Ross Douthat is a conservative, albeit of a somewhat heretical temperament, so his assessment of John McCain’s new “economic agenda” is particularly interesting insofar as he thinks the whole thing is, well, pretty poorly thought out and essentially a box-checking exercise.

McCain’s speech reads like an attempt to unify a divided party by offering every faction something to make them happy. For the GOP’s supply-siders and business interests, there are promises to extend the Bush tax cuts and slash corporate rates. For moderate Republicans clinging to seats in Democratic states, there’s a pledge to cut the Alternative Minimum Tax, which hits upper-middle class Blue Staters hardest. For free traders, there’s a shout-out to the Colombian Free Trade Agreement; for flat-tax obsessives, there’s a call for an alternative tax-filing option, featuring just two brackets instead of four or five. For deficit hawks and porkbusters, there’s a promise to veto any bill with earmarks, an attack on corporate welfare, and a call for a one-year freeze in discretionary spending and a top-to-bottom review of every agency’s budget. For entitlement reformers, there’s a call to means-test the prescription drugs benefit. There’s even something for the small band of conservatives (this writer among them) who have been agitating for a distinctively pro-family economic agenda, in the form of a pledge to double the tax exemption for dependents, from $3500 to $7000.

In other words, it’s all pretty much a politically-motivated grab-bag, with the desire to shower tax benefits on voters struggling rather painfully with McCain’s long-time theme of demands for fiscal discipline. McCain does seem to have figured out that it’s not exactly the right moment to pose as Dr. Root Canal (to use the term of abuse supply-siders have traditionally applied to fiscal hawks). But it’s not especially clear that offering something to everyone will work politically, either. As Douthat says:

This is almost certainly a wiser approach than campaigning as the prince of budgetary rectitude and nothing else, but by leaving McCain without a signal theme, it runs the risk that the media will end up deciding which aspects of his program get highlighted, and what narrative he ends up saddled with.

Well, yeah, insofar as one of those “media narratives” could involve getting out the calculator and figuring out that McCain’s tax proposals will once again shower corporations and the wealthy with the bulk of benefits, while dwarfing the negative fiscal consequences of even Bush’s tax plans. And maybe that’s why Ross concludes by suggesting that McCain could wind up vulnerable to claims than on economic issues, he’s “George W. Bush redux.” It might even, you know, be true.

For a variety of logistical reasons, I wasn’t able to watch last night’s Democratic candidate debate, sponsored by ABC. But I did watch some highlights–or as they put it, lowlights–put together by TalkingPointsMemo, and it does indeed look like the terrible reviews are justified. Here’s what Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales had to say:

When Barack Obama met Hillary Clinton for another televised Democratic candidates’ debate last night, it was more than a step forward in the 2008 presidential election. It was another step downward for network news — in particular ABC News, which hosted the debate from Philadelphia and whose usually dependable anchors, Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, turned in shoddy, despicable performances.

The main complaint is that the moderators spent an inordinate amount of tiime on substance-free gotcha questions and querelous follow-ups, mostly aimed at Obama. The whole show, which also featured constant commercial breaks, was generally so bad that the audience booed the moderators at the end.
This will probably be the last debate between the Democratic contenders in this cycle, and it is devoutly to be hoped that the news media have learned some things about how to conduct a debate that will be used during the general election. Last night’s event wasn’t, however, a good sign.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

I wrote the other day (in a post that was reprinted by RealClearPolitics) about the motives of the Clinton campaign and the Right-Wing Noise Machine in inflating a few ambiguous remarks made by Barack Obama about rural voters in Pennsylvania into a major feeding frenzy. But now it appears every political writer on earth feels constrained to use “Bitter-gate” to expound on some Big Theory or other about elitism or the future of the Democratic Party.
Consider Michael Lind’s vast article in Salon today. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Mr. Lind, let me just say that the two adjectives his work most often conjures up are “brilliant” and “cranky.” He is indeed one erudite dude, but he has chosen to deploy his intelligence and learning in the obsessive service of various Big Revisionist Theories, invariably served up in a tone of anticipatory anger towards the fools and knaves he knows will mock or ignore him (he was briefly a Charter Blogger at TPMCafe, but bowed out quickly when he predictably got barbecued in the comment threads).
One of Michael’s big obsessions is the ethnic dimension of political allegiances. He once wrote an entire book that was ostensibly “about” George W. Bush, but was actually an elaborate and passionately rendered reinterpretation of Texas political history through the lens of the ethnic rivalry between Germans and Scotch-Irish (the Scotch-Irish were the villians of this tale, as in much of Lind’s earlier work; that makes it even odder that he’s now treating this evil group as part of a virtuous anti-Yankee coalition essential to Democratic victory).
Given his ethnic preoccupations, it didn’t particularly surprise me to learn that Lind’s take on “Bitter-gate” is to associate Barack Obama with the sneering elitism and moralism of the Greater New England Yankee diaspora, whose landing-points across the country more-or-less coincide with those lily-white states where Obama has done especially well in the nominating contest. And this association, he says, is politically disastrous.

The question, then, is not why Greater New England progressives would vote for Obama. He presses all their age-old buttons: opposition to war, nonpartisan reform. The question is why anyone would assume that such a candidate would appeal to other Democratic constituencies, other than blacks (voting in this case for the favorite-son candidate).
Indeed, the Greater New England moralist culture has been rejected by practically every other substantial subculture in the United States: Irish-Americans in Northeastern cities, Appalachian white Baptists and now, evidently, Mexican-Americans. And this has always been the case.

So: the unwilliingness to vote for Barack Obama by some working-class white voters isn’t about race and isn’t about Hillary Clinton, really. It’s about the instinctive knowledge of these voters that Obama represents the hated New England ethic, which his “bitter” comments simply illustrated.
Lord-a-mercy.
As it happens, the Greater New England Theory is hardly novel. It was one element of Kevin Phillips’ ethnic-based analysis of political trends in The Emerging Republican Majority, nearly forty years ago. Lind’s version of the theory superimposes an ethnic take on the famous “wine-track, beer-track” distinction that is so often used to distinguish the followings of Democratic presidential candidates
The problem with Lind’s exposition, and many others that share its fundamental premise if not its ethnic bitterness–if you will excuse the term–is that it endows one group of voters with almost supernatural political power not necessarily justified by their size or strategic importance. Sure, Obama’s relative weakness–at least in Democratic primaries–among white working-class voters in Appalachia or heavily Catholic areas would be a problem for him in winning states like Pennsylvania and Ohio in a general election. But Hillary Clinton’s relative weakness in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa would be a problem as well. And you know what? It’s really not all that accurate to assign whole states to ethnic categories. One of the successful non-Yankee Democrats Lind cites as a role model was a guy named Jimmy Carter from my home state of Georgia. His appeal to southern regional pride helped him a lot, not only in the South, but in southern-inflected areas of the midwest. But he damn near lost Ohio, and the presidency, because of his relative weakness in the heavily Yankeefied Western Reserve area of the state.
A vote is a vote; the Democratic Party is at present a coalition party that includes both “wine-track” and “beer-track” voters, and Yankees and non-Yankees. Even if Michael Lind is entirely right about the ethnic underpinnings of the current Democratic nominating contest, attributing moral or political superiority to one element of the coalition at the expense of another represents exactly the sort of contemptuous type-casting that Obama has been accused of in “Bitter-gate.”
It is time, folks, for Democrats and the chattering classes to calm themselves about the Greater Meaning of this or that demographic group’s preference for one candidate or the other in the nominating contest. Lest we forget, the whole “identity-based” pattern of voting we have seen is to a large part attributable to the scant policy differences separating Barack Obama from Hillary Clinton, and also to the historic nature of both candidacies. The idea that “losing” groups are going to migrate en masse to John McCain in November is not only a dubious proposition, but one that Democrats should fight like sin. Burn off all the chaff of “analysis,” and the fact remains that Barack Obama has a much better idea (as Mark Schmitt usefully points out today) of how to help those “bitter” working-class white voters than John McCain, while Hillary Clinton offers a much better prospect for the reforms desired by “wine-track” voters than any Republican, including McCain.
The endlessly discussed idea that either Democratic candidate represents one element of our coalition at the definitive expense of the other is frankly the best and perhaps only hope for a Republican victory in November. The persistence of these manichean assumptions about our candidates, whether delivered as horse-race analysis or as Big Theories like Lind’s, are beginning to make me feel–yes–bitter.

So here’s something to look for in the vast conservative over-reaction to Barack Obama’s comments about the economic roots of “bitterness” and cultural reaction among certain rural and small-town voters.
If you accept (as I certainly do) that economic and non-economic voter concerns are generally legitimate, then there’s more than one way to express elitist, condescending attitudes.
One way is to dismiss non-economic concerns. But the other way is to dismiss economic concerns. And that’s what many conservative pundits and politicians do every single day, by:
(1) arguing that the highly negative feelings Americans have towards the current state of the U.S. economy are delusional or even wimpish, given relative sanguine employment and inflation statistics; (2) suggesting that grievances against economic globalization or trade agreements reflect the views of “losers” who can’t or won’t adjust to economic “dynamism” and who selfishly wish to deny their fellow-citizens the benefits of a rapidly changing economy; (3) claiming that “values issues” or “patriotism” (i.e., support for the Bush administration’s national security policies) are objectively more important than mere “material” bread-and-butter economic issues; and (4) denouncing demands for even-handed economic policies or opposition to reverse-Robin-Hood tax priorities as forms of a divisive “class warfare” that threatens national unity and economic growth.
Methinks conservatives should cease and desist in all these lines of argument if they really intend to keep calling Barack Obama an “elitist.” To cite one example, there’s something pretty risible about the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal blasting Obama’s condescension towards the cannon-fodder of that newspaper’s loony and disastrous economic policies.
Let’s recall that the real elitists in this country are the folks who currently exercise most of the political and economic power, and they are not at present found on the political Left.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

The Republicans are also trying to paint Obama as “elitist,” but that’s the standard GOP template (twice used successfully by George W. Bush – a graduate of Phillips Academy Andover, Yale University, and Harvard Business School, son of a former president and grandson of a former U.S. senator). It’s particularly amusing to hear that “elitist” label being thrown around by John McCain, given the fact that McCain is married to a multimillionaire heiress; that McCain wants to extend the Bush tax cuts that help the rich at the expense of the working class; and that he has spent weeks tweaking his mortgage assistance proposal, which originally offered homeowners the same quality of aid that Herbert Hoover extended to Great Depression victims nearly 80 years ago. (Another thigh-slapper: William Kristol – descendent of a Manhattan intellectual family, and son of a New York University professor – used his New York Times column today to argue that Cling-gate is proof of Obama’s attitudinal ties to…Karl Marx.)

Selah.

Unless you spent the weekend blissfully unexposed to every news medium, or limited yourself to Master’s Tournament coverage, you’re probably aware that Barack Obama has endured a non-stop pounding from Hillary Clinton and her surrogates, and from the entire Right-Wing Noise Machine, over comments made at a California fundraiser about his struggles with downscale rural and small-town voters in places like Pennsylvania.
The furor is over a passage in which Obama suggests that people living in chronic economic sinkholes have become “bitter” over their condition and the false promises of politicians to do something about it, and are “clinging” to religion and gun ownership, and hostile attitudes towards immigrants, trade and people of color, out of frustration.
The first question to ask is whether Obama’s remarks would have raised eyebrows significantly if they hadn’t been leapt upon by Obama’s enemies as a symbol of elitism and condescension, and indeed, on the Right, as proof that Obama is something of a crypto-Marxist (google “Obama opiate of the masses” for examples of that line of attack, or just read Bill Kristol’s New York Times column today).
I sort of doubt it. It’s hardly a revolutionary observation to note that people for whom decades-long economic trends (particularly those associated with globalization) have not been kind tend to “cling” to what they perceive as a rosier past, and to the cultural verities that endure, while expressing fear and hostility towards agents of change. On the face of it, that doesn’t mean rejecting the validity of those cultural verities, or mocking the generally sour and change-averse outlook of Americans who think their way of life is under general assault (you might want to look back at TDS Co-Editor Bill Galston’s cogent discussion in 2001 of the feeling among white men that they are history’s losers). And indeed, in his efforts to put out the fire, Obama has repeatedly argued that he was expressing sympathy towards these voters, and a determination to help them, rather than condescendingly dismissing their concerns, economic or cultural.
It’s interesting to compare the reaction to the scratchy audio of Obama’s original comments to those made in the summer of 2004 by Howard Dean: “I am tired of coming to the South and fighting elections on guns, God and gays. We’re going to fight this election on our turf, which is going to be jobs, education and health care.”
Yes, Dean got challenged on Fox News for this comment, but although it arguably expressed contempt for the legitimacy of cultural issues a lot more clearly than anything said this year by Obama, it didn’t produce that much reaction. And for that matter, Dean was accurately reflecting a “false consciousness” attitude towards religion-based political issues in particular that has long been a staple of neo-populist polemics (expressed most famously and brilliantly by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter With Kansas?) for decades.
But Barack Obama has never associated himself with this brand of neo-populism. And his personal religiosity (in contrast to Dean), his high comfort-level with discussions of faith and other cultural matters (in contrast to the last two Democratic presidential nominees), and his campaign’s emphasis on the non-economic dimensions of the case for change (in contrast to Hillary Clinton), all make him an unlikely candidate for the role of sneering materialist in which his opponents are now trying to cast him.
What’s really going on here is that Obama’s “gaffe” has provided an imperfect but adequate match for the most urgent needs of his Democratic and Republican critics.
The primary worry in Democratic circles about Obama is his persistent electoral weakness among white working-class voters. But as it learned just prior to the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign has to be careful about this “electability” story-line lest it appear to validate or promote racist sentiments. So what better way to raise the subject than to seize on the idea that Barack Obama is the offender, even the aggressor, in his uneasy relationship with these voters! His “contempt” for them retroactively justifies their reluctance to vote for him.
Among Republicans, the “gaffe” has become an important data point in their efforts to undermine everything novel, interesting and appealing about Obama’s candidacy as a post-Baby Boom, post-partisan reform movement that makes a hash of the traditional left-right ideological spectrum. It’s all a hoax, they say, a mask: Obama represents nothing new; he’s actually the avatar of an old, familiar “threat:” the leftist elites who hate America, and particularly hate the sturdy folk virtues and simple piety of middle America. In much of the emerging conservative invective about Obama’s remarks, the venue gets as much attention as the content. Among the right-wing cognoscenti, Marin County, California is the Vatican City of elitist, New Agey liberalism (see Martin Mull’s 1980 movie, Serial, as the ultimate send-up of Marin County as hell on earth; cf. Sean Tyla’s roughly contemporaneous song, Breakfast in Marin).
The close interdependence of the intraparty and partisan effort to exploit this incident is beyond dispute. Clinton campaign surrogates are battening on the Right’s hysteria about Obama-the-Marxist as evidence that, sadly, unfortunately, the poor man is out of touch and unelectable. And every Democratic attack on Obama’s “elitism” provides another piece of evidence for the Right’s argument that Obama’s “mask” is slipping.
I have no idea whether this brouhaha will matter at all in terms of a Democratic nominating contest that Obama’s coming close to wrapping up. Without question, it will provide some renewed impetus to Clinton’s determination to stay in the race until she’s all but mathematically eliminated, and lots of breaths will be bated in anticipation of poll results weighing the impact of all the media hype on Obama’s “controversial” remarks. The one thing we know for sure is that the Right’s reaction is providing a full-on sneak preview of its strategy to defeat Obama if he is the Democratic nominee. And it ain’t pretty.

It’s been obvious for a while now that Hillary Clinton’s ability to continue her candidacy to the Democratic Convention depends on her success in at least one of three dimensions (assuming she can’t catch Barack Obama in pledged delegates without some complete collapse of his campaign): (1) an uniterrupted winning streak in the final primaries; (2) the sudden appearance of a major positive differential in her general-election poll standings from Obama’s; or (3) a plurality in the final cumulative popular vote. Number (3) is the most plausible for her right now, particularly if she can convince the media and other Democrats to choose a measurement of the total popular vote that gives her the best chance of catching up.
This last note reflects the little-comprehended fact that there’s not any sort of “official” tabulation of the popular vote; nor will there be one when the whole game’s over.
Pollster.com’s Mark Blumenthal has an analysis up today on the National Journal site that runs through some of the difficulties involved in figuring out the people’s choice. They go beyond the question of whether votes cast in unsanctioned primaries in MI and FL ought to “count,” along with the fact that popular vote totals aren’t available for four caucus states. There’s also the anomalous situation in WA, which held a “non-binding” primary to accompany its delegate-selection caucuses.
Blumenthal also raises the technical but politically explosive issue of “measurement error:” at some point, the margin of victory or defeat for a candidate in an extremely close race becomes smaller than the number of votes cast or counted in error.
The bottom line here is that there’s enough confusion about popular vote totals to enable HRC to at least attempt to claim a victory if she can come up with a version of the results that passes the laugh test. And that could lead to a “numbers war” that will be very difficult to resolve.
For that to happen, of course, she needs to keep winning primaries, and the underlying big question is whether superdelegates will tilt decisively to Obama if he can win in, say, North Carolina. I think that’s more likely than not.

Today’s presidential campaign news includes a couple of items that bring back some bad old memories for Democrats of a certain age: discussions of crime and welfare policy.
Those who came of age in the 1990s or later may have a hard time comprehending the extent to which perpetually rising violent crime rates and the vast unpopularity of high public assistance levels affected politics at every level during the 1970s and 1980s. Crime and welfare served as the hardy perennials of race-tinged conservative “wedge issues” that helped erode white working-class support for the Democratic Party. The decline of crime rates (particularly murder rates) in and after the 90s, and the even more rapid decline in welfare rolls after the 1996 federal welfare reform legislation signed by President Clinton, largely took these issues off the table.
Well, crime rates have been recently going back up in many cities, even as the Bush administration slowly starved Clinton-era crime-fighting initiatives. So it’s no big surprise that Hillary Clinton has unveiled a new anti-crime proposal in Philadelphia, a city where spiking homicide rates have become a major local preoccupation.
Much of Clinton’s plan really isn’t new; it focuses on reviving her husband’s signature COPS initiative, which was largely gutted by Bush and pre-2006 Republican-controlled Congresses. And indeed, the fact that it’s a Democratic candidate who has first raised this issue in the presidential contest reflects the extent to which Bill Clinton succeeded not only in blunting conservative “wedge” appeals on crime, but making support for police officers, as opposed to the GOP’s obsessive focus on maximum incarceration of drug offenders, a popular theme for progressives.
It will be interesting to see if Barack Obama, who in the past has bluntly criticized the failed war-on-drugs as a crime-fighting strategy, begins talking about crime policy more visibly as well. Meanwhile, if the issue continues to emerge, we may find out whether John McCain goes back to the tried-if-not-so-true Republican rhetoric on crime as a reflection of social permissiveness.
The welfare issue hasn’t really “come back” yet, except as a subordinate item of John Edwards’ discussion of poverty. But as a New York Times feature today indicates, it may just be a matter of time, as the struggling economy collides with the rising numbers of public assistance recipients who have reached the time limits established in the 1996 law. Both Clinton and Obama have praised the reforms as successful, and it’s very unlikely Democrats will re-embrace the idea of a national entitlement to cash assistance. But soon enough, the subject may no longer be “off the table,” and it could be of more than passing importance how the partisan dynamics of a new debate on the government’s role in providing a safety net against extreme poverty eventually shape up.

My post earlier this week about the important new Democracy Corps survey and analysis on national security as a campaign issue was reinforced and amplified by the invariably clear-eyed Jon Chait yesterday, who warns that the Democratic advantage on Iraq can coexist with a Republican–or at least McCain–advantage on national security generally. Here’s Chait on the broad problem:

Are the Republicans politically suicidal? I don’t think so. The public can oppose you on a specific policy question but still favor you on the issue in general. Richard Nixon was fighting an unpopular war in 1972, but he still crushed George McGovern on foreign policy. Likewise, despite the unpopularity of the Iraq war, John McCain’s general hawkishness might still be an asset for him.

Chait goes on to suggest that the right formula of wrapping opposition to the war with an overall national security posture that allays voter fears of excessive Democratic reluctance to use military force when necessary may have already been signalled by Barack Obama:

Iraq may not be popular, but the general perception (which is not the same thing as reality) that they’re willing to fight the bad guys remains a key positive for the GOP brand. Am I saying the Democrats need to try to mimic Republican positions in order to win? Not at all. A creative approach is needed, and Obama’s combination of dovishness on Iraq and hawkishness on al Qaeda in Pakistan strikes me as probably the best approach.

Whether or not Chait’s right about that assessment of Obama, I certainly share his main argument: you can’t just look at polls about individual issues, domestic or international, and then assume the electorate’s overall candidate preference will mechanically follow who’s right or who’s wrong about the sum of those individual issues. And that’s why Democrats truly do need to start thinking about a “creative” approach to national security that combines being right about Iraq with an overall posture that strikes Americans as being right about the security challenges the country faces going forward.
This can be a highly nuanced exercise. In 2004, John Kerry made hundreds of speeches that made it clear his foreign policy would use America’s full arsenal of military and non-military assets to keep the country safe and improve our strength and prestige. The order of the military and non-military arguments was a subject of constant debate within his campaign, and more often than not, he stressed the value of non-military initiatives before reassuring voters that of course he’d use military force if necessary. His actual platform would not have changed at all had he gone the other way, but the political impact arguably might have been different. The same is true for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
The “creative” approach to national security Chait argues for is pretty much what most Democrats, and both Democratic candidates for president, actually support. But sometimes messaging is more about order and emphasis than overall content, and it would be a good idea for Democrats to start thinking about that even now.

As a bit of a Cassandra on the subject of the possibility of an unplanned and hideously divisive Democratic National Convention, I was interested to read a “movie treatment” called “Four Days In Denver” that New York magazine commissioned TV commentator and West Wing scriptwriter Lawrence O’Donnell Jr., to write. The idea is that Democrats arrive in Denver with Barack Obama enjoying a lead in pledged delegates and popular votes, but without enough superdelegates to win the nomination outright. Then the fun starts.
I won’t reveal the plot of O’Donnell’s fantasy, but if you read it, be sure to take it as entertainment, not a semi-serious prediction of what might happen. For one thing, the premise that HRC’s candidacy would survive final Obama leads in pledged delegates and popular votes is dubious in the extreme. Most of the dramatics that O’Donnell conjures up would have certainly played themselves out long before the convention itself, while he omits entirely some events (e.g., credentials, rules and platform fights) that really could happen.
At some point over the next few weeks, if the subject isn’t made moot by primary results, we’re thinking of publishing here at TDS some thoughts from convention veterans of the real issues posed by the possibility of a convention where the nominee is not certain going in. But I’m reasonably sure none of them will begin with a superdelegate sex scene. And that’s one of many reasons I’m toiling away here instead of pulling down big bucks in Hollywood.

HRC’s campaign is not the only one getting some extra scrutiny this week. Jason Zengerle of The New Republic has done a major article analyzing the personnel and strategy of John McCain’s campaign. He unravels the complex John Weaver-Rick Davis rivalry that’s been at the center of the campaign’s various purges and power struggles. And he also explains the odd Davis-driven decision to organize the general election campaign around a “regional autonomy” model that sounds a bit like one of those plans for stabilizing Iraq.
One thought I had after reading Jason’s fine piece is that it’s clear McCain’s back-from-the-grave nomination victory will tend to freeze the current campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message into place even if they aren’t necessarily right for the general election. That, after all, is how John Kerry wound up going into the 2004 general election with a questionable campaign structure, leadership, strategy and message. At about this stage four years ago, I can remember some Kerry supporters muttering to each other things like: “How can you convince a candidate his campaign is making potentially fatal mistakes when he’s just won the nomination after being left for dead?” I wonder if any McCainiacs are muttering similar things to each other today.