One of the more interesting phenomena in the Democratic presidential contest has been the very strong showing of Hillary Clinton (and correspondingly poor showing of Barack Obama) in Appalachia–the stretch of mountain areas in the eastern United States, including much of West Virginina; significant portions of Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia, and smaller portions of New York, Ohio, Maryland, South Carolina and Alabama.
I have a personal interest in this story, as someone whose “people” were mostly Scotch-Irish folk who came down the mountain trails from Pennsylvania through the Carolinas to Georgia (two of my great-grandfathers were ministers in that quintessential Appalachian sect, the Primitive Baptists).
In the blogosphere, The DailyKos poster DHinMI has been the most acute in pointing out the geopolitical implications of HRC’s strength in Appalachia, particularly in terms of future primaries in PA, NC, KY and WV.
But the whole Appalachia-for-Hillary story has to be taken with a large grain of salt due to demographic factors that have little or nothing to do with the Scotch-Irish heritage or the Mountain Ethic. Most obviously, Appalachia is a virtually all-white region. Its voting base is also relatively old, and relatively bereft of the upscale, highly educated white voters who have been warm to Obama’s candidacy even in parts of the Deep South. Finally, the Democratic primary vote is low in many parts of Appalachia (outside heavily unionized areas of West Virginia and portions of Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Virginia), where Republican voting loyalties go straight back to the Civil War. And Appalachia is also not much of a fertile territory for political independents, partisanship being a fighting matter for many residents.
Still, overall, in the two Appalachian states I’m most familiar with, Georgia and Virginia, Obama’s percentage of the white vote appears to have been notably lower in mountain counties than elsewhere. This can’t be dismissed simply as a function of racism, given Obama’s better performance among white voters in places like central and southside Virginia, and South Georgia, where politics has always been far more dominated by race. So something’s going on, even if it’s just the natural resistence of Appalachian voters to Obama’s highly nuanced message of progressive bipartisanship as opposed to pure class warfare. Obama’s famous wine-track appeal isn’t terribly communicable to moonshine-track voters.
But I do want to draw attention to, and express some strong doubts about, one recent effort to expand this analysis beyond the Mountains and into the general election. Yesterday Michael Barone published a long article on the US News site that casts the Obama/Clinton divide among white voters as one of “academics versus Jacksonians.”
Barone’s description of pro-Obama white voters as “academics” is obviously a massively distorted over-simplification, made easier by the fact that his account ignores all those lily-white states where Obama trounced Clinton. Are Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Wyoming and Idaho Democrats mostly “academics?” I think not.
But his analysis of “Jacksonian” Democrats–used to describe the vast Scotch-Irish diaspora that extends to East Texas, to the Little Texas region of New Mexico, to that country music haven of Bakersville, California–has some merit, marred as it is by almost total reliance on number-of-counties-won as a misleading measure of voter preferences. Working and middle-class white Democrats of southern origin wherever they are do indeed seem to be tilting decisively towards Clinton, if not always by Appalachian-level margins.
It’s Barone’s extrapolation of this trend into the general election–arguably, given his Republican allegiance, the real point of his entire disposition–that’s most questionable. Having established that Obama’s got some problems with “Jacksonians,” Barone pivots to this argument:

Of course, the real Jacksonian in this race is John McCain. He is descended from Scots-Irish fighters who settled in Carroll County, Miss. Former Sen. Trent Lott, who once worked as a fundraiser for the University of Mississippi and therefore knew the folkways of elite types in his state very well, once told me that he had relatives who had known McCain’s relatives in Mississippi. “They were fighters,” he said, as best I can remember his words. “They would never stop fighting you. Those people would never stop fighting.”

Aside from the fact that Barone confuses the conservative, WASPy Delta planter tradition of Ole Miss with the “Jacksonian” tendency in Mississippi and southern politics, the idea that John McCain is catnip to Scotch-Irish “Jacksonians” is highly questionable. If that were the case, you’d think McCain would do particularly well among Scotch-Irish Appalachian voters in Republican primaries, eh?
Remembering that in the definitive GOP primary of 2000, South Carolina, McCain won the non-Scotch-Irish lowlands but decisively lost the Scotch-Irish highlands, I looked at some of the 2004 primary results before the contest was decided and didn’t see any “Jacksonian” longing for McCain. He won exactly one highlands county in SC this time (and by a small plurality over Huckabee and Romney). He lost every single country in mountain Georgia. He lost every single country in mountain Virginia. And in an area where he had a lot of important endorsements, he lost about half of mountain Tennessee (generally getting a little over one-third of the vote). His margins in Appalachian Ohio tracked his statewide totals.
If Obama is the Democratic nominee, he’s got a lot of work to do to reduce Republican margins in Appalachia (that have existed in every presidential election since the Civil War, other than 1932 and 1964). HRC’s got a base of support to work with. But the idea that John McCain is the Chosen Son of the Scotch-Irish in the ancestral mountains and beyond, is at this point just spin.

Yesterday we published a guest post by Franklin & Marshall professor Stephen Medvic that offered a different take on the superdelegate debate than we usually hear. His analysis is based primarily on a challenge to the idea that delegates chosen by less-than-purely-representative formulas in lightly attended caucuses and open primaries really can be said to represent the popular will of Democrats.
I’d like to add two notes to the argument undertaken by Dr. Medvic.
First, virtually the entire debate over superdelegates seems to be based on the assumption that their sole purpose is to counteract or ratify caucus and primary results. As I recall from the original discussions surrounding superdelegates, there was another, much simpler rationale: ensuring that major Democratic elected officials would get to attend the convention as delegates. One of the byproducts of the earlier reforms in the nominating process had been to significantly limit elected official participation, except for those who happened to run for delegate positions on successful candidate tickets. And this in turn reinforced a fear that the Democratic Party was increasingly becoming bifurcated into a national party dominated by constituency groups and issue advocates, and state and local parties (and their elected officials) who represented voters, and arguably, the Democratic rank-and-file.
I raise this point for the simple reason that superdelegates do not have to have full voting rights, or the freedom to withold or change pledges of support, to exist. It’s not necessarily and all-or-nothing proposition. That’s worth keeping in mind when the subject is, as it will certainly be, taken up by the party after this election.
My second point relates to Dr. Medvic’s argument that only closed primaries electing delegates on a more strictly proportional basis are truly legitimate as expressions of the Democratic “popular will.” I generally agree with him about caucuses, with the qualification that caucuses vary in nature from quasi-primaries to highly demanding multi-hour events. And in terms of participation, there’s also no fixed pattern: Iowa’s caucuses are famously among the most demanding, but also have relatively high levels of participation and a lot of popularity among Democrats and the public as a whole.
The open/closed question is more complicated. A uniform system of closed primaries would require a uniform system of party registration among the states that current does not exist. A number of state, including several in the South, have no party registration at all, and states also vary in terms of the privileges typically accorded to independent or “undeclared” voters. And it’s no secret that many registered independents are functionally partisans, or at least lean strongly in one direction or the other. Closing primaries means excluding these voters from the party in a fairly overt way, making re-registration, instead of candidate support, the only way to expand formally expand the party’s electoral base. Absent any indication that non-registered-Democratic participation in presidential primaries significantly distorts outcomes, the political costs of demanding closed primaries strikes me as potentially high.
But actually, there’s a way out of this dilemma that’s already at play in many states: radically liberalized registration procedures. Same-day voter registration not only helps attract non-voters to the polls; it also makes it much easier for registered independents (and even Republicans) to re-register as Democrats and participate in closed primaries and caucuses. This is why the formally closed caucuses in Iowa, to mention one example, attracted so many independents: they were able to re-register right outside the caucus room. Arguably, requiring re-registration would deter most casual or tactical voters from participating in Democratic primaries and caucuses, while making true battlefield conversions much easier, and formally expanding the party’s base.
Dr. Medvic has raised some very important issues, but there may be ways to address them without abolishing superdelegates altogether or restricting the franchise in the Democratic nominating process.

Like many of you, no doubt, I’ve read a lot of back-and-forth over the last few days about “who won and who lost” in the recent Maliki-Sadr conflict in Iraq. Dick Polman of the Philly Inquirer has a good if not impartial summary of the debate in his blog today, and I agree with his assessment that it’s hard to say Maliki “won” since he started the dispute and then abandoned it before any sort of victory.
But this argument seems to miss a much bigger point that’s getting lost: the generally accepted fact that Maliki’s own party and government had to go to the Iranians–and not just any Iranians, but the Qods Force militia of Iran”s Revolutionary Guards–to get consent for a cease-fire that would be binding on Muqtada al-Sadr, who is himself living in Iran. Given the longstanding Iranian sponsorship of Maliki’s Dawa Party and its close ally, the Islamic Supreme Counsel of Iraq, it’s kind of hard to avoid the impression that Iran, not the U.S., is the Big Dog in Iraq, and indispensible to any sort of tenuous peace and security. I mean, really, if “our side” has to crawl to Qom to get Sadr’s chain yanked, how can any sane person promote a policy that simultaneously aims at pacifying Iraq while threatening Iran with war? Neocon heads should be exploding over this chain of events.
I’ve only seen one conservative reaction to this particular aspect of the current crisis, and it’s truly interesting. The Tank blog on the National Review site has a post by Steve Schippert that claims the government/Dawa/ISCI mission to Qom is a sign that Maliki’s standing up to Iran, and was dictating terms to Sadr through the Iranians.
That does indeed seem to be the only way to square this particular circle and avoid an explosion of heads, but it’s not terribly compelling on the face of it. The Iranians have relationships with all sorts of Iraqi Shi’a that go back a long time, involving large subsidies, safe havens, military and ideological training, religious identity, and a common hostility towards Sunnis, Israelis, and yes, Americans. The best evidence, reinforced strongly by this latest series of events, is that a stable Iraq requires Iranian support, and that if everything goes the way war supporters want, the best-case scenario is an Islamist regime in Baghdad aligned with Tehran, or at least very friendly towards Iran. How to reconcile that with neocon enthusiasm for war with Iran is a puzzle beyond my ability to solve.

I’ve just read the Meridian, Mississippi speech with which John McCain launched his “biography tour,” and found it more interesting and troubling than I expected.
Most obviously, I can’t recall any major speech by a president or presidential candidate that was devoted so thoroughly to the subject of the speaker’s own family background–not just the immediate family (which, for example, was the background theme in Richard Nixon’s famous “Checkers” speech, and in Bill Clinton’s “Place Called Hope” speech, and is obviously important to Barack Obama’s “story”), but the Family Heritage. McCain goes into considerable detail to establish himself as the scion of a very old (by American standards) and very distinguished warrior tribe, whose traditions he first spurned and then half-heartedly embraced, before rediscovering them in the crucible of his imprisonment at the Hanoi Hilton.
In so doing, McCain runs afoul of two pretty important American political traditions: ambivalence towards military leaders in politics, and an expectation of modesty about the accomplishments of one’s forebears.
On the first point, yes, five (W.H. Harrison, Jackson, Taylor, Grant and Eisenhower) or perhaps six (if you add the planter-soldier George Washington) American presidents were professional soldiers. Several others were wartime military leaders but not really career military professionals (Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, and Teddy Roosevelt). But the list of military leaders who sought and failed to obtain the presidency is equally long, from Winfield Scott and George McClellan to Scott’s namesake W.S. Hancock, to Leonard Wood, to Douglas MacArthur, to Alexander Haig, to Wes Clark. And among those who succeeded, Jackson, Grant and Eisenhower were almost universally revered national heroes of an unparalleled magnitude.
While there’s nothing uncommon or surprising about John McCain’s highlighting of his own military record, his decision to identify himself as primarily the product of the military ethic, by family background as well as by personal experience, is unusual, and perhaps risky in a country that has always honored professional warriors but has also insisted on civilian control of the military. It’s no accident that the last Annapolis graduate to become president, Jimmy Carter, chose to identify himself as a peanut farmer rather than as a nuclear submarine officer.
McCain’s insistence on establishing a distinguished pedigree is counter-intuitive as well. The current president of the United States, after all, went to inordinate lengths to create a public persona remote from his actual aristocratic background as grandson of a U.S. senator and son of a president. Another president who often touted his own military service–John F. Kennedy–did so in no small part to provide a common link to Americans who might otherwise dwell on his father’s wealth and political connections. FDR’s polio, and TR’s cowboy-hunter-soldier machismo, offset their elite backgrounds. And most American presidents and presidential candidates have talked about their ancestors mainly to stress their humble roots, and thus accentuate their own accomplishments. In the Meridian speech and elsewhere, John McCain seems to be visibly struggling, even today, to live up to his family’s martial tradition. It’s all pretty remarkable.
The theme of the callow young man achieving maturity and then complete identification with his patrimony is as old as the Biblical story of the Prodigal Son. It’s complicated in McCain’s case by the fact that his callowness, by his own account, appears to have survived the Hanoi Hilton and persisted well into late-middle-age and into his political career (viz. the admitted serial carousing, not to mention the Keating Five).
It’s tempting to speculate that by design or accident, McCain’s self-description is an analogy for his latest political transformation from the “maverick” who flirted (or at a minimum, whose staff flirted) with becoming John Kerry’s running-mate in 2004 to today’s reinvented conservative. He’s rebelled against his heritage, but now, in the crucible of this campaign, McCain is falling back on the fundamentals of family, faith, party, ideology, and yes, maybe even a hereditary strain of military jingoism, and is determined, as prodigals often are, to live up to the heritage to a fault. This must be immensely reassuring to the conservatives who have for so long mistrusted him. And it’s an appeal that is also seductive for the many Americans who constantly struggle to reconcile libertarian impulses with the tug of traditions, even bad traditions.
Maybe this is all emphemeral, and at some point John McCain will abandon the biographical message to focus on policy issues. But Democrats need to understand what he’s trying to do in presenting himself as the embodiment of the Prodigal Son seeking to lead the Prodigal Nation back to its heritage of greatness, and react accordingly. In 1996 Bob Dole offered himself as “the bridge to an America that only the unknowing call myth… a time of tranquillity, faith, and confidence in action.” Bill Clinton successfully turned that offer into a contrast between nostalgic reaction and progressive action. At present, McCain is advancing a more appealing version of Dole’s political package, gussied up with plenty of Prodigal policy offerings that will make it harder to typecast him as reactionary. Exposing him will not just be a matter of deriding media credulity or hammering his voting record in the Senate. It will require an unwavering spotlight on his basic message and its troubling implications.
In a 1999 review of McCain’s memoir “Faith of My Fathers,” and of Robert Timberg’s hagiographical “John McCain: An American Odyssey,” Nathanial Tripp offered this assessement of both books and of the martial hymn that inspired the title of the first:

The problem with this hymn, and these books, is that they are not about leadership, they are about followership. Admittedly, the hymn’s type of rhetoric seems to have an almost narcotic effect on some voters, but distrust of authority is a salient legacy of Vietnam. Furthermore, civil leadership demands humanity, compassion and the skills of negotiation and compromise, which are often contrary to the military mind. Chimerically, McCain may go from the Keating scandal to campaign reform, from heavy smoking to anti-tobacco legislation, setting a zigzag course toward the White House and defying those who will put him in a box. But there is something hauntingly familiar about his confusion of mission with personal ambition.

This remains an important observation. If John McCain’s main credential for presidential leadership is his “followership” of the military traditions of his forefathers and the ideological traditions of the GOP, then the rest of us should rightly object to the harnessing of our future to his past.

One of the things you heard a lot from Obama supporters over the last couple of weeks was the rueful observation that the Jeremiah Wright controversy would at least greatly reduce the whisper-campaign-fed perception that he’s a Muslim. Not so, says a new Pew poll.

There is little evidence that the recent news about Obama’s affiliation with the United Church of Christ has dispelled the impression that he is Muslim. While voters who heard “a lot” about Reverend Wright’s controversial sermons are more likely than those who have not to correctly identify Obama as a Christian, they are not substantially less likely to still believe that he is Muslim. Nearly one-in-ten (9%) of those who heard a lot about Wright still believe that Obama is Muslim.

The percentage of Americans believing Obama’s a Muslim ranges from 14% among Republicans, to 10% among Democrats, to 8% among independents. At the risk of repeating one of those misleading triple-loaded poll findings, 23% of white Democrats with an unfavorable opinion of Obama think he’s a Muslim.
Moreover, a third of poll respondents–and a third of Democrats–say they don’t know what religion Barack Obama observes.
Otherwise, the Pew poll has a lot of welcome findings for Obama, showing a positive reaction to his “race speech,” and leads over HRC and McCain roughly the same as they found a month ago. But it’s beginning to become obvious that the “Obama is a Muslim” thing has become one of those ineradicable myths that evidence to the contrary can’t shake.

Appropos of my suggestion yestereday that John McCain may be repeating John Kerry’s 2004 mistake of placing too much emphasis on his military biography, it’s interesting to note that he is about to begin what his campaign calls a “biography tour.”:

The Republican presidential nominee-in-waiting begins a “biography tour” next week, visiting schools and military installations “that have played a significant role in shaping who I am today,” as McCain put it in a fundraising letter.

One such “tour” probably can’t do McCain much harm. But if his whole campaign becomes a “biography tour,” he could well be in trouble.

I did an appearance today on the excellent syndicated public radio show, To the Point, to talk about the latest developments in Iraq and their impact on the presidential contest. Other guests included Peter Beinart of CFR and TNR; Bobby Ghosh of Time; Shawn Brimley of the Center for a New American Security; and GOP pollster John McLaughlin.
I was pretty much paired with McLaughlin, and thought I did reasonably well at swatting down his efforts to change the subject to the latest pseudo-stories about Clinton’s Kosovo experience and Obama’s “radical friends.”
But as often happens, my one real insight occurred to me just as the show ended. Listening to McLaughlin redundantly cite McCain’s military service record as establishing his vast superiority to the Democrats on national security issues, it finally hit me: what did this sound like? Yes, it sounded like John Kerry’s campaign talking points at key junctures of the 2004 race.
McCain may be in the process of making the same big mistake his friend Kerry made in 2004–making his biography the overriding centerpiece of his national security message. Sure, McCain’s war record attests to his character and patriotism, but hardly means he’d be an effective commander-in-chief. If that were the case, we’d only have military leaders as presidents. What McCain has to say about national security issues will, over time, have as great an impact on how he’s perceived by persuadable voters as endless clips of him in uniform or returning from the Hanoi Hilton. The tragedy of the Kerry campaign was that the man did have a pretty powerful grasp of national security challenges and what to do about them, but it never much got a hearing thanks to the back-and-forth about his own “story.”
In contrast, much of what John McCain’s been saying on the substance of national security and foreign policy strikes me as an odd combo of George W. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 messages: a multilateral, “humble” foreign policy based on the continuation and even expansion of the very single-minded military adventurism that’s made Bush a global pariah and empirical failure. Suggesting that the Democratic nominee isn’t fit to debate him on national security because he or she doesn’t have a war record isn’t going to cut it for John McCain.