The ever-insightful John Judis has a lengthly, fascinating article up on the New Republic site evaluating Rudy Giuliani’s political and governing philosphy based on his upbringing, education, and experience as mayor of New York.
In terms of Giuliani’s early background, Judis basically concludes that while Rudy is a pretty crummy Catholic when it comes to personal conduct, he drank deeply from a Catholic Aristotelian tradition of political philosphy that has been known on occasion to lead from a mild communitarianism to a dangerous authoritarianism (viz, the sad history of European Catholic political thinking in the first half of the twentieth century).
Of more immediate interest is Judis’ fine analysis of the false and frightening analogy that Giuliani often draws between his anti-crime campaign in New York and how he would “police” the world as president:

In a recent essay for Foreign Affairs, [Giuliani] wrote: “I know from personal experience that when security is reliably established in a troubled part of a city, normal life rapidly reestablishes itself: shops open, people move back in, children start playing ball on the sidewalks again, and soon a decent and law-abiding
community returns to life. The same is true in world affairs. Disorder in the world’s bad neighborhoods tends to spread. Tolerating bad behavior breeds more bad behavior.”
This is a foolish analogy. In policing the world, the United States cannot claim to be enforcing its own laws; we lack legitimacy to do so, as we found after invading Iraq. When the NYPD went into poor neighborhoods, it was not an occupying force; when the U.S. military took over Baghdad, it was, and it suffered the consequences. Some of the “neighborhoods” Giuliani wants to clean up, such as Iran, possess their own armies and can call on other “neighborhoods,” such as Russia and China, to deter an attempt to punish them for bad behavior. In short, the world is not New York writ large, and the trade-offs between authority and liberty look very different from the White House than from Gracie Mansion. But these distinctions seem lost on the man who aspires to be the next mayor of the United States.

Judis doesn’t mention the grand irony of the front-running Republican candidate using a law enforcement paradigm for anti-terrorism policy, particularly given Giuliani’s large platoon of neocon advisors. (It’s supposed to be Democrats who don’t understand this is World War III, not gang-busting). But to the extent that Rudy seems to have convinced a lot of voters that his record in reducing violence in New York is the best reason to believe he can reduce violence around the world, Judis has performed an invaluable service in showing how ridiculous a credential that really is, and the danger to both national security and civil liberties that a Giuliani presidency would pose.

As anyone paying attention to the Democratic presidential contest is probably aware, there is a massive Greek Chorus out there, spanning the blogosphere and the MSM, telling Barack Obama that he needs to get tougher and more specific in outlining his differences with Hillary Clinton (I may be one of the few bloggers who hasn’t climbed on that bandwagon). But on the Left, at least, there probably isn’t much happiness about the precise way in Obama has chosen to take their advice.
Obama’s running an ad in Iowa–where the very latest major poll shows him effectively tied with Clinton–implicitly accusing HRC of putting her “finger to the wind” on key issues, with Social Security solvency being a leading example. Obama’s criticism of Clinton on SocSec has been more explicit in speeches and press events over the last few days.
So what is Obama offering on Social Security that Clinton’s not? The ad and his campaign’s materials say he wants to eliminate the “wealth exemption” for Social Security payroll taxation, which refers to the current $97,500 “cap” on earned income subject to the tax. But it’s not clear at this point if he is proposing to abolish the cap altogether, or, like John Edwards, to expose income above $200,000 to the payroll tax, while leaving marginal earned income between $97,500-$200,000 untaxed (sometimes called the “doughnut hole” approach). As it happens, HRC has expressed a willingness to “consider” monkeying with the payroll tax “cap”–in the context, as everyone always says, of a “comprehensive” approach (code for Republicans accepting a payroll tax increase while Democrats accept some sort of benefit cuts).
What seems to be a bit new about Obama’s line is that he’s discarded all the usual “comprehensive reform” language and is aggressively, not defensively, promoting a payroll tax increase while rejecting significant benefit changes. This makes many Democrats nervous because (a) unlike a rollback in the Bush income tax cuts, this is unmistakably a tax increase, which Republicans will point out every five minutes if Obama is the nominee; (b) abolishing the cap, instead of creating a “doughnut hole,” would represent a tax increase on millions of upper-middle-income earners, often the same people getting hit by the Alternative Minimum Tax; and perhaps most importantly (c) lots of Democratic activists, particularly after the campaign against Bush’s 2005 privatization proposal, really can’t stand any sort of talk about Social Security solvency, considering it either a non-problem or a “conservative meme.”
So why is Obama taking this controversial tack? Much of the aforementioned Greek Chorus, after all, wants Obama to go after HRC from the Left, particularly on national security and/or anti-corporate issues, not from the “entitlement reform” Center (see this post from Josh Marshall, one of the leaders of the successful fight against Bush’s 2005 SocSec initiative, on why he thinks this is a really bad idea).
I don’t have any inside knowledge here, but one reason Obama might want to talk about Social Security stems from the demographics of the Democratic electorate, particularly in Iowa. The University of Iowa poll I linked to above shows Obama with an impressive 41% from likely Caucus-goers under 44 (with 19% for HRC and 16% for Edwards). Among voters between 44 and 60, HRC leads him 31% to 21% (with an impressive 26% for Edwards). And among over-60 voters, HRC has 31%, Obama 24%, and Edwards 16%. Given the vast skewing of the Iowa Caucus turnout towards oldsters, Obama’s path to victory has two obvious elements: boosting turnout among younger voters, and gaining stronger support up the age ladder. His field organization is keyed to the former goal. And it’s beginning to appear his policy message may be keyed to the latter.
Remember that Obama has already proposed exempting $50,000 in income for seniors from income taxation. Perhaps his campaign has decided that biting the bullet for a tax increase to maintain Social Security benefits will give him a crucial boost in the geezer- and near-geezer vote.
In any event, Democrats nervous about candidate talk on Social Security–beyond adamant refusal to consider it a problem–should remember that this will inevitably be a general election issue. And given the stubborn willingness of the Republican presidential field to embrace Bush’s unpopular approach to Social Security, it’s an issue likely to favor Democrats.

In Virginia earlier this week, U.S. Rep. Tom Davis, who’s has been carefully planning for years to run to succeed Sen. John Warner, announced with some visible bitterness that he would not run for the Senate now that Warner has finally retired.
The bitterness flows from the immediate cause of his abandonment of that long-cherished dream: a decision by the Virginia Republican Party to hold a convention rather than a primary to choose the candidate to face Democrat Mark Warner next November. A convention, as everyone in the state understands, will be dominated by conservative activists who are almost certain to spurn the relatively moderate Davis in favor of former Gov. Jim Gilmore, who’s already announced for the gubernatorial contest.
Davis, mind you, is a prodigious vote-getter and fundraiser from Northern Virginia, the area where recent Democratic statewide victories have been based, while Gilmore is a failed governor, failed RNC chair, and most recently, a failed presidential candidate, who will not have a prayer against Mark Warner. Moreover, Gilmore represents the hard-core culturally rigid, fanatically anti-tax wing of the state GOP, which has now lost two straight gubernatorial bids and a Senate contest, and whose primary challenges to moderate GOP state senators this year are endangering a GOP majority of that chamber previously thought to be impregnable.
This deliberate decision to hand Gilmore the Senate nomination can only be understood as an act of self-deception, under the bizarre theory that Virginia Republicans have been losing because they are insufficiently conservative, or as the expression of a death wish, reflecting a determination to hold onto intraparty power at the expense of real governing power.
Virginia is only the latest example of this phenomenon, as explained by Ron Brownstein in a column today. What he calls an “ideological inquisition” in the GOP is reflected in other primary challenges of party heretics, and indeed, in the behavior of the GOP presidential field (with the arguable exception of Rudy Giuliani).
The CW on this subject remains that both parties are under the control of their activist “bases,” and that moderates in both parties are being hunted to extinction. But as Kevin Drum accurately suggests in his commentary on Brownstein’s column, this equivalency argument is just wrong:

Every two years the losing party has this exact same conversation: (a) move to the center to appeal more to swing voters, or (b) move left (right) in order to stay true to the party’s liberal (conservative) heritage? My sense is that (b) is almost always the choice after the first loss or two, after which (a) finally wins out.
This year, though, we’re in a historically odd position. The Republican Party is still in stage (b), but to a smaller extent, the Democrats are back there too. The Democratic Party spent so long in stage (a) during the 90s, moving aggressively to the center after years in the wilderness, and the GOP moved so far to the right under Gingrich and Bush, that Democrats have the luxury of being able to move modestly to the left and yet still be moving relatively closer to the center than the Republican Party. On a scale of 1 to 10, it’s like the GOP is moving right from 8 to 9 while the Democratic party is moving left from 4 to 3.5. The lunacy of the conservative base is providing a huge amount of cover for liberals to make some modest progress this year.

And Virginia offers a good illustration of the relative moderation of Democrats, even those on the intense Left. After all, there are plenty of Democrats, in Virginia and elsewhere, who probably think Mark Warner is an unprincipled Clintonian triangulator whose constant talk of bipartisanship makes him a sell-out (viz, Matt Stoller’s description at OpenLeft of Warner’s announcement statement for the Senate as “disgusting” and “Liebermanesque”). But you don’t see anyone trying to deny him the nomination, at the cost of a precious Senate seat.

In his efforts to help along the sorta-kinda revival of John McCain’s presidential campaign, National Review‘s Ramesh Ponnuru came up with an interesting proposal: McCain should announce that if elected, he would serve only one term.
Ponnuru doesn’t exactly explain why this would work magic for McCain, other than attracting some buzz, and perhaps (if he followed Ramesh’s advice and said his one term would be devoted to a few big goals) reviving his tarnished rep as a principled pol among power-mad opportunists. If McCain were in better political shape, a one-term pledge might assuage concerns about his age and health, but those aren’t really his problem at present. Theoretically, knowing a President McCain would leave office in 2013 might appeal to current or potential Republican rivals, but that won’t turn many real votes. If things started looking really, really bad for GOPers in 2008, I suppose McCain could fulfill his old buddy Marshall Wittmann’s dream by announcing Joe Lieberman as a running-mate and propose some sort of four-year Government of National Salvation. But it’s hard to imagine that series of events congealing in time to crucially affect the nominating contest, and as Ponnuru says, the time for a big bold move is now.
But there is one Republican candidate for whom the strategy of a one-term pledge coupled with a strategic, announced-in-advance running-mate could make some sense: Rudy Giuliani. Rudy’s appeal to many Republicans is that he may be the only choice who could thwart the likelihood of a Democratic president working with a Democratic Congress, perhaps breaking the partisan gridlock of the last decade or so, and taking the Supreme Court out of reach of those whose raison d’etre is the overturning of Roe v. Wade. But many of the same people are terrified that a President Giuliani would reshape the GOP itself in his image. Limiting himself in advance to one term, and at the same time choosing in advance a culturally conservative running-mate who would be the Heir to the Throne, might produce a small but crucial breakthrough for Rudy in the GOP ranks.
While we are on the subject, the use of the vice-presidential nomination as a strategic device is an idea that doesn’t get discussed much these days, thanks to the abundant evidence that it usually doesn’t change many votes. But a well-timed and dramatic running-mate announcement is a proposition that’s rarely been tested. What if John Kerry had actually secured McCain as his running-mate in 2004 (which I’m pretty sure was a much livelier possibility than a lot of people realized then or now)? And while the Reagan-Ford ticket that nearly materialized at the GOP Convention of 1980 would probably not have affected the outcome of that election, it certainly might have affected world history by sparing us all the Bush Dynasty.
Then there’s the ever-lurking idea of a candidate announcing a running-mate before winning the nomination. It’s happened just once: in 1976, when Ronald Reagan stunned Republicans by choosing Sen. Richard Schweiker of PA as his putative Veep shortly before the convention. The move was narrowly tactical, aimed at prying loose some delegates from PA, and it failed, because Schweiker’s relatively liberal voting record produced a backlash that lost Reagan the previously uncommitted Mississippi delegation and thus the nomination.
But it’s a strategem eminently available to any candidate who wants to create a large buzz, signal a grand coalition, or attract a key voter bloc. And at some point, if not this year then before too long, it will be tried.

In case you missed it, the robo-pollsters at Rasmussen have released a survey showing that an independent presidential run by Stephen Colbert would net 13% support in a Clinton-Giuliani contest. Just as surprisingly, comparison of the three-way test with Rasmussen polls of the Big Two alone seems to indicate that Colbert pulls significantly more support from Rudy than from HRC. Less surprisingly, Rasmussen finds that the comedian does really, really well–around 30%–among voters under the age of 30.
There is one very obvious reason to dismiss these “findings”: Asking poll questions about an unserious candidate invites an unserious answer.
So why am I writing about it? Because when polls came out a few months ago showing Mike Bloomberg with similar levels of support in a three-way race, many thousands of words of serious analysis were spilled in print and online. But the truth is that polls offering any well-known “third choice” typically elicit significant support well in advance of elections–support that tends to evaporate as actual voting grows nigh. The alleged Bloomberg Boom wasn’t any more serious than today’s Colbert Boom.
Still, to suspend disbelief for a moment, it is fun to wonder why Colbert would cut into Rudy Giuliani’s base of support so disproportionately. Are there actually a lot of Colbert viewers who don’t understand that his Fox Bloviator shtick is a joke? Or is Rudy benefitting from a hitherto-undiscovered segment of the electorate that doesn’t understand he’s dead serious?

A good catch by Michael Crowley, who noticed that the latest LA Times/Bloomberg national poll revealed a very strange finding: among the one-third of GOP voters who say they’d go third-party if Republicans nominate a pro-choice, pro-gay-rights candidate, the plurality choice for that nomination is none other than Rudy Giuliani. These, uh, rather counterintuitive folk amount to only about 8 percent of GOP voters, but it’s still an interesting mystery. Do they not know about Rudy’s history on these issues, and his continuing refusal to support a direct overturning of Roe v. Wade or a national constitutional ban on gay marriage? Or do they buy his arguments that he “hates” abortion and wants states to control gay marriage? Is he benefitting from ignorance, or from persuasion?
In the same post on the same poll, Crowley suggests the numbers support Clinton pollster Mark Penn’s recent assertion that Rudy may have some issues with female voters. Giuliani’s gender gap (among Republicans) in the LA Times/Bloomberg poll, however, is dwarfed by that of Mike Huckabee, who draws support from 11 percent of men and only 4 percent of women. On the flip side, Mitt Romney draws 14 percent of women and only 7 percent of men.
Speaking of Mark Penn, here’s a sneak preview of my review of Penn’s recent book, Microtrends, that will soon appear in The Washington Monthly.

In the first significant policy-oriented thrust by Fred Thompson’s meandering campaign for president, Fred has released an immigration proposal that appears likely to touch off a new immigrant-bashing competition among the various GOP contestants.
The proposal focuses on enforcement of immigration laws rather than prevention of new influxes of illegals. By embracing an “attrition” strategy of reducing current levels of undocumented workers, it supposedly avoids the draconian alternative of mass deportations, without accepting any sort of path to citizenship. More importantly in terms of the presidential race, the proposal includes withdrawal of federal grants to “sanctuary cities” like Rudy’s New York and Mitt’s Boston.
Fred’s own Senate record on immigration issues is one of indifference and occasional pro-immigrant heresy, so his sudden effort to emerge as Tom Tancredo’s saner cousin will draw a lot of fire. But it will also likely bring out the worst in a Republican Party that has begun to see immigration as the new right-wing wedge issue of the twenty-first century.

If you have any reason to care about web traffic, you might want to check out a New York Times piece (via Matt Yglesias) that explains why it’s always hard to answer the question: “Who reads your blog?”
Aside from the basic problem of sorting out hits, unique visits, and pageviews, and determining their relevance, there are a host of technological and even philosophical issues that have prevented the emergence of any “gold standard” for internet site traffic measurement. And the variety of measurement tools complicates the picture immensely.
Back when I was writing NewDonkey.com, I neglected to look at site traffic reports for a couple of months, and when I did, nearly had a heart attack, due to what appeared to be a calamitous drop in traffic for no apparent reason. Turns out we had shifted from one measurement tool to another, and I never did quite figure out whether the old, good numbers were more reliable than the new, not-so-good numbers.
I’ve been tempted to conclude that web traffic stats are like poll numbers: the important thing to watch is the trend-lines within measurement tools using the same methodology. But there are a host of problems that make that approach unreliable as well, viz., the use of RSS feeds, which in some incarnations boost actual traffic while reducing measurable traffic. And as the Times piece, by Louise Story, explains, you also have to pay attention to technological issues on the consumer end, particularly large server software that makes individual usage impossible to measure, and “cookie deletion” by individuals that thwarts tracking.
Story suggests, accurately, that this problem is probably inhibiting the growth of internet-based advertising, which relies on accurate understanding of target audiences. But it also affects a vast number of internet-based political voices, whose reach is hard to assess. Sometimes you have to measure impact by quality as well as quantity, and by how well you reach the destination through the traffic you encounter.

Check out this column from St. Pete Times political editor Adam C. Smith, and tell me if you buy it. Its subject is the alleged advantage Republicans are going to get, now and apparently forever, due to the Democratic presidential candidate boycott of next year’s Florida primary. (Republicans are merely going to strip Florida of half its delegates).
Sure sounds dubious to me. We are supposed to believe that Floridians have instantly acquired the self-referential obsession with their role in the nominating process that voters in Iowa and New Hampshire have developed over many moons. Given Florida’s size and perpetual general-election relevance, it’s hard to believe its citizens think a well-attended primary is important to either the state’s economy or its political standing. But when I was in the state recently, it’s true you heard a lot about this from Democrats as well as Republicans.
In any event, I’m glad I read Smith’s piece, if only to marvel at this quote from state GOP chair Jim Greer: “Our party, because of what the Democrats have done, has an opportunity that it has never had before to step forward and say every vote will count…”
Yeah, that would be a first.

For politics-as-sheer-fun, you might want to check out Joshua Green’s Atlantic piece offering a mock-serious strategy for a mock-serious Stephen Colbert primary run in South Carolina.
Like Colbert at his best, Green eerily comes close to “truthiness” now and then, as when he suggests that the media coverage the comedian would soak up might be bad news for lower-tier candidates, and particularly for Ron Paul, whose young-white-male-internet-based supporters (“pot smokers,” says an unnamed Republican consultant) are probably Colbert-watchers as well. Leaping over the top, Green offers a brief discussion of the often-overlooked “drunken college student” demographic.
But I’m guessing Josh is dead serious in offering his services to Colbert as campaign manager. The cool-factor alone–not to mention future book deals and television bookings–would make the gig invaluable.