In the confused aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, it didn’t take more than about five minutes for political media types to begin speculation about the potential impact of the event on the U.S. presidential contest. The staff of the Politico, unsurprisingly, had the most complete initial guesstimate on the subject, suggesting that Senate Armed Services Committee members Hillary Clinton and John McCain, full-time terrorism opportunist Rudy Giuliani, and maybe Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Joe Biden, would get a boost. The Politicos also reported that the “C.W. will say that the candidates most damaged will be Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R).”
As I type this, MSNBC has Joe Scarborough on arguing that Giuliani’s whole campaign might be revived by this development, and could fatally hurt Obama in the run-up to Iowa.
Not so fast, folks. We obviously don’t know what’s going to happen next in Pakistan. I understand that if Pakistan melts down in the next few days, at a time when the holidays limit other political news, it could get a lot more attention than would otherwise be the case. And I also understand that instability in the Greater Middle East might reinforce the campaign messages of those Democrats or Republicans who stress their foreign policy experience and/or anti-terrorist credentials.
But who really knows? International instability can reinforce both status quo and “change” sentiments, and the most proximate contest, in Iowa, features a small electorate that is probably more focused on the campaign unfolding right in front of it than on news events. But media interpretations of political trends have a way of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies, so how the candidates react in the next day or two could be very important.
No matter how it plays out, it’s really disgusting to watch the White House’s efforts to spin the Bhutto assassination as a vindication of its own anti-terrorism efforts. As Spencer Ackerman of TalkingPointsMemo reports in a conversation with Pakistan expert Barnett Rubin, the administration’s strategy was to promote a Bhutto/Musharraf “moderate” coalition after the January 8. That strategy is now “in tatters.”

In case it’s not obvious, The Daily Strategist is on a bit of a holiday hiaitus for a day or two, and to tell you the truth, it’s nice to go for an extended period of time without reading polls or pondering the fate that Iowans are planning for the rest of us. I wish everyone a blessed Xmas or holiday season, and a happy New Year.

Credit Matt Stoller of OpenLeft with one of the best one-liners in recent memory, in a post deriding wildly varying media assessments of the competence of various presidential campaigns: “At best, campaigns are garbage moving in the right direction.” Certainly anyone who thinks about it can remember reading assessments of ultimately disastrous nomination campaigns (e.g., Kennedy 1980 and Dean 2004) as brilliant and irresistable, and of successful nomination campaigns (e.g., Reagan 1980 and Kerry 2004) as disorganized and faction-ridden nightmares. (It’s also worth noting that the two Republican presidential campaigns that seem to be doing well right now, those of Huckabee and McCain, were both written off not long ago as completely inept and hopeless). And a lot of the excessively positive talk about specific campaigns is a function of campaign spin and the endless desire of the chattering classes to identify the Next Big Thing and Next Big Gurus in politics. The truth is, as Stoller suggests, that campaigns are a messy business full of guesswork and unintended consequences.
But I would issue one demurral about the current Democratic contest in Iowa. Best I can tell from talking to people with experience there, the Big Three candidates’ ground-level organizations are all exceptionally well-run by historical standards, benefitting from a lot of prior Caucus experience. But even so, guesswork and such accidents as the weather on January 3 may ultimately determine the outcome by confirming or rejecting the turnout models on which campaigns must inevitably rely.

If readers will allow me a moment of home-state parochialism, I want to note the passing of Tom Murphy, the Democratic Speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives for nearly thirty years (1974-2003).
Murphy first emerged as a factor in Georgia politics as House floor leader for the zany segregationist Governor Lester Maddox (whose chief of staff, BTW, was Murphy’s longtime rival Zell Miller), who wound up having a relatively progressive record despite his nutty right-wing rhetoric. As Speaker, Murphy’s career tracked the gradual evolution of the southern Democratic party from its conservative past to its eventual condition as a moderate biracial coalition.
But unlike such former Dixiecrat-types as George Wallace, he never had to apologize for racial demagoguery, and never abandoned the Democratic Party. Indeed, the one great constant of Murphy’s career was an inveterate hostility to the GOP.
Murphy finally lost his power, and his seat, when his once-rural West Georgia district (where most of my mother’s family still lives) became a Republican-trending Atlanta exurb, at about the same time that demographic changes finally flipped Georgia into the Republican column in state as well as national elections.
But Georgia resisted the region-wide GOP trend longer than any other state, electing Democratic governors and controlling the state legislature throughout the post-Civil Rights Act era, right up until 2002. It was no coincidence that this remarkable period in which Georgia Democrats defied the inevitable coincided with the Speakership of Tom Murphy. May he rest in peace.

On the American Prospect site, Mark Schmitt today offers a fascinating analysis on the most fundamental differentiation among the Big Three Democratic presidential candidates:

This is not a primary about ideological differences, or electability, but rather one about a difference in candidates’ implicit assumptions about the current circumstance and how the levers of power can be used to get the country back on track. It’s the first “theory of change” primary I can think of.
Hillary Clinton’s stump speech is built around the speechwriter’s rule of three, applied to theories of change: one candidate believes you achieve change by “demanding” it, another thinks you “hope for it,” while she alone knows that you have to “work for it.”
That’s accurate as a rendering of the candidates’ language: Her message of experience and hard work, Obama’s language of hope and common purpose, Edwards’ insistence that those with power will never give it up willingly.

Schmitt goes on to defend Obama’s own “theory of change,” suggesting that only a “common purpose” approach can build the political capital necessary to defeat conservatives and special interests and deliver real change. But whether you agree with him about Obama or not, Schmitt does nicely define the battleground which the candidates have chosen.

Adding his own rock to the establishment conservative assault on Huckabee, Robert Novak did a column today disclosing that the Rev. Mike has lost some Southern Baptist endorsements because he backed–or at least didn’t oppose–the “liberal” side in the fights for control of the denomination back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Maybe some Baptists do resent that Huckabee wasn’t a foot soldier in the takeover of the SBC by those favoring a centralized drive for dogmatic purity and right-wing political engagement. But calling their opponents “liberals” is highly misleading, sort of like talking about conservative Unitarians based on some intra-denominational fight. Some opponents of the takeover were simply defending Baptist traditions of state convention and congregational autonomy, and hardly any of them could be described as “liberals” in any theological, much less political, sense. So tarring (or from a more progressive perspective, crediting) Huckabee with the L-word in this context is ridiculous, and I suspect the Prince of Darkness is smart enough to know that.

A few days ago, New York Magazine published an article by John Heilemann that, as the title “Huckabuchanan” suggested, explored the parallels between Mike Huckabee’s alleged fusion of social conservatism and economic populo-nationalism with that of Pat Buchanan, who briefly frightened establishment conservatives during his two presidential runs in 1992 and (especially) 1996. I thought of it again today after reading George Will’s jeremiad against Huckabee as representing a complete repudiation of conventional conservatism.
After suggesting the parallel between Preacher Mike and Pitchfork Pat, Heilemann doesn’t completely buy it, noting that much of the “economic populism” attributed to Huckabee is exceptionally vague or primarily rhetorical. He doesn’t go on to note the contrasting precision and detail associated with Buchanan’s economic thinking, but it’s worth remembering that Pat basically called for a revival of Henry Clay’s American System in its entirety. Moreover, you can’t really assess Buchanan’s appeal without mentioning his foreign policy views, which echoed a slightly more recent conservative icon, Robert Taft. Huckabee has occasionally made heterodox noises on foreign policy, but nothing that would remind you of Charles Lindbergh.
It says a lot about the insecurity of contemporary conservatives that Huckabee seems to be scaring them as much as Buchanan did. And I also hope that those Democrats who squint sideways at Huckabee, and setting aside his views on social issues, see him as a congenial “populist” spirit, take a much closer look. He’s like Buchanan in all the wrong ways.

If you are interested in the deeper dynamics of the Democratic presidential contest, I strongly recommend you set aside a half-hour and read Matt Bai’s thumb-sucker for next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, entitled “The Clinton Referendum.”
Much of the material here will be familiar to those who read Bai’s recent book The Argument, which also made ambivalent feelings about Bill Clinton’s legacy the big unstated subtext of intra-Democratic tensions. The new piece updates Bai’s hypothesis by dealing with the specific impact of this issue on 2008 Democratic politics.
The most interesting passage is Bai’s take on how HRC’s rivals have appealed to the semi-submerged anti-Clintonism of Democratic activists, focusing on Edwards’ “culture of corruption” indictment of Clintonian Democrats, Obama’s anti-baby-boomerism, and both candidates’ condemnation of “triangulation.” He goes on to suggest that Edwards and Obama, and all Democrats, have incorporated Clintonian policies and rhetoric quite thoroughly, even if they won’t acknowledge it during a competition with the Big Dog’s wife.
For what it’s worth, I think Bai is oversimplifying the ways in which Edwards and Obama do and don’t reflect a “no vote” in a “Clinton referendum.” Edwards is channeling the purest form of anti-Clintonian Democratic analysis–the argument that Democratic “centrists” deliberately and consciously sold out progressivism for a mess of corporate pottage, treacherously serving as enablers of Bush-era conservatism. That’s why his campaign often comes perilously close to a Naderite plague-on-both-houses message. Obama, meanwhile, has out-Clintoned Hillary in the use of classically Clintonian “third way” themes, even, ironically, in his “turn the page” repudiation of boomerism, which sounds like an updated version of Bill Clinton’s 1992 modernization message (a point made most clearly by Armando at TalkLeft in his reaction to Bai’s piece). (For those really interested in the subject, I did a post back in September that went into considerable detail in comparing the takes on Clintonism–and the old and new anti-Clintonian strains in the party–by Edwards and Obama).
But quibbles aside, I think Bai’s article is important reading. A lot of bloggers seem perpetually irritated at Bai for his strong empathy with Bill Clinton’s self-evaluation as a misunderstood reformer, but they are actually proving his larger point about the very different ideas Democrats have about the pre-Clinton progressive tradition. Bill Clinton looks at a lot of progressive critics of his own legacy (and of his wife’s record and agenda) and sees 1970s-era mossbacks who think progressivism is purely defined by the New Deal-Great Society programs and an unapologetic ethic of entitlement. Those same critics look at Clinton-style politicians and see an embarassingly outmoded and corrupt accomodation of a once-ascendant conservatism. The mutual mistrust often really does resemble that of old hippies and their kids.

Count me among those who think Mike Huckabee’s “Merry Christmas” ad, which is running in Iowa and two other states, is very clever. It identifies him with the undoubtedly growing ranks of voters who are getting weary of political ads, while allowing him to get across a forthrightly (if understated) Christian holiday message. It won’t offend anyone who would consider voting for him in the first place, and it represents a nice dog-whistle appeal to those conservative evangelicals who think anodyne holiday greetings represent a “war on Christmas.”
It’s weird to watch conservatives–even religious conservatives–try to get indigmant about this ad. Like Bill Donahue, the heavily hackish chief of the heavily politicized Catholic League, some of them are claiming the ad features a subliminal religious message in the form of a bookshelf in the background that forms a cross-like image. Huckabee’s reaction to that theory was truly priceless:

Huckabee said the bookshelf is just a bookshelf and shrugged off the controversy: “I will confess this: If you play the spot backwards it says, ‘Paul is dead. Paul is dead.'”

The odd thing is that there are plenty of things Huckabee has said and done over the years that are ripe targets for legitimate criticism from both the left and right, including his gubernatorial record and his nutty tax proposal. Sarah Posner offers a rich menu of such Huckabisms in today’s FundamentaList at The American Prospect. But accusing him of being too Christian ain’t going to cut it among the kind of people he’s appealing to in the early Caucus and primary states. Indeed, such attacks let him indulge in the kind of bogus martyrdom that conservative evangelicals are all to prone to embrace these days.

One new poll of Iowa Democrats, by InsiderAdvantage, came out yesterday, and another, by Washington Post/ABC, came out late last night. The former created a big buzz among Edwards supporters, because it showed him up 4 over Clinton and up 6 over Obama among likely Caucus-goers. The latter had Obama up 4 over Clinton, and 13 over Edwards. InsiderAdvantage hasn’t done a previous Iowa poll, so there are no trend-lines to look at; the WaPo/ABC poll shows small trends towards Obama and Clinton and a small drop for Edwards since last month.
The top line aside, the two polls agree on some things, most notably John Edwards’ increasingly strong performance in second-choice preferences, and the now-familiar Obama dominance among younger and highly-educated voters. As Chris Bowers at OpenLeft points out in an excellent analysis, the InsiderAdvantage poll stipulates an extremely low turnout among voters under 45, even by Iowa standards, making its numbers for Obama especially suspect (the WaPo/ABC poll isn’t accompanied by age breakouts).
So: while campaigns can be expected to spin any given favorable poll as indicating a “surge” or a “comeback” or whatnot, the real deal remains very hard to measure. Typically, “likely voter” screens become more accurate as the actual event approaches, but the legendary difficulty of determining likely participation in the Iowa Caucuses makes even that prediction perilous. About the only statements that can be made with any degree of confidence based on a variety of recent polling are that John Edwards will probably do better than his first-preference polling suggests, and that young voter turnout will probably be decisive, one way or another, for Obama.