For much of this year, one of the surest bets in political circles has been that embattled New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine would go down to defeat at the hands of Republican former U.S. attorney Chris Christie. Aside from Christie’s (now tarnished) goo-goo rep as a corruption fighter, the thinking was that Corzine had a “ceiling” of somewhere in the low forties, thanks to persistently low approval ratings and the likelihood that most NJ voters had fixed opinions of the incumbents. Thus, for the first time in decades, a GOP candidate would get the late breaks in a NJ campaign, and end the party’s long losing streak in the Garden State.
Now the polls are all showing Corzine and Christie running neck-and-neck, with the big wild card being the double-digit support being attracted by independent candidate Chris Daggett.
At Politico today, Jonathan Martin looks at the race from Christie’s perspective, and focuses on the strategic dilemma faced by the GOP candidate in dealing with Daggett:

Christie, who had been running a traditional anti-incumbent campaign against Corzine, must now reckon with a perennial question faced by candidates who are imperiled by a lesser-known, third-party contender: To attack Daggett is to elevate him, effectively acknowledging that he’s a serious candidate and offering him free publicity. But ignoring him could amount to disregarding the most serious threat to Christie’s campaign, leaving Daggett to siphon away a significant amount of voters who are intent on registering their opposition to Corzine.

But Christie really doesn’t control that decision, since his major funding source, the Republican Governors’ Association, has already started going after Daggett with sledge hammers. It appears their theory is that attacks on Daggett as a “tax-and-spend liberal” will either flip Daggett voters to Christie, or perhaps even drive liberal voters who would otherwise support Corzine to the third-party candidate (who already has significant support from environmentalists). Again, the operative assumption is that Corzine’s vote has hit its “ceiling,” so there’s relatively little risk in drawing further attention to Daggett.
But you have to wonder: does Christie’s vote (now that he’s increasingly campaigning like a conventional conservative Republican) also have a “ceiling,” based on the Republican Party’s legendary handicaps in NJ?
This question shows why the outcome in NJ may have national significance, beyond the silly efforts of pundits to make every state race a referendum on Barack Obama, and the undoubtedly positive impact a Corzine win would have on Democrats who had written off the incumbent many months ago. If the Republican party “brand” is enough to sink a challenger against one of the most vulnerable opponents you’ll ever see, then Democrats aren’t the only party with a lot to worry about going into next year’s 2010 midterms.

With the entire U.S. political world engaged in handicapping the likely outcome of the health care reform debate, while others focus on the Obama administration’s impending decision on strategy and troop levels for Afghanistan, there hasn’t been much attention paid outside advocacy groups to prospects for action on climate change legislation (passed, as you might recall, by the House during the summer).
The general prognosis has been pretty negative, in part because of the extreme difficulty encountered in getting the revised Waxman-Markey legislation through the House (requiring compromises that left a lot of advocates cold or lukewarm), and in part because the Senate was so absorbed with health reform.
But last weekend the leading Senate climate change legislation advocate, John Kerry, threw a change-up that will at the very least require a recalibration of expectations, by signing onto a New York Times op-ed with Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham offering a new “deal”: combining a cap-and-trade system for carbon emissions with provisions liberalizing offshore oil drilling and relaxing regulations on nuclear power development.
The op-ed is worth reading in its entirety, but aside from offering conservatives the carrot of more U.S. oil and nuclear power, it also bluntly threatens the stick of unileratal action on climate change by the Obama administration:

Failure to act comes with another cost. If Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change, the administration will use the Environmental Protection Agency to impose new regulations. Imposed regulations are likely to be tougher and they certainly will not include the job protections and investment incentives we are proposing.
The message to those who have stalled for years is clear: killing a Senate bill is not success; indeed, given the threat of agency regulation, those who have been content to make the legislative process grind to a halt would later come running to Congress in a panic to secure the kinds of incentives and investments we can pass today. Industry needs the certainty that comes with Congressional action.

This threat may actually be welcomed by hard-core Republican pols who would lick their chops at the idea of “bureaucrats” end-running Congress to set up a cap-and-trade system, but not by those industries that would actually be affected, particularly since the business community is already divided on the issue.
The op-ed also discusses the national security case for action on climate change, and as Brad Plumer at The Vine notes, this argument polls well, has some appeal to conservatives, and also explains why Foreign Relations Committee chairman Kerry has for the moment displaced Barbara Boxer of CA as the “face” of the climate change initiative in the Senate.
Meanwhile, Nate Silver goes through the Senate membership and tries to assess which specific senators might be moved by a new bipartisan “deal” on climate change:

So what does this get the Democrats? It gets them Linsday Graham’s vote, and possibly Lisa Murkowski’s. It takes Mark Begich from a leaner to a likely yes. It might encourage Mary Landrieu, and possibly George LeMieux of Florida, to look more sympathetically at the bill. Then there are a whole host of more remote possibilities: Isakson of Georgia, and perhaps Cochran and Wicker of Mississippi or Burr of North Carolina; none of those votes are likely, but they become more plausible with offshore drilling in place. Overall, it seems to be worth something like 2-4 votes at the margin.
That would give the Kerry-Graham bill a fighting chance, especially if an additional vote or two — possibly John McCain’s — can also be picked up as a result of the nuclear energy compromise. Of course, that’s assuming that no liberals would rebel against the new provisions, but the opposition to both offshore drilling and nuclear energy seems to be fairly soft in the liberal caucus

On this last point, it’s worth noting that Dave Roberts of Grist, a highly credible warrior for action on climate change, adjudges the concessions on oil and nuclear energy “an affordable price [to pay] for the benefits of passing a bill.”
If nothing else, Kerry’s gambit has shuffled the deck, complicated Republican claims that Democrats are uninterested in genuine bipartisanship, and offered a sign of potential progress in advance of international climate change negotiations in December. All in all, it’s a good example of strategic audacity on an extraordinarily wonky issue, and well worth watching.

There was an interesting blogospheric exchange yesterday between Matt Yglesias and Nate Silver about the differences between the two parties’ Senate Caucuses on disciplinary issues. Matt expressed a very common progressive envy for the willingness of Republicans to threaten serious sanctions for heterodoxy on key issues:

The Senate Republican caucus is organized, like the House caucuses of both parties, like a partisan political organization whose objective is to advance the shared policy objectives of the party. The Senate Democratic caucus, by contrast, is organized like a fun country club trying to recruit members. Join Team Democrat and Vote However You Want Without Consequence!

Nate, however, wonders how effective Republican Senate hardball tactics have been over the years in building a strong and loyal Caucus. Taking the 10 GOP senators deemed (by one credible measurement) most “liberal” in 2001, here’s Nate’s count of what’s happened to them:

[Of the ten, there have been] two defections (Jeffords and Specter), two losses (Chafee and Smith), two retirements (Warner and Fitzgerald), two Senators that the party can pretty much no longer rely upon (Snowe and Collins), and finally, two who have indeed become more conservative and remained loyal to their party (McCain and Cochran). That’s a .200 batting average, which isn’t good in baseball and isn’t any better in the Senate.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence that the size of the Senate Republican Caucus has also shrunk by 20% since 2001, but Nate makes the excellent point that enforced unity has its limits as a party-building exercise. Probably the best response to that kind of argument is simply that one joins a political party in the first place (particularly if you are a progressive) to get things done in the real world. If the “big tent” keeps thwarting that objective in fundamental ways, then its size is pretty much irrelevant.

Mike Thomas of the Orlando Sentinel has a funny — and interesting — column. “Who’s taking on Grayson? Anyone? Hello?” on how Rep. Alan Grayson’s recent broadsides against the Republicans’ opposition to health care reform are playing out in his district vis a vis his potential challengers. Here’s a bite:

…The path to a long political career in Central Florida is win that first election, stay out of trouble and win the rest by default.
And now comes U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson, who dynamited that model, calling Republicans knuckle-dragging obstructionists who want the sick to “die quickly.”
If this fits the definition of unstable and unhinged, it certainly seems to have served a very lucid purpose.
The Republicans are cowering in knock-kneed terror.
Potential challengers are dropping out with comical regularity.
The last credible challenger standing is former state Sen. Dan Webster, who is so conflicted he can’t say yes and he can’t say no.
So he ponders away while the Republicans cross their fingers for a savior.
“I don’t have to be in elective office,” Webster says. “I am happy coasting right now. It’s great.”
You don’t enter a race against someone like Alan Grayson with this mindset. You go into this race needing to be in Congress more than you need to breathe.
…The Republicans look like a bunch of Chihuahuas yapping at the Rottweiler behind the fence. But this Rottweiler not only is snarling and frothing at the mouth, it also went to Harvard.

More?

…Consider state Rep. Steve Precourt.
Last week he boldly announced that Grayson was an “egomaniacal, socialist, loose cannon.”
Then he announced someone else would have to do something about it because he wasn’t running.
Yap. Yap. Yap.
Orange Mayor Rich Crotty once was considered the Republicans’ best hope. In June, Grayson released a seven-page letter explaining in detail how he would gut Crotty over Crotty’s leadership of the expressway authority.
In early July, Crotty said he had made a decision and would announce it shortly.
Days turned to weeks, weeks turned to months — until finally, the mayor gave us his verdict.
He could beat Grayson “handily.” But he wasn’t going to run.
Pretty slick. He declared victory and bowed out of the race.

Thomas goes on, mining this vein for chuckles. If Thomas proves to be right, Democrats may have found a new template for winning in centrist districts.

This is the second part of a two-part analysis. A print (PDF) version of the memo is available here
The two basic weaknesses of counterinsurgency theory – the doctrines’ wildly ambitious social objectives and its myopically narrow conception of “victory” — are directly reflected in General Stanley McChrystal’s August “Commander’s Assessment” of the situation in Afghanistan.
A. McChrystal’s strategic approach will ultimately require huge numbers of soldiers and resources – far more than are now being discussed.
The Commander’s Assessment defines dramatically ambitious goals for a counterinsurgency campaign: The campaign must:

“…earn the support of the Afghan people and provide them with a secure environment.”
…focus on operations that bring stability while shielding [the the civilian population] from insurgent violence corruption and coercion.
…protecting the people means shielding them from all threats….
…protecting the population is more than preventing insurgent violence and intimidation. It also means that [coalition forces] can no longer ignore or tacitly accept abuse of power, corruption or marginalization.

This is a completely different objective than the goal of neutralizing Al Qaeda and will demand resources far beyond anything that has been publically proposed. John Nagl — one of the three authors of FM-3-24 — has repeatedly warned that actually doing the “armed social work” envisioned in FM-3-24 will require far more troops than anyone is currently discussing. This is how Michael Crowley summarized Nagl’s view in the January, 2009 New Republic:

Nagl’s rule of thumb, the one found in the counterinsurgency manual, calls for at least a 1-to-50 ratio of security forces to civilians in contested areas. Applied to Afghanistan, which has both a bigger population (32 million) and a larger land mass (647,500 square miles) than Iraq, that gets you to some large numbers fast. Right now, the United States and its allies have some 65,000 troops in Afghanistan, as compared to about 140,000 in Iraq. By Nagl’s ratio, Afghanistan’s population calls for more than 600,000 security forces. Even adjusting for the relative stability of large swaths of the country, the ideal number could still total around 300,000–more than a quadrupling of current troop levels.

Moreover, from a purely military point of view, if we are eventually going to end up sending 300,000 troops, it is vastly preferable to “bite the bullet” sending the bulk rapidly to dramatically alter the tactical situation rather than in small driblets over a period of several years.
Nagl also notes that in the longer term, maintaining such large numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan will create nearly irresistible pressure to reinstate the draft and will require a massive increase in the military budget – one that will eventually necessitate new taxes.
For Nagl and many other conservatives, these are sacrifices that all Americans should be gladly willing to make. They point to the example of the stalwart working class and middle class British families who sent generation after generation of their sons to fight in India, Asia, Africa and the Middle East during the era of the British Empire. Most ordinary British citizens at that time fully accepted the need for large garrisons of British troops doing “armed social work” in British colonies around the globe on an essentially permanent basis. By the 1920’s many British families had proudly sent three or four successive generations of their young men to fight “For the Empire” as their noble patriotic duty.
It is dubious, however, that a majority of Americans share this perspective and are willing to make the same kind of commitment today. The current arguments over sending 40,000 or 50,000 more troops are therefore really just preliminary skirmishes in a much larger battle to convince the American people to support a full-scale, 300,000 soldier counterinsurgency campaign that may last for decades.

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Despite unfounded conservative attacks on President Obama’s stimulus measures, the public “remains supportive of specific spending measures to create jobs, improve the economy, and make investments” in key areas of concern, according to TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira. In his ‘Public Opinion Snapshot’ at the Center for American Progress web pages, Teixeira explains:

…in a new Economic Policy Institute-Hart Research poll, the public, by 61-36, said “The focus for improving the economy should be on creating good jobs, and investing in education and energy independence,” rather than…“shrinking government spending in order to reduce the federal budget deficit.”

Teixeira adds that impressive majorities now favor a range of federal spending measures to increase employment and economic recovery, including:

Pass a major new job creation tax credit for businesses that create jobs in the United States in the next two years (87 percent support)
Extend unemployment insurance benefits for those who have lost their jobs during the recession and are unable to find new jobs (81 percent support)
Put unemployed people back to work at government-funded public service jobs that help meet important community needs as Roosevelt did when he created the Civilian Conservation Corps (74 percent support)
Put unemployed people back to work at government-funded public service jobs that help meet important community needs (71 percent support)
Give a new round of tax rebates to lower- and middle-income Americans (63 percent support)
Provide increased federal assistance to state and local governments to prevent additional layoffs of government employees because government layoffs add to unemployment and harm vital services (52 percent support)

Teixeira concludes that “there may be a reservoir of public support” for more federal investment in economic recovery measures, “provided they are clear, specific, and not labeled as part of a new stimulus package.”

It is encouraging that Republican Senator Olympia Snowe (ME) joined in supporting the Senate Finance Committee version of health care reform, setting an admirable, albeit lonely example of bipartisanship in the 14-9 vote. As WaPo‘s Chris Cilliza suggests in ‘The Fix,’ Snowe’s vote could be significant in another way — inspiring hesitant Democrats to stand up for consumers against the worst instincts of the health care industry.
For the best report thus far on the SFC vote and it’s ramifications, read The Washington Post‘s coverage by Lori Montgomery and Shailagh Murray. Read also Chris Bowers’ easy-to-follow explanation of the legislative process regarding health care reform going forward.
It’s not such great news that a solid public option did not make the SFC cut. Nor is there much cause for celebration in the committee’s approval of nonprofit, consumer-run cooperatives to instead perform that role. In addition, agreement on the financing of health care reform is no closer as a result of the committee’s vote. According to the Posts’ coverage, the SFC version is a disappointment to some progressives because,

The measure does not mandate that businesses provide coverage to their workers. Committee members defeated two versions of a government insurance option. And the bill would tax high-value policies that, to the dismay of many liberal lawmakers, could affect some union households.

However, the good, make that great news is that all relevant Senate committees have now approved health care reform legislation that caps out of pocket spending by consumers at a reasonable level, bans disqualification from coverage based on prior medical condition and increases by millions the number of citizens covered. As Montgomery’s and Murray’s article notes, “Not since Theodore Roosevelt proposed universal health care during the 1912 presidential campaign has any such bill come this far.” Adds House Energy and Commerce Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-CA), “We are much closer than we’ve ever been. I think we’re going to make it.
A range of creative compromises regarding the public or co-op options are still in play, including Snowe’s ‘trigger mechanism,’ state public options or some hybrid version, perhaps even widened access to ‘health exchanges,’ as Sen. Ron Wyden has proposed, all of which would be better than what we have now. Regrettably, the single-payer option remains d.o.a. — although single-payer for catastrophic coverage only could be proposed as an amendment before the deal is done.
Although the white house and congressional leaders would have welcomed more than token bipartisanship, Democrats should not hesitate to use the Republicans’ nearly unanimous obstructionist front against them, if need be. They can grumble, gripe and whine all they want. Democrats need only keep reminding the press and public that majority rule is the American way.

As noted in the update to the last staff post, Sen. Olympia Snowe voted for the revised Baucus Bill in the Senate Finance Committee today. To hear Republican Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, Snowe just wanted to keep the ball rolling, and didn’t necessarily like a thing about the bill itself.
At the same time, the National Republican Senatorial Committee came out with this blast at Sen. Blanche Lincoln for casting the exact same vote:

“It very troubling that Senator Lincoln went back on her word and decided to vote in favor of a bill that will ultimately shift costs to voters in Arkansas who are still struggling to make ends meet,” said NRSC spokeswoman Amber Wilkerson Marchand. “Despite her assertions to the contrary, Blanche Lincoln has effectively opened the door with this vote for a government-run program that will come between her constituents and their doctors and potentially cause over 88 million Americans to lose their coverage.”

You don’t have to be Aristotle to understand the logical contradiction between these two spins from the GOP side of the Senate.

As everyone waits on the Senate Finance Committee’s final action today on health care reform, Ezra Klein has an interesting take on the final vote and what it will mean in terms of which senator has leverage in the rest of the process:

The big question mark is Olympia Snowe: She’s been given virtually everything she asked for. But there’s talk that she might withhold her vote to increase her leverage on the floor. As the thinking goes, if she votes for the bill coming out of committee, Democrats will assume she’s committed to the legislation and cease trying to woo her. On the other hand, if she votes against the bill coming out of committee, Democrats might decide she’s simply not serious about signing onto the legislation, and they’ll forge ahead with a 60-vote strategy.
But liberals should hope for an “aye” from Snowe. If she abandons the bill, that empowers Ben Nelson as the eventual dealmaker, much as he was during stimulus.

Whether you agree with Ezra or not on this point, it does appear that the votes on cloture and on final passage of health reform legislature have become hopelessly entangled, making the party identity of the cricial “decider” irrelevant.
UPDATE: So the vote was 14-9, and Olympia Snowe was on board for a fleeting moment of token bipartisanship. We’ll soon see if that helps with balking Donkeys in the Senate.

(this is the first of a two part analysis. A print (PDF) version of the entire memo is available here)
The real decision America must face in regard to Afghanistan is not the precise number of troops that should be sent but rather the mission they are given to perform.
Last January, when Obama took office, there was a broad national consensus on this subject. On the one hand, there was universal agreement that US forces should prevent Al Qaeda from ever again using Afghanistan as a base for training camps or other terrorist facilities. Quite the contrary, there was wide approval of the goal of completely dismantling and destroying Al Qaeda as an organization.
Although it was not always explicitly stated, it was quite obvious that this would require preventing the Taliban from taking control of (1) the capital city of Kabul and several other major urban areas and (2) a number of key infrastructure installations like major airports, electric power stations and national highways. The commitment to destroy Al Qaeda also clearly implied the need to establish and maintain a certain number of observation posts, forward operating bases and other “in country” forces adequate to provide intelligence about terrorist activity in various regions of the country. Most Americans were entirely in agreement with this approach.
On the other hand, there was absolutely no support for the ambitious “nation building” and cultural reprogramming of the kind the Bush-Cheney administration tried in Iraq– a vast investment of soldiers, funds and resources aimed at transforming Iraq into a pro-American, free market utopia. Most Americans were not willing to sacrifice more American lives or resources in this ideological neo-conservative crusade.
Public opinion on these issues has not changed greatly since January and behind all the complex maneuvering of the last several weeks the view described above still appears to be Obama’s view as well. There are difficult practical decisions about the proper number of troops that are needed to execute this strategy but the issue has become additionally and deeply confused in recent weeks because the influential military doctrine called “counterinsurgency” suggests a fundamentally different mission and strategy from the one described above. The current version of this doctrine is embodied in FM-3-24 – the US Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual.
The term “Counterinsurgency” – often abbreviated as COIN — has had phenomenally good press in recent years. On the one hand, it is frequently credited as being the strategy behind the success of the surge in Iraq. Yet, at the same time, it is also described in a way that makes it sound rather appealing to liberals. The most common one-sentence description of the doctrine is that it is focused on “protecting the local population rather than killing the maximum number of enemies” which makes it sound relatively cautious and even rather humane. Because it is usually presented in this appealing way, the approach has received remarkably little critical scrutiny.
(In fact, the general lack of clarity about what the doctrine actually entails was the major source of the confusion that emerged during the last few weeks. Last March, in the six-page “White Paper of the Interagency Policy Group” that defined US policy toward the Af-Pac region, there was actually only a single paragraph specifically devoted to the role of counterinsurgency in protecting the Afghan population. It read as follows: “Our counter-insurgency strategy must integrate population security with building effective local governance and economic development. We will establish the security needed to provide space and time for stabilization and reconstruction activities.”
To people unfamiliar with FM-3-24 these words sounded comfortably vague and relatively benign. But based on standard formulas for estimating the appropriate size of forces in COIN operations a literal interpretation of the paragraph above could be argued to require the deployment of as many as 600,000 troops to Afghanistan. The COIN specialists in the Interagency Policy Group all understood this potential interpretation of the paragraph when it was included in the draft and now point to these two sentences as having represented a binding presidential commitment to a vast expansion of the US forces and mission. As a recent Washington Post article has outlined, however, a number of the non-COIN participants in the drafting of the White Paper absolutely did not intend these few words to represent a binding, open-ended commitment on Obama’s part for a massive increase in US forces)
More important than this confusion, however, is the fact that Counterinsurgency doctrine has two fundamental weaknesses.

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