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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Ed Kilgore

Reality Breaks Through On Iran

The release of a startling new National Intelligence Estimate showing that Iran shut down its nuclear weapons program in 2003 was a timely reminder that real-life events can trump politics. The document has clearly put the kibosh on the administration/neocon campaign to justify, if not execute, a preemptive military strike–perhaps in conjunction with Israel–on Iran. And the extreme irritation being expressed towards the report by such noted saber-rattlers as John Bolton and Norman Podheretz is as good a measure as any of its enormous impact.
The weird thing, of course, is that George W. Bush knew about this intelligence well before his inflammatory “World War III” remarks about Iran in October. This makes today’s spin effort by the White House to cite the report as a validation of the administration’s Iran policy especially laughable. More seriously, Bush’s decision to ignore as long as he could his own government’s best information on Iran is yet another blow to U.S. credibility around the world.
Aside from its impact on the administration, the intelligence estimate should have a salutory effect on the Republican presidential campaign, where discussion of military action against Iran has been (with the obvious exception of Ron Paul) kicked around as a matter of “when,” not “if.” It’s less clear that Iran will subside as an issue on the Democratic side, with the Edwards and Obama campaigns already citing the report as evidence that Hillary Clinton was again misled by Bush in voting for the Kyl-Lieberman resolution.
However it shakes out politically or diplomatically, the intelligence estimate clearly puts up a big roadblock on the path to preemptive war with Iran, and should lessen fears that Bush will be able to double-down on his Iraq disaster before he finally heads home to Crawford.


Romney’s Big Religion Speech

Many months after he had been urged to take this step, Mitt Romney is finally going to do his Big Religion Speech on Thursday, addressing his Mormonism in some manner or other.
He’s running the risk that The Speech will be interpreted as a panicky reaction to his Huckabee problem in Iowa, and more fundamentally, that talking about his faith will make exploitation of its more eccentric (to most Americans) features fair game on the campaign trail.
But he’s decided to do it, and has picked an interesting venue: The George H.W. Bush presidential library at Texas A&M, with Bush 41 himself performing the introduction. It’s in the same state where John F. Kennedy delivered his famous Big Religion Speech in 1960, though Romney hasn’t staged the kind of clever inquisitorial trappings JFK chose (a panel of evangelical Protestant ministers).
What’s not clear at this point is how Romney will approach the subject. He could take JFK’s tack of suggesting that his religion is an “accident of birth” that’s not germane to his public persona. He could try to educate voters about Mormonism (though his campaign has said he won’t do “Mormon 101”). Or he could, as he’s more or less done up until now, suggest that having a faith, any faith, is the issue, and stay completely vague about the content of his own faith.
If I were Romney, I’d go right at the conservative evangelical Protestant suspicions about Mormonism by stressing and restressing its culturally conservative teachings and practices, ignoring the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith and formal theological issues altogether. Theology aside, Mormons could be perceived as evangelicals with a much better track record of worldly accomplishments and moral fidelity. And in many respects, the LDS church has built the sort of conservative commonwealth in Utah that many evangelicals dream of for the whole country. I happen to have a family member, a longtime Southern Baptist Deacon, who’s travelled to almost every corner of the world. The only place I ever heard him wax rhapsodic about was Salt Lake City. “It’s so clean!” he kept saying, reflecting a tanglble envy for what Mormons have wrought in comparison to the messy and hypocritical cultural milieus in which most evangelicals live.
But somehow I doubt that the Mittster, whose own native cultural milieu is the corporate boardroom, is capable of pulling off this sort of visceral appeal to people who think Mormonism is weird, but who wouldn’t have much of an argument with Mormonism’s more practical implications. So I’m guessing he’ll do a very abstract take on the importance of religion generally, suggest that anyone who questions his own faith is in alliance with godless liberal secularists, and then flee the podium, ever after dismissing the subject as something he’s already addressed down at Texas A&M.


Gettin’ Real in Iowa

We’re now one month out from the Iowa Caucuses, and it’s no longer possible to say it’s “too early” to get a handle on what may happen on January 3. That’s why yesterday’s new Des Moines Register poll of likely Democratic and Republican caucus-goers is worth a look. (Another reason is that Iowans pay a lot of attention to Caucus coverage by the Register; more than you might think in this post-print-media era. The Register‘s own candidate endorsements, likely to come out on the eve of the Caucuses, could actually matter, as evidenced by the boost the paper gave John Edwards in the Des Moines area in 2004).
The poll confirms Barack Obama (leading Clinton and Edwards 28-25-23) and Mike Huckabee (leading Mitt Romney 29-24) as the “candidates on the move” in Iowa. It also indicates that lower-tier candidates in both parties aren’t in a very good position to make a last-minute surge (among Democrats, Richardson’s stuck at 9% and Biden at 6%, and among Republicans, Giuliani, at 13%, is the only other double-digit candidate), at a time when caucus-goers are likely to begin firming up their preferences.
Typically, the Register isn’t very forthcoming in releasing internal poll findings, though sometimes they publish them later. According to a David Yepsen column, Obama’s now leading Clinton among women, and has apparently moved ahead of Edwards among those most likely to participate in the Caucuses. And another Register article tells us that on the Republican side, Romney’s more dependent than Huckabee on support from the younger voters who are traditionally least likely to show up.
Yepsen makes the obvious point that the unprecedented proximity of the Caucuses to the holidays could have an inhibiting effect on negative advertising. But the more salient fact is probably that a high percentage of Iowans will be spending a lot of time in front of the tube in the period between Christmas and January 3, and many will also be off work and at home to take or ignore campaign robo-calls.
Speaking of television, my favorite question in the Register poll asks likely Caucus-goers if they are “tempted” to stay home and watch the Kansas-Virginia Tech Orange Bowl game on the evening of January 3 instead of bundling up and discharging their civic obligations. Only 5% of Republicans and 4% of Democrats report that they are struggling with this decision, which would be a huge factor if an Iowa team was playing in Miami. Maybe regional solidarity will convince a few Iowans to watch the Jayhawks play, and you have to figure that Gov. Chet Culver, a former Hokie football player, will be casting a few glances at the scoreboard. But overall, it shouldn’t matter much.


Down Ballot

Aside from each candidate’s “electibility” as president, a related issue affecting Democratic presidential candidates for 2008 is how each would affect “down-ballot” races for Congress, governorships, and so on. At The New Republic today, Tom Schaller takes on the strong if under-documented belief that Hillary Clinton would be a “down-ballot” disaster for Democrats, particularly in red states or red regions.
As Schaller notes, this belief appears to be based mainly on polls that persistently show HRC with high “negatives,” reinforced by anecdotal evidence (which is everywhere) of the amazing, pathological intensity with which many conservatives hate her.

[W]hile Americans view Clinton about as favorably as they do her two chief rivals, Democrats think she is a better leader, Republicans think she’d make a worse leader, and a greater share of voters who do not approve of her actually disapprove of her–which sounds like a redundancy, but is not when you realize that many voters have neither a favorable nor unfavorable view of Obama or Edwards. If either of them wins the nomination, however, don’t doubt for a second that the Republican machine can’t or won’t ratchet up their negatives later.
Still, is there something unique about Clinton that could put other 2008 Democratic candidates at risk? The strongest claim to that is she’s an uncommonly unifying figure–for Republicans and the right. So while the intensity of Clinton hatred may not multiply a voter’s vote, it could motivate citizens to engage in other ways, such as donating to Republican candidates, walking precincts, or persuading their friends and co-workers to vote against Clinton and other Democrats.

Negative as well as positive enthusiasm towards candidates is often overrated, since “bonus votes” are not rewarded for the intensity of voter preferences. And as Schaller notes, Obama-hatred or Edwards-hatred might well emerge on the Right if either of those men won the nomination. But the anecdotal case you often hear about Clinton is that she is polarizing in an unbalanced way: her nomination would strongly motivate conservatives who think she’s a dedicated socialist and one-worlder, while discouraging progressives who think she’s a warmongering corporate puppet. (You even hear the reverse argument made about Edwards, i.e., that he’s usefully perceived by Republicans and independents as more “centrist” than he actually is).
Interesting as they are, such theories about HRC’s effect on the electorate would have more power if there was any objective evidence for them. So far, polls testing various Democratic candidates against Republican rivals in specific states (mainly those conducted by SurveyUSA) show her doing as well as or better than Obama and Edwards in most states, and doing quite well in red and purple states. To be a “drag” on the ticket down-ballot in a lot of states, you have to actually lose them, and lose them badly. To put it most simply, it’s hard to get too obsessed about the down-ballot “damage” that might be inflicted by a candidate who’s currently running four points ahead of Rudy Giuliani in Kentucky.


The Nexus

So the big buzz in the progressive blogosphere yesterday and today is about Ben Smith’s story in The Politico revealing that Rudy Guliani billed a lot of travel and security expenses to the City of New York (processed through a vast array of minor agencies) for trips to the Hamptons that might have been associated with opportunities for Private Time with his then-girlfriend, later-wife, Judith Nathan.
You can read about this virtually anywhere (Josh Marshall has gone into major campaign mode on the subject, which is a clear sign the story has legs), but it’s important first to connect the dots. This is a classic example of a development that links a “personal” scandal involving a political candidate–in this case, Rudy’s semi-public adultery, not to mention his serial marriages, the last of which self-excommunicated him from the Catholic Church–with a legitimate public policy issue. It’s an even more lurid version of the “lying under oath” charge that converted many years of smoke about Bill Clinton’s sexual behavor into the fire that got him impeached.
In Rudy’s case, The Nexus between personal and public behavior is particularly strong because it touches on two of his major rationales for candidacy. The guy who ostensibly cleaned up the most corruption-laden and spending-addicted city in America appears to have corruptly spent public money to feather his own nest, so to speak. Moreover, there’s fresh speculation that his decision to site a doomed emergency management command post in the World Trade Center might have had more to do with sexual than with law enforcement logistics.
And then there’s the whole impact of the story on Rudy’s wife. I personally find the whole obsession Americans have about vetting the families of political candidates atavistic, distasteful, and irrelevant, and God alone could fairly compare the Giuliani family’s ethics to those of others. But the fact remains that Republican primary voters probably won’t react very well to information that seems to depict the Next First Lady of the United States as some sort of hoochie mama.
No matter how much of the details of the scandal turn out to be accurate, this story will likely unleash the hounds of hell on Rudy, precisely because the “personal” stories he’s so far brushed off just got very “political.” At this point, his Republican presidential rivals are leaving it alone, but that won’t last, and unless Giuliani comes up with a solid way to squelch the story, he’s in big trouble.


Movement in the Expectations Game

For those of you who missed last night’s YouTube/CNN Republican presidential candidate debate, you didn’t miss a whole lot, other than a predictable escalation of hostilities among Guiliani, Romney and Huckabee, and a few outbreaks of the humma-hummas that rival any stumbling and mumbling among the Democratic candidates on immigration. Huckabee seemed to do himself the most good, and that leads to the really important (if objectively superficial) development in the GOP race, nicely expressed by John McIntyre at RealClearPolitics:

What we have developing is Huckabee stepping in and filling the void in the GOP field that was available to Thompson in the summer – a void that his inept campaign has been unable to fill. So perhaps instead of the Tennessean sinking the Romney campaign it could very well be the Arkansan.
For the Romney campaign the silver lining in Huckabee’s move into the first tier — and it is not an unimportant silver lining — is that Huckabee has totally shaken up the expectations for Iowa on the GOP side. Because of this resetting of expectations in December, if Romney is able to hold off Huckabee in Iowa it will be a huge win for his campaign. A win that would allow the Romney campaign to get the kind of momentum they were looking for when they originally laid out their sling-shot strategy to the nomination. (Win Iowa, win New Hampshire, win Michigan, make it a two-person race against Giuliani, combine the early wins with Romney’s personal wealth to overwhelm Rudy).

I think McIntyre’s got his finger on how the Media Herd is likely to change the expectations game going into the Iowa Caucuses. With Huckabee getting all the buzz these days, Romney, despite his large early lead, his win in the State Republican Straw Poll, his substantial field operation, and his expenditure of a gazillion dollars, is now rapidly becoming the underdog in Iowa. Meanwhile, Huckabee, whose spending in Iowa is pretty much limited to the spare change Romney could find under the seat cushions of his campaign bus, is moving into a position where a second-place finish, which would have been deemed miraculous not long ago, could “finish” him as a realistic candidate for the nomination.
Hardly seems fair, but that’s how the game is played at present.


How “Rumors” Get Started

Most readers are probably aware that there has been a sustained, deliberate smear campaign aimed at Barack Obama over the last few months based on fabricated “information” that he’s a secret Muslim, and/or a graduate of a Muslim “madrassa” in Indonesia.
So it’s not a big surprise that the Washington Post published an article about this phenomenon. But the Post gave Perry Bacon, Jr.’s piece the following headline: “Foes Use Obama’s Muslim Ties to Fuel Rumors About Him.”
You don’t have to be a journalist to understand the two problematic words in this headline: “ties” implies there’s something to the idea that Obama’s got a Muslim background, and “rumors” sounds a lot more credible than “lies.”
And this is how “rumors” get started.


Our Christian Left President

There’s a long-simmering debate going on in progressive political circles about the legitimacy of faith-based political appeals, as reflected in a recent TRB column by Jonathan Chait in The New Republic.
But concerns about the religious motivations of politicians aren’t limited to the Left. For one thing, there’s the drumbeat of conservative criticism of Mike Huckabee for espousing views on domestic issues characteristic of the Christian Left (sic!).
Huckabee’s not, it seems, the only major GOP figure that has been led astray into socialism and do-gooderism by Christianity. Check out this uintentionally hilarious post from Andy McCarthy at National Review‘s The Corner blog

When a politician who wants to be president of the United States adheres to them, I don’t see why we should hesitate to ask about what those beliefs are and why he thinks they are sensible. And when a politician holds himself out to be a person of deep religious belief, again I don’t see why we should not probe. I don’t think that’s hostility to religion; I think it’s common sense.
President Bush, for example, is a man of deep religious faith. Faith may be able to move mountains; but it can also substitute hope and blind conviction for experience and hard inquiry. In my observation, the president believes in democracy with a religious zeal that ignores the real limitations of democracy; he sincerely believes in the oneness and dignity of all human beings to a degree that makes him insensitive to the downsides of his proposed comprehensive immigration reform; he sincerely believes in our duty to help our fellow human beings in need with an ardor that makes him insensitive to the limitations of government (and, indeed, to the negative effects of public welfare on the individual). I could be wrong about this, but I perceive a connection between his religious convictions and the things I don’t like about his policies.

Jesus wept.


Libertarian Chic

The latest evidence that the Ron Paul Revolution has achieved pop-culture Cool Status is in the puffy Washington Post Outlook Section piece today by Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch that discovers libertarianism for readers who have somehow missed the whole phenomenon over the last few decades.
To be sure, the authors of this piece know their subject; they are both editors for the libertarian mag Reason. But they are pitching their faith in a skewed way aimed at seducing people who should know better.
For one thing, Gillespie and Welch gets some simple facts wrong: they call the hyper-clericalist Guy Fawkes an “anarchist,” and they falsely claim that the libertarian strain of conservatism was once “dominant” in the GOP. More importantly, they almost exclusively identify libertarians with their most fashionable, progressive beliefs–opposition to the Iraq War and to civil liberties violations, and support for decriminalization of drugs–and not with their virulently reactionary opposition to every conceivable positive function of government.
If I sound a bit cranky on this subject, it’s because I think libertarianism is the least Cool, and most pedantic and tiresome political ideology on the map. Maybe you had to go through (as I did as an adolescent) the Ayn Rand Virus to understand the extent to which Ron Paul’s obsession with bringing back the Gold Standard is typical of the libertarian mindset. These are people who consider even the mildest forms of progressive taxation as “looting,” and even the most basic regulation of corporations as steps on the road to communism and fascism.
The most ridiculous part of the Gillespie/Welch effort to make libertarianism Cool is their breathless citation of celebrity support for Ron Paul and his Cause (Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Matt Stone, Tucker Carlson, and even Barry Manilow are cited as self-described libertarians, and Drew Carey is also dragooned into the category). Well, what do you expect? Is it a surprise that some wealthy and hedonistic celebrities might favor an ideology that simultaneously lets them oppose wars, take drugs and avoid taxation?
Gillespie and Welch also note Markos Moulitsas’ effort to claim libertarianism as part of a latter-day Democratic ideology. With all due respect to Markos, it’s tough to imagine any real coalition involving people like him, who think it’s heretical to consider any changes in the Social Security system, and want Democrats to stand for universal health care, and people like Ron Paul, who would happily abolish Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, SCHIP, and every other safety net program.
The simple reality is that libertarianism is neither new nor hip, nor progressive. No less an authority than Rand Herself described Bourbon Democrat Grover Cleveland, the late-nineteenth-century bete noir of the populists, as the beau ideal of libertarian governance. And the one contemporary libertarian who actually gained real power was Rand’s ever-faithful disciple Alan Greenspan, hardly a progressive figure.
I understand why some Democrats want to fete Ron Paul for his opposition to the war and his support for civil liberties. But get real, folks: an America run by the likes of Ron Paul might be peaceful and non-authoritarian, but from the perspective of every other progressive value, it would be Hooverism on steroids (though libertarians might well object to the analogy on grounds that Hoover was far too altruistic!).
The Ron Paul Counter-Revolution would be a better monniker for the Texan’s campaign.


Labor Day

Down in Australia, the Labor Party has won a decisive victory over the Liberal/National Coalition that previously ruled the country, and Kevin Rudd will replace John Howard as Prime Minister. Having spent some time hanging out with Australian (and New Zealand) Labor folk last year, I strongly believe that they deserve their electoral good fortune, and will provide a clear breath of fresh air for their country.
Howard has been one of the longest-reigning conservative leaders in the world. He will not be missed.