The “electibility” argument among Democratic presidential candidates is complicated enough from the get-go, as illustrated by a recent exchange between Jonathan Chait and Ezra Klein about the general election strengths and weaknesses of Obama and Clinton, which pretty much covers the waterfront of informed speculation.
But two new factors are pushing the electibility debate in new directions. The first is the re-emergence of John McCain as the Republican front-runner. He’s the only GOPer in shouting distance of the two Democratic front-runners in general election trial heats, and actually runs ahead of Clinton in some. And there’s a reason for that: aside from his famous appeal to independents, and the media adulation he enjoys, he’s the one candidate hardest to typecast (except on the subject of Iraq) as mired in the same ideological delusions that gave us the Bush administration. His one major electoral weakness, the hostility of movement conservatives, won’t be much of a problem in a general election (and they seem to be coming around; elite conservative attitudes towards McCain at the moment strongly resemble those of establishment Democrats towards Howard Dean just prior to Iowa in 2004–resigned).
The second factor, though, cuts in the opposite direction. It’s now virtually certain that the economy will be in recession during the critical period prior to the general election. This will represent a real anchor on the Republican ticket, regardless of its composition. And this is not a subject conducive to any McCain Magic. The Arizonan’s economic message is basically one of fiscal austerity seasoned with a commitment to heavy defense spending. It’s hard to imagine a prescription less well suited to hard times.
This problem may catch up with McCain in the primaries; Mitt Romney would be insane not to exploit the advantage of being both more knowledgable and more conservative than McCain on economic issues. But if McCain does win the nomination, all the talk about service and courage and straight talk won’t matter much to people who are worried about their jobs, their pensions, and their homes.

Well, what can I say? World financial markets are in an uproar; the Fed has discarded all decorum in issuing a major interest rate cut; the Bush administration, after spending most of the autumn posturing against federal budget deficits, is now in a panic-stricken drive for a “stimulus package;” and the two leading Democratic candidates for president are going after each other like crazed weasels.
I think giving this day a few hours to sort itself out would be a prudent idea.

As a white southerner whose childhood was mostly spent in a Jim Crow society, the life and death of Martin Luther King, Jr., is not something I just read about in history books. I remember the searing challenge he posed to the polite white southern “liberals” who were embarassed by his simple demands for justice, and his direct evocation of the ideals of their country and their faith. And I also remember the incredible hatred his gentle, quintessentially Christian movement provoked in so many of my own “people” (e.g., an aunt who before the apprehension of James Earl Ray said she’d love the opportunity to hide and care for King’s murderer).
Even today, I’d guess a majority of white southerners–and white yankees, for that matter–think of MLK Day as an ethnic holiday that has nothing to do with their own “people.” I recently read a new biography of Jesse Helms that showed pretty convincingly that Helms’ opposition to a federal MLK holiday was the single most important factor in his survival of the toughest political challenge of his life, his come-from-behind victory over Jim Hunt in 1984. Clearly, many white North Carolinians thought of MLK as a man who had helped vanquish their heritage, when in fact he helped redeem it.
More than anyone in recent memory, Martin Luther King, Jr., held up a mirror to the people of this country and asked them to live up to the best of what they believed about themselves. And that’s why this is, and should be, a truly national holiday, for all of us.

John McCain’s narrow win in SC over Mike Huckabee probably dooms the Arkansan and creates an entirely new dynamic in the January 29 FL primary. As you will hear over and over in the next few days, SC was a kind of terrain that was as close to ideal for Huckabee as he could have wanted, a southern state with a heavily evangelical Republican voting base.
But in the end, Huck’s luck wasn’t that good. Fred Thompson’s decision to throw everything into SC, and to go negative on Huckabee, and Romney’s decision to all but bail in the state, almost certainly produced the McCain win. Thompson ran well in Huckabee Country, while Romney ran well in McCain Country. Had Thompson pulled out, and had Romney really competed, it’s pretty clear Huckabee would have had a major advantage.
Now we get to find out if Rudy Giuliani’s decision to concede every state prior to Florida was a fatal mistake. Today Rudy won 4% of the vote in NV and 2% in SC; he was running first in some SC polls less than two months ago.
But more and more, it’s looking like a McCain-Romney contest for the nomination. And despite McCain’s reinforced front-runner status after SC, Romney may have the money and the positioning to overcome him.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Hillary Clinton won the Nevada Democratic Caucuses by a decent if not overwhelming margin. As in Iowa, the results are being reported in terms of state delegates elected. By that measurement, she won by about a 51%-46% margin, with John Edwards finishing a very disappointing third with less than 4%. The entrance polls probably give a better indication of the raw vote, with HRC winning about 46%, Obama about 41%, and Edwards a bit over 8%.
It appears HRC won Las Vegas handily, and at least one report indicates she may have actually won those at-large Strip caucusing sites that her allies tried so hard to shut down.
The most striking finding in the entrance polls (IMHO) was the age composition of the caucus participants: 13% were under 30; 19% were aged 30-44; 34% were 45-60; and 36% were over 60. Unsurprisingly, HRC’s vote rose with each older age group, peaking at nearly a two-to-one margin among the oldest, and Obama’s declined (he won by nearly two-to-one among the youngest group). Income, ideology, religion and union status didn’t seem to matter all that much. And while Obama won handily among independents (51%-33%), they were only 15% of the participants.
Knowing the MSM, however, I suspect their big story won’t be the age composition, but the racial/ethnic/gender breakdown. According to the entrance polls, Obama won a staggering 83% of the African-American vote, while HRC beat him among Latinos 64%-26%, with each group representing 15% of the participants. The former is probably a good sign for Obama in SC, the latter a good sign for Clinton in a number of February 5 states.
And as in NH, the gender disparities were notable. Women outnumbered men by nearly a three-to-two margin, and HRC beat Obama among them 51%-38%.
According to MyDD, total turnout was over 100,000, much higher than anticipated, making this the third straight contest where Democratic turnout set new and high standards.

As a complement to Matt Compton’s essay about the blogosphere and Barack Obama in our Featured Content section, you might want to read a new Chris Bowers’ OpenLeft post, which looks more closely at blog readers’ preferences, and the factors that influence them, including demographics, high information consumption, and hostility to “bipartisanship” and to the Democratic status quo.
While you’re at OpenLeft, you can also read Chris’ predictions for the Democratic caucuses in Nevada. He thinks Obama may eke out a close win over Clinton, and cites the reasons, while acknowledging that all the late polls show Clinton ahead, albeit narrowly.
I think the truth is that we still know virtually nothing about likely turnout in Nevada, so making any prediction–and for that matter, taking any poll–is probably a crap-shoot, if you’ll excuse the gambling reference.

Want to know how desperate Mike Huckabee is to win the South Carolina primary tomorrow? Well, he’s desperate enough to grab the Third Rail of cultural politics, by identifying himself with bitter-end defenders of the public display of the Confederate flag.
As you may have heard, Huck coupled his state’s-rights-oriented position that “outsiders” shouldn’t tell South Carolinians what flag to fly with a colorful suggestion that said “outsiders” should be told to perform an act that he would otherwise deplore as banned by “God’s standards.” And the line now seems to have become part of Huckabee’s SC stump speech.
It’s pretty odd to hear an “outsider” urge Palmetto State voters to go sodomistic on other “outsiders” for allegedly butting into their sovereign right to celebrate the Lost Cause that this very state plunged the nation into in 1861. Presumably he knows that African-Americans in the state have not been “outsiders” since their arrival on slave ships some time ago. And Huckabee may even be aware that some would question the propriety of raising this issue in the midst of the annual commemoration of Martin Luther King’s legacy. But hey, black folks don’t vote in Republican primaries, right?
Other than reminding voters that he’s from a dixified background himself, Huck seems to be appealing to a small group of voters that in Georgia we refer to as “flaggers,” a small and dwindling segment of largely rural white folk for whom the Confederate flag remains a fighting and voting issue (their impotence was exposed in Georgia when they failed to carry through threats to do political damage to Gov. Sonny Perdue, who reneged on a campaign promise to hold a referendum on the subject). His decision to “go there” is all the more puzzling as part of a campaign tour with former Gov. David Beasley, who infuriated flaggers while in office by removing The Flag from public property.
In any event, even if Huck wins the battle of South Carolina, his decision to embrace this hoary symbol of white supremacy could help lose him the war. Already maginalized as the candidate of conservative evangelicals and not much of anyone else, he now bids fair to make himself a southern regional candidate as well, and divisive even in southern conservative ranks. It’s a sure sign of a campaign that can’t see the forest, or even the trees, and is scratching around in the pine straw for some dirt to throw.

Over at The Plank, Eve Fairbanks exposes herself to several hours of noise pollution from Rush Limbaugh, and reports on the impressive ferocity of his assault on Mike Huckabee and (especially) John McCain. Since McCain remains (in most reckonings) the closest thing to a front-runner in the Republican presidential contest, and could solidify that status in South Carolina on Saturday, the rampant hostility of the still-reigning conservative gasbag could be a bit of a problem for party unity.
But we’ve been here before, at the same juncture in the nominating process, in the same state.
For those of you who don’t remember it, I have to tell you: the full-scale panic that gripped the conservative ideological-and-corporate establishment of the GOP in 2000 after McCain’s trouncing of George W. Bush in NH is hard to over-estimate. Yes, local operatives in SC were responsible for much of the sleazy tactics against McCain in the Palmetto State that helped saved Bush’s bacon, but they were carrying water for the vast coalitiion of Christian Righters, K Street types, and DC careerists who had placed all their chips on the Texan, and who feared McCain in no small part because he owed them nothing.
Yes, I know, I know, since then McCain has mended fences with the conservative establishment by loyally stumping for Bush in 2000 and 2004, kissing up to Christian Right leaders, going apocalyptic about “Islamofascism,” and championing the Iraq escalation. But in the same period of time, he also flirted with a party-switch, voted against Bush’s tax cuts, and cosponsored another twenty-or-so bills with Democrats, including the immigration proposal that looked to have knocked him out of the race just a few months ago. He’s also never renounced the campaign-finance law that ideologues hate with an irrational passion, and opposed torture, which a startling number of conservatives perceive as the worst heresy of all.
So it’s not surprising that Rush and others aren’t being convinced by McCain’s general election poll numbers (he’s currently the only GOPer nationally competitive against Clinton or Obama) to roll over. But they have a real problem. In 2000, it was a simple matter of helping the lavishly financed and well-positioned Bush to croak him in a state or two. Now, for many conventional conservatives (largely, like Rush, more-or-less supporting Romney or what’s left of Fred Thompson), beating McCain is a complex three-cushion-shot game of denying him the nomination without elevating someone they dislike as much or more. After all, if McCain loses SC, Mike Huckabee’s going to win it. If McCain loses momentum, Rudy Giuliani gets his final chance. And if McCain wins the nomination anyway, you’ve got a GOP nominee who will remember all the abuse he’s gotten on his right flank for the last eight years, and a legion of McCain-haters tempted to take a dive and hope for better times in 2012.
To put it another way: if McCain (or for that matter, Huckabee) is the nominee, what are you going to rant about every day if you’r’e Rush Limbaugh? Senate races?
So no wonder Limbaugh is hyperventilating. As in 2000 at this point, it’s cookies-on-the-line time, but this time the odds look really bad for the conservative establishment’s Noise Machine.

The odds are reasonably high that the Mike Huckabee presidential adventure is going to effectively come to an end in South Carolina this weekend, thanks to residual McCain strength in the state and an unlikely but much-reported mini-surge by The Big Dead–er, Fred–Machine.
But if the Huckster’s headed for the exit, he’s going out with flair. In Michigan, and more recently on Fox, the Arkansan has been talking about the need to amend the U.S. Constitution to make it conform with “God’s standards.” This has unsurprisingly led to a revival of commentary referring to Huckabee as a “Dominionist” or “Theocrat.”
As a connoisseur of Christian Right theory and practice, I have to say that while Huckabee may privately be a “dominionist” (and Sarah Posner is undoubtedly right that he’s been appealing to dominionists in the clergy and laity alike), his public pronouncements fall short of that particular uber-heresy.
“Dominionism” (or more formally, Christian Reconstructionism) generally refers to the belief that Holy Scripture should entirely displace secular sources as the legal foundation for society. Its adherents tend to think of the Bible–and specifically, the Mosaic Law–as a sort of Christian Sharia, that provides all necessary and sufficient guidance for the ordering of national and community life.
All Huck’s confessed to, so far as I am aware, is that when the Constitution is directly in conflict with major elements of “God’s standards”–specifically on the subjects of abortion and gay marriage–it should be amended to be brought into conformity. And as he points out, constitutional amendments on both subjects are part of the last Republican Party Platform. He has not, on the other hand, smitten Rudy Giuliani with the classic Dominionist argument that adulterers should be put to death, or suggested that Muslims should be converted to the True Faith on the edge of U.S. bayonets.
I’ve argued with fellow progressives about this for some time, but it bears repeating: if you happen to believe, on religious or other grounds, that legalized abortion is a vast Holocaust (a term Huckabee has used) extinguishing millions of human lives, then it’s not that surprising that you might consider a constitutional amendment to ban it appropriate. And if you also believe that heterosexual marriage is the fundamental pattern of life demanded by God and respected by all civilized societies, a constitutional amendment enshrining that belief isn’t a big reach, either.
Obviously (for anyone who’s read my stuff in the past) I very strongly disagree with Huckabee, on both religious and civic grounds, with respect to these beliefs, but it’s important to understand them instead of conflating them with a totalitarian theocratic ideology that would rewrite the entire constitution (as satirically suggested yesterday by Daily Kos’ Meteor Blades) to smite the infidels.
Ol’ Huck’s platform is nutty, all right, and I’m not one of those Democrats who’s inclined to give him a lot of props for his empty “populist” posturing, either. I’d love to see him get the nomination, because I think it would lead to a Democratic victory of–if you’ll excuse the expression–Biblical proportions. But let’s save the Dominionist tag for the Rough Beast who may someday begin slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.

There’s a new article in The Politico by Jim VandeHei and John Harris that sums up the psychological effects of lethargy and low enthusiasm levels among Republicans this year (so far): “GOP funk slows turnout, money.”

Ambitious Republican politicians at the state and local levels are not deciding that this is the year to make a bid for higher office.
Republican contributors are not opening their wallets and writing campaign checks.
Most striking of all, Republican voters are not heading to the polls to vote in the GOP primaries in anything like participation rates of early years.
Most of these trends have been noted and amply commented upon in isolation. It is in combination, however, that their effects tend to reinforce each other and reach maximum toxicity. A disgruntled base is the root cause of weak fundraising, which contributes to poor candidate recruitment, which in turn leads to GOP activists staying on the sofa rather than heading to the polls.

To put it another way, GOPers are beginning to look at 2008 as just a “bad year” for them, like 2006, and maybe even worse.
Another sign of the bad moon rising for Republicans is an editorial in the Washington Times–normally an organ of relentless partisan agitprop–offering a very downbeat assessment of the party’s prospects in Senate races this year, conceding major Democratic gains as virtually inescapable.
It’s a long way to November, obviously, and all sorts of things could change. But as the Politico article suggests, low expectations can become self-fulfilling prophecies.