt to associate him with the anti-American politics of 1968, when he was 7 years old. This, then, may be the ultimate high-stakes gamble for the party of confident risk-takers: Accept that everything else–ideas, competence, governance–is gone, and instead of trying to reconstruct it, as the books recommend, bet everything on the bare essentials of Republican identity politics, “The American President Americans Are Waiting For.”

Mark doesn’t come out and say it, but he’s explained why the McCain campaign is almost certain to be one of the most negative and nasty in living memory, despite McCain’s alleged “centrism.” Theoretically, an “American identity” campaign could be unifying, uplifting, and communitarian in tone. But that’s Barack Obama’s theme, not John McCain’s. And in the current political climate, and for a candidate of the Right, an “American identity” appeal is bound to be exclusive, fearful and even vengeful. McCain really has no other option.
Think about it. McCain’s war record, “character,” and occasional exercises in “independence” might be enough to get him over the hump in an election year where Americans really wanted a Republican president, though perhaps one not named “Bush.” But that’s obviously not how 2008 is shaping up. McCain isn’t going to win the presidency with his foreign policy views. Given how terribly out of alignment he is with public opinion on Iraq, the amazing thing is that he’s doing as well as he is in assessments of him as a commander-in-chief; the numbers are unlikely to improve the more voters get to know McCain’s essentially neocon position on foreign policy.
On domestic issues, McCain at best offers a slightly sanitized version of Bush-era conservatism: he doesn’t like pork-barrel spending and torture; isn’t a global-warming denier; and doesn’t strike anyone as the kind of man who will wake up every morning in the White House scheming to criminalize abortion or demonize gays and lesbians. That’s not a lot of “change.” As for McCain’s reputation for bipartisanship, there’s not much left there these days beyond the echo chamber he shares with Democratic apostate Joe Lieberman.
So like it or not, John McCain is going to be relentlessly driven in the direction of a negative effort to make the contest about his Democratic opponent rather than his own or his party’s merits, and in Barack Obama, he’s got an opponent tailor-made for a gutter campaign aimed at convincing swing voters that he simply represents too much change, and too much risk, in the very visceral sense of embodying so many unfamiliar things.
There’s a pretty clear historical precedent for the strategy that McCain is likely to pursue: Jimmy Carter’s 1980 campaign. Carter faced a political landscape just as forbidding as McCain’s today: a weak economy, plunging U.S. strength and prestige around the world, an exceptionally sour public mood, and a restless and uninspired party “base.” Unsurprisingly, Carter staked his re-election on an effort to make the contest a referendum on all the doubts and fears raised by Ronald Reagan. His Convention Acceptance speech was built on the theme of “The Two Futures,” a forthright appeal to voters to forget about the previous four years and focus on the scary prospects of a Reagan presidency. That was also Carter’s approach in the one 1980 presidential debate, in which his “two futures” argument was decisively trumped by Reagan’s simple “are you better off?” formulation of the case for change.
Perhaps John McCain is in a better position than the 1980 incumbent Carter to offer a minimum case that he represents some degree of “change,” but the odds are that his candidacy will depend on doing a better job than Carter at frightening voters about his opponent. So buckle in for a tough, unsavory GOP campaign, sports fans. When you’re wrong on the issues, your party and ideology have been discredited, and the whole sweep of history seems to conspire against you, dragging the campaign deep into the mud may be the only option left.


Jim Webb, His Fans, and His Detractors

Can anyone recall a presidential election cycle in which there has been so much speculation and argument about Veep choices so very early? The only one that comes to mind is 1964, when LBJ conducted a very extended and very public “search” for a running-mate that seemed to include virtually every Democratic elected official in the country.
There are obvious reasons for this Veep-o-mania. On the Republican side, John McCain’s age, and his less-than-perfect relationship with the GOP’s dominant conservative wing, have made his choice of running-mate a very big deal, leading to a common assumption (which I share) that conservatives will enjoy an implicit veto over the decision.
On the Democratic side, early Veep speculation has been spurred by perceptions that the long nomination contest has divided the party, and that Barack Obama has some very specific weaknesses in his biography and his electoral appeal that a running-mate might help address. Moreover, the idea that he could heal the intraparty wounds and broaden his appeal by forming a “Unity Ticket” with Hillary Clinton has acceletated the discussion, since there’s some sense that an early move in that direction by Obama might bring Clinton’s challenge to a decisive and amicable end.
In any event, we are beginning to hear the opening salvoes of the argument over a prospective Obama running-mate, beyond the strong negative reaction of many Obama supporters and progressive pundits to the Unity Ticket talk. And it’s not surprising that the name of Virginia Sen. Jim Webb is already arousing some very passionate pro and con feelings.
A lot of this sentiment hasn’t quite gone public yet, but there’s a sizable group of progressive activists and bloggers who viscerally identify with Webb’s staunch opposition to the Iraq War, his high-octane brand of economic populism, and (I might as well come out and say it, since Webb’s most avid promoters are almost invariably male) his testosterone-heavy approach to politics generally.
On a more rational level, at a time when there’s a lot of disagreement about what Obama most needs in a running-mate, Webb is rivalled only by Bill Richardson in the number of “boxes” his potential candidacy would check.
As a war hero and former Secretary of the Navy, Webb abundantly possesses the national security credentials that–on paper at least–Obama largely lacks.
He’s from a medium-sized red state that most Democrats consider potentially winnable.
As a former Republican, Webb could shore up Obama’s once-formidable and now-vulnerable ability to reach out to disaffected GOPers and GOP-leaning independents.
And Webb is the distinguished expert on and personal embodiment of a particular demographic group–the Scotch-Irish Americans who populated Appalachia and eventually migrated through the South and all the way to California–among whom Obama has done especially poorly in the Democratic primaries.
There are a few other factors that Webb boosters sometimes cite in his favor. One is his stellar performance delivering the 2007 Democratic response to Bush’s State of the Union Address, often contrasted with the understated effort this year by Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a frequently-mentioned Veep possibility for Obama. And another is the talent for expression Webb has evidenced in his long literary career in fiction and nonfiction works, most recently his well-timed new book, A Time to Fight, which lays out a comprehensive agenda for the Democratic Party and the country.
But the case for Webb as Veep (even if he wants the gig, which is not at all clear from his recent comments on the subject) is by no means going to go unchallenged, as shown by a guest post today on Matt Yglesias’ site by feminist blogger Kathy G., who deems Webb “unacceptable.”
Kathy G. devotes some attention to disputing the positive case for Webb. She cites his relatively poor performance among white voters in VA in 2006, in a strong Democratic year against a wounded Republican incumbent; and his reputation as an indifferent campaigner and a difficult person generally. She also examines the downside of Webb’s ex-Republican status, including his past support for Republican candidates and policy positions, and his very recent endorsement of conservative revisionist theories about the Vietnam War.
But the heart of her post, in an exposition that we will hear again and again if Webb gets “short-listed” by Obama for the Veep position, is about Webb’s history on gender issues, dating all the way back to a highly controversial 1979 magazine piece in which the future Secretary of the Navy denounced the admission of women to the military academies, and opposed any consideration of allowing them anywhere near combat.
Webb, says Kathy G., became an enabler of all sorts of torments aimed at women in the military:

Webb’s writings on women did a hell of a lot of damage. It gave invaluable ammunition to the enemies of women’s presence in the military and helped stall and perhaps even roll back women’s progress there. Kathleen Murray, a 1984 academy graduate who went on to become a commander in the Navy, said of Webb’s screed: “This article was brandished repeatedly. [Men] quoted and used it as an excuse to mistreat us.”

And Webb’s controversial utterances about women in the military didn’t abate much later on.

At a 1991 convention of naval aviators called Tailhook, 83 women were reported to have been sexually harassed or assaulted by military personnel. From the beginning, Webb’s concern for the victims was merely perfunctory. But he gave many speeches and wrote many articles vociferously defending the accused. In a 1992 article in the New York Times, he called the investigation of Tailhook a “witch hunt.” In a 1997 article he wrote for the conservative Weekly Standard, he was highly critical of what he termed “ever-expanding sexual mixing” in the military and he referred to feminist efforts to improve the status of women in the military as merely “salving the egos of a group of never-satisfied social engineers.”

In a preliminary and atypically defensive response to Kathy G. today, pro-Webb blogger Spencer Ackerman cites some examples of how Webb promoted significant if non-combat assignments for women as Secretary of the Navy. But it’s still a problematic record, particularly, as Kathy G. notes, when it comes to the impact of a Webb Veep nomination on pro-Hillary Clinton women:

[I]n practical terms, selecting Webb would be a slap in the face to the Hillary Clinton supporters. I’m not saying that Obama has to pick Hillary as veep (and indeed, I think that would be a bad idea). I’m not even saying that he needs to pick a woman.
But Hillary was the first woman to ever have a serious shot at the presidency, and she came so close. So the Hillary supporters (of whom, to be clear, I am not one) will feel frustrated enough that their candidate didn’t win. But for Obama to choose — out of all the well-qualified candidates out there — the one person who has a really awful record on gender issues would be like rubbing salt in the wound. It would be seen as a big “screw you” to Hillary’s supporters and to feminists in general.

That’s the really key argument that stands in the way of a prospective Obama-Webb ticket.
And more generally, the passionate arguments for and against Jim Webb as Veep show that rejecting the Unity Ticket won’t take Barack Obama out of the thick woods on this issue. One of the main reasons I eventually came around to Unity Ticket advocacy, despite serious misgivings, is that there’s really no obvious alternative that doesn’t raise a lot of questions as well, without the upside of a quick resolution of the nominating contest and a balm on the wounds it created. Maybe the whole subject of the vice-presidential nomination is being overrated as a factor in the general election. But no matter: among the chattering classes at least, it’s going to hang fire for quite a while.


Memorial Day

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.


State-by-State General Election Polls

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.”


Bowers on the Unity Ticket

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.