As a long-time (since the mid-1980s) foot soldier in the uphill effort to get the United States to adopt a serious national service system, I was quite interested in Barack Obama’s Mount Vernon, Iowa speech earlier this week, in which he unveiled a comprehensive service proposal that would represent something between a major expansion and a quantum leap.
Among national service junkies, a distinction is frequently made between government-organized, compensated service, and public support for (typically uncompensated) voluntarism, with Republicans typically supporting the latter (e.g., Bush 41’s “Points of Light” initiative) but not fhe former. Among Democrats favoring some sort of public support for more serious, sustained and focused kinds of service, the main distinction is between those who view service as a relatively minor if valuable resource for dealing with national or community problems, and those who want service to become a quasi-universal experience for Americans, much like the military was for men prior to the abolition of the draft.
Obama’s proposal covers both compensated and uncompensated service; sustained as well as occasional service opportunities; and in its entiretly, moves in the direction of making service a “universal opportunity,” though not a legal obligation.
He’d double the size of the Peace Corps, and more than triple the size of AmeriCorps. (In this respect, the one candidate who outdoes him, and by a big margin, is Chris Dodd, who would expand AmeriCorps from the current 70,000 positions to one million).
At the same time, Obama would encourage voluntary community service among high school and college students, the former by making federal aid to school districts conditional on the creation of service programs, and the latter by linking an expansion of tax credits for college tuition to an obligation to perform 100 hours of service each year.
More interestingly, for those familiar with past national service struggles, Obama appears to favor shifting the College Work-Study program towards service positions rather than part-time employment at colleges, an idea that college administrators have bitterly opposed in the past.
Finally, Obama would create a Social Investment Fund aimed at supporting non-profit community service initiatives.
As noted above, only Dodd rivals Obama at this point in his commitment to national service. Clinton’s service agenda (as does Biden’s) aims at creating a West-Point-style Public Service Academy, though she’d also double the size of AmeriCorps stipends. Edwards, as in the past, is focused on making service a focus of K-12 education programs, and a condition for high school graduation. Richardson’s main initiative is to provide student loan forgiveness for various forms of service. If any of the Republican candidates have a significant service proposal, I can’t find it with a casual search (see this Time article for a quick review of the field on this subject).
It’s anyone’s guess whether service could become a significant issue in the campaign. Back in 1992, Bll Clinton’s campaign consultants weren’t real jazzed about his insistence on talking about national service, until they noticed it had become one of his biggest applause lines in the early primaries. Most Democratic candidates at some point get around to pointing out that George W. Bush lost a big opportunity after 9/11 when all he asked of Americans was to travel and shop. They should also make a point of explaining exactly what they would ask of Americans, and how they would support and organize those who respond to a call to service. Obama and Dodd are to be applauded for doing just that.

About a month ago I wrote about the phenomenon of African-American voters (specifically in SC) who don’t support Barack Obama because they are convinced white folks won’t vote for him, making him unelectable. I theorized that a strong Obama showing in the very pale states of IA and NH might take care of at least part of that problem.
Well, even a rise in the polls among white folks for Obama may be having an effect. As Kate Sheppard points out at TAPPED, the trend lines in the last two Rasmussen polls of SC Democrats show Obama narrowing a long-standing deficit to Clinton in that state, mainly because he now leads her among African-Americans by a 51-27 margin, after trailing her in that voter category 46-45 last month.
John Edwards, BTW, continues to be an afterthought among Democratic voters in his native state, pulling 13% in the latest Rasmussen poll as compared to 36% for Clinton and 34% for Obama.

I’m coming a bit late to the analysis of Mitt Romney’s Big Religion Speech, being in travel purgatory much of the day, but the reaction is almost as interesting as the speech.
Nobody much denies that it was well-staged and well-delivered, but that’s pretty much where the agreement ends.
Hugh Hewitt regards the speech as “on every level…a masterpiece,” a “brilliant exposition of the American political theory of faith and freedom,” and even says anyone who doesn’t agree with him about this “is not to be trusted as an analyst,” a remark whose arrogance matches the hyperbolic tone of his whole post.
Nobody else I read got quite that hyterical in praise, but quite a few folks thought Romney did a good job of threading the needle by avoiding some obvious pitfalls in addressing this subject. He didn’t do a purely anodyne and impersonal tribute to “faith” without any specificity. He didn’t try to make the case for Mormonism. He didn’t (God forbid for a Republican!) suggest that religion should be irrelevant in politics.
At least a couple of conservative commentators were a lot less enthusiastic. The Editors of National Review pointed out that Romney was just wrong in asserting that those who wanted him to justify his faith were guilty of violating the constitutional ban on religious tests for holding office. David Frum quickly catches the contradiction between Mitt’s aggressive confession of belief in Jesus Christ as the Son of God and his argument that specific Mormon beliefs about the nature of Jesus were somehow off-limits to discussion, and sugggested, accurately I think, that many conservative evangelicals wouldn’t buy it.
On the Left, there’s a lot of justifiable attention being paid to the obvious point that Romney again and again identified religious freedom in a way that excluded the irreligious. “Religion requires freedom, and freedom requires religion,” was one of the speech’s big catchphrases. Thomas Jefferson is surely rolling in his grave.
In that respect, Michelle Cottle at the Plank is very impressed, in a horrified sort of way, by Romney’s phrase, “The religion of Secularism” in deploring aggressive church-state separation. Actually, this has been a hoary meme of the Christian Right for decades, central to its claim that any limitation on government support for religion is itself a form of religious oppression by the Church of Secularism (BTW, Romney hit a lick on another such hoary convention, the identification of the anti-abortion movement with abolitionism and civil rights as essential faith-based crusades for human rights).
And that’s why of all the reactions I’ve read, Ezra Klein’s seems to get at the essential point most directly:

What Romney’s speech today seeks to do is construct a new “us versus them.” Where Huckabee was having some success making the us equal “Christians” and the them equal “Mormons,” Romney is making the us equal “believers” and the them equal “atheists.” The bet is that voters hate “secularists” more than they’re unsettled by Mormons, and that if Romney can set himself up as the foremost opponent of atheists in public life, that will be more important than precisely which version of Jesus he believes in, or how many planets he’ll be given to rule after his death. It’s a speech calling for tolerance, that hinges on a public display of intolerance. It’s classic Romney, and totally disgusting.

Before the speech, I suggested that Romney’s best bet politically was to do everything possible to establish solidarity between Mormons and conservative evangelicals as comrades in culture warfare with secularists and even “liberal” Christians. I also doubted he could pull that off. But it looks like he at least made an eloquent effort in that direction.

Mike Huckabee began this week as the hot commodity in presidential politics, surging in IA and nationally, and inspiring a host of positive media attention. But in a striking illustration of how rapidly worms turn in the current political environment, he’s had a really bad week so far.
One problem had been lurking in the background for ages, and probably made its way from some rival campaign’s oppo-reasearch file into the media just as he emerged from the second tier into major-candidate viability. That would be the Wayne DuMond case. You can read all about it in the linked article, but basically, Huckabee appears to have personally lobbied the Arkansas parole board to releasee DuMond, a convicted rapist, in 1999, in response to right-wing political pressure (strangely, DuMond appears to have become a cause celebre among some conservatives who believed his original life-plus-20-years sentence was influenced by the fact that his victim was a distant relative of Bill Clinton). DuMond proceeded to rape and murder another woman in Missouri, and upon dying in prison in 2005, was the prime suspect in another rape and murder.
This is potentially the Willie Horton case on steroids, since Huckabee, unlike Mike Dukakis in Massachusetts, knew about the specific case and seems to have personally intervened, disregarding pleas from DuMond’s earlier victim’s family.
A second bad development for Huckabee is probably less damaging, but is still an indication of his and his campaign’s shortcomings. A full day after the release of the new National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, and at a time when it was the leading news story in several major media outlets, Huckabee was asked about it, and clearly had no clue about the report or its significance. It goes to show that even if you can overcome a small budget and a shoestring campaign operation in places like Iowa, it’s still helpful to have a staff to keep you aware of big breaking news, especially if one of your main vulnerabilities is lack of expertise in international relations.

Rich Lowry of National Review, who’s not a big fan of Mike Huckabee, did an interesting brief meditation today on the larger meaning of the Arkansan’s recent rise to relevance in the Republican presidential contest:

Remember how evangelicals had “matured”? Remember how the war on terror had replaced social issues? It shouldn’t be hard, since all those things were being said a couple of weeks ago (heck, still being said maybe even a few days ago). Part of what seems to be going on with the Huckabee surge is evangelicals sticking their thumbs in the eyes of the chattering class—we’re still here, we still matter, and we still care about our signature issues. Remember the lack of excitement in the Republican race, especially among dispirited social conservatives? Well, now there is some excitement, and it isn’t over free market economics or the war on terror, but a candidate who doesn’t speak compellingly about either of those things but instead about social issues. As a friend I was talking to a little earlier points out, the most important moment of the campaign so far came when a social conservative excited a social conservative audience—Huckabee with his “I come from you” speech at the “values summit.” This friend argues that the Huck surge makes it harder, not easier, for Rudy to win the nomination. Now that many evangelicals have a horse in this race, it would be very hard to tell them that not only will their guy not get the nomination, but they’ll have to settle for a pro-choicer. I don’t know about that, but Huck has certainly trashed about nine months-worth of conventional wisdom on the changing nature of social conservative voters.

This is probably a useful reminder of the source of Huckabee’s core vote for those progressives who view him as some sort of economic populist. In Iowa, at least, and probably nationally, Mike Huckabee’s “surge” is primarily a product of his success in remobilizing–and de-marginalizing–the Christian Right.

My post on Romney’s impending speech dealing with his Mormonism drew the ire of Ross Douthat at The Atlantic, who judged my suggestion that Mitt stress the successful LDS model of cultural conservatism as “exactly wrong.”
Douthat strongly subscribes to the theory that the most important reason for evangelical Christian hostility towards Mormonism is competitive pressure: Mormons “tend to offer a similar sociological appeal to religious seekers, and thus are in direct competition for converts.” Thus, he concludes, anything that reminds evangelicals of the similarity of that appeal to their own–much less that celebrates Mormon moral values–will horribly backfire.
Gee, I dunno. Douthat’s a lot closer to evangelical opinion than I am these days, but I suspect this competition factor is more prevalent among religious leaders than among the rank-and-file in the pews. But even if your typical Southern Baptists look at your typical Mormons and see zealous members of a rapidly-growing cult that’s stealing souls, they also inevitably see deeply conservative, godly folk who are renowned for clean living, patriotism, an intense devotion to family, and who dislike abortion, homosexuality and booze and drug use to a fault. You’d think that anything Mitt Romney could do to elevate the latter perception as opposed to the former would be helpful to the cause of conservative evangelical tolerance for Mormons, who after all, are comrades-in-arms in the larger fight against liberal Protestants and secularists.
If, on the other hand, I’m “exactly wrong” and Douthat is “exactly right,” then Mitt Romney is truly screwed. What is he supposed to say about his religion? He can’t do the JFK separation-of-church-and-state bit; he’s in the wrong party at the wrong time of history for that approach. He can’t educate evangelicals about the tenets of the LDS church; aside from being a complex endeavor, that would probably alarm listeners even more than their current vague suspicions about the Mormon “cult.” So if he also can’t even appeal to the deep cultural conservative consanguinity of Mormons with evangelicals, he might as well cancel the speech and hope for the best.

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.

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.

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.

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.