Scott Helman of the Boston Globe reports from South Carolina on a wrinkle in the “electability” debate that especially affects Barack Obama: the strong belief of many African-Americans that their white fellow citizens will never elect a black president, at least any time soon.
Unsurprisingly, this feeling is particularly strong in the South, where such attractive African-American statewide candidates as North Carolina’s Harvey Gantt and Tennessee’s Harold Ford have succumbed to racially-charged negative campaigns.

“Personally, I don’t think he has a chance in hell,” said Leah Josey, a 20-year-old English major at Morris College, a Baptist school in Sumter. “All those white people? Come on.”
Such sentiments are prevalent among black South Carolinians, who are expected to make up nearly half of voters in the Democratic primary in January. Nearly a third of black voters surveyed in a statewide poll in September said white Americans would not vote for a black presidential candidate.

This helps explain why Obama is running no better than even with, and in many polls, well behind, Hillary Clinton among African-American Democrats nationally, and also why he’s running behind her in South Carolina. And I’d have to say that anecdotally, Helman’s report comports with what I’ve personally heard from some African-American elected officials who express negative opinions about Obama’s electibility not as a fear, but as a bedrock conviction.

“Obama’s chief opponents are ‘Mr. and Mrs. He-can’t-win,’ ” said I.S. Leevy Johnson, a lawyer and power broker in Columbia who is active in Obama’s campaign. “You hear it a lot because historically that has been the case.”

Now it’s true that this sort of ambivalent feeling is common towards “pioneer” candidates. Elizabeth Edwards has not-so-subtly appealed to the fears of some women that Hillary Clinton would actually set back the cause of gender equality in politics by losing a general election. And going back a while, many Catholic opinion-leaders in 1960 openly opposed John F. Kennedy’s presidential candidacy on grounds that it would become a lightning rod for anti-Catholic prejudices.
But in the end, an overwhelming majority of Catholics did vote for Kennedy, and the question is whether the excitement of a viable campaign would dispel electibility concerns about Clinton among women and Obama among African-Americans.
Fortunately for Obama, by the time the primary calendar rolls around to SC, the question will either be moot, or he will have already demonstrated strong support in the exceptionally pale electorates of Iowa and New Hampshire. Just as JFK’s landslide primary win over Hubert Humphrey in profoundly Protestant West Virginia in 1960 helped dispel fears that he couldn’t win Protestants, an Obama win in Iowa would be hard to ignore. In general, if the millstone of African-American skepticism about Obama is as strong as Helman’s report suggests, and if he can dispel it, then Obama’s “upside” against Clinton in the South and in other states with large African-American populations may be higher than many analysts realize.

David Brooks has the latest installment in the never-ending effort to sanitize the late President Ronald Reagan’s track record. In his op-ed column in today’s New York Times, Brooks makes his case that the charge “that Reagan opened his campaign with an appeal to racism — is a distortion,” referring to Reagan’s 1980 campaign launch in Philadelphia, Mississippi, most famous as the site where three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Mickey Schwerner were murdered in 1964.
It is impossible to prove what Reagan intended to do on that occasion. Certainly, those who were involved in the decision and who are still alive would be unlikely to admit that it was a deliberate effort to exploit racial animosity. For the same reason, it is equally-impossible to disprove his intentions. What is known is what Reagan said on that day, and Brooks quotes him:

Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.

Brooks expects his readers to believe that the use of the term ‘states’ rights’ in that town was not intended to evoke segregationist sympathies, even when the previous sentence makes it clear that education is the primary issue here. What Brooks doesn’t provide is a little more background on Reagan’s views on racial justice, as does Sydney Blumenthal in his article in The Guardian:

Reagan opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, opposed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (calling it “humiliating to the South”), and ran for governor of California in 1966 promising to wipe the Fair Housing Act off the books. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house,” he said, “he has a right to do so.” After the Republican convention in 1980, Reagan traveled to the county fair in Neshoba, Mississippi, where, in 1964, three Freedom Riders had been slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Before an all-white crowd of tens of thousands, Reagan declared: “I believe in states’ rights.

Alec Dubro points out in his TomPaine.com article ‘Reagan White As Snow” that Reagan also vetoed anti-apartheid legislation and did what he could to screw up it’s implementation after the veto was overridden.
The reason Reagan’s record has any relevance to today’s politics is that the current GOP field is so weak that they feel a need to repeatedly invoke Reagan’s name as a touchstone to recall better times for their Party. Brooks and other Republicans, however, would be wiser to say as little as possible about Reagan’s racial views and policies.

Back in April, I did a NewDonkey post noting a Robert Novak column that put the official Right-Wing imprimatur on the proto-candidacy of Fred Thompson. Indeed, the column was reminiscent of The Novak’s highly influential epistle back in 1998 designating George W. Bush as the “ideological heir of Ronald Reagan.”
Now the Dark One appears to have withdrawn the imprimatur from Big Fred, because of his “astounding lack of sensitivity on abortion,” as reflected in Thompson’s Meet the Press appearance last Sunday.
In Novak’s account, Thompson’s specific sins were (1) a blunt refusal to support a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution, a longstanding demand of the Cultural Right that has been a staple of Republican Party platforms since 1980; and (2) an association with the idea that a reversal of Roe v. Wade might mean a “criminalization” of abortion.
The Prince is definitely right in his political analysis of the price Fred may pay for these comments; he should have known that sounding even vaguely reasonable on the “Holocaust” of abortion is something Republicans only dare essay in general elections.
But the sweeping nature of his excommunication of Thompson made me wonder anew about a Novak column a few weeks ago that read like a valentine to Rudy Giuliani, suggesting that California conservatives weren’t that worried about Rudy’s heresies on social issues.
If Fred’s off-limits for opposing a Human Life amendment, what should cultural conservatives think about a candidate who still supports legalized abortion in its entirety?
I don’t know quite what’s up with Novak, but his column on Thompson did offer one tantalizing hint of the current hard-right zeigeist. After demolishing Thompson, noting Rudy’s pro-choice stance, side-swiping Romney for his late-life conversion to The Cause, and dismissing Huckabee as a member of the “Christian Left,” the Prince of Darkness concludes:

That leaves McCain, no favorite of the right, but the major candidate with the clearest longtime position against abortion.

I don’t want to get into any conspiracy theories here, but it is interesting that Novak penned these words shortly after his fellow Opus Dei convert to Catholicism, Sam Brownback, endorsed McCain over the rest of the field.

Over at TAPPED, Dr. Tom Schaller has suggested that Barack Obama and John Edwards should supplement their attacks on Hillary Clinton’s policy positions by making a parallel political argument: that “the Clintons” presided over the destruction of the Democratic Party during the 1990s:

On her health care debacle and war vote, Edwards and Obama are making the case that she used bad policy and/or personal judgment, but they ought to try a new, politically-themed tack: Hillary and (they should be more careful here) Bill Clinton fought the Republicans but the GOP was stronger, not weaker, when they left office in 2001 than the Republicans were when the Clintons arrived in 1993.

Also at TAPPED, Dana Goldstein doubts that actual Democratic voters will be persuaded by a political narrative of the 1990s that doesn’t accord with their own memories. I agree.
But the discussion of the political viability of Schaller’s hypothesis avoids a more fundamental question: Is it true?
This question isn’t just a matter of historical interest. Schaller is faithfully expressing a revisionist take on the 1990s that has become an article of faith in many Left-netroots circles, with an implication that is of immediate importance to Democrats. The idea is the Clinton-style centrism was an electoral as well as an ideological disaster, producing at best two less-than-majority presidential wins at the price of the erosion of Democratic support in congressional and state elections. The 2006 Democratic comeback, according to this theory, proves that a more base-oriented, left-bent Democratic strategy is the key to a long-term Democratic majority.
But what really happened to Democrats in the Clinton years? And why?
The first essential step in answering that question is to isolate the effects of the 1994 Republican landslide. In the three Clinton administration elections after that (plus some off-year state elections), it’s hard to argue there was any significant erosion of Democratic support. After the 1994 elections, there were 204 Democratic House members and 47 Democratic Senators. After the 2000 elections, there were 212 Democratic House members and 50 Democratic Senators. Between 1995 and 2000, Democrats made a net gain of one governorship, and a net loss of one state legislative chamber.
So the case for Clinton’s disastrous effect on the Democratic Party’s national standing–if you are willing to overlook or minimize his two presidential wins–really comes down to the one calamitous election of 1994, when Democrats lost 54 House seats, 8 Senate seats, 10 governorships, and 18 state legislative chambers.
There are, of course, two divergent narratives that hold Clinton partially or wholly responsible for the 1994 debacle. One often heard on the Left is that his support for deficit reduction and NAFTA, and an insufficiently progressive health care plan, “discouraged the Democratic base” and gave Republicans a victory by default. Another, often heard among party centrists, is that Clinton disappointed voters–most notably 1992 Perot voters–looking for a “different kind of Democrat” with unpopular early-term positons on gays-in-the-military and fetal tissue research, and above all, a decision to devote much of his second year in office pursuing what looked like a vast new health care entitlement instead of welfare reform.
Aside from the inherent improbability that Clinton’s brief record in office could have alone produced this kind of adverse landslide, the intensity of the pro-GOP wave in state elections undermined both blame-Clinton narratives. After all, Democrats had managed to hold their own at the state level through periods of national GOP victories in the 1980s, and going back further, even in the vast Nixon landslide of 1972. Something deeper must have been going on that had little to do with Clinton or perceptions of “Clintonism.”
The two theories most often accepted by analysts at the time were (1) an unusually toxic “wrong-track” feeling in the electorate, which helped boost both Clinton and Perot in 1992, was taken out on the dominant congressional and state party of the previous two decades; and (2) a slow but steady realignment of the two parties on sharper left-right ideological lines finally “flipped” conservative Democrats towards the GOP, and reduced split-ticket voting, particularly in the South, where the 1994 losses were particularly large. Ephemeral circumstances, particularly a record number of U.S. House retirements and a pattern of racial gerrymandering in the South, intensified both effects in U.S. House races.
It’s entirely possible that structural issues that Bill Clinton had little control over, and administration policies he did control, both played a role in the 1994 debacle, just as it’s possible that both “blame-Clinton” interpretations had some truth with respect to different categories of voters. But it’s hardly a simple story, and hardly provides any clear ideological direction for Democrats today, much less an effective talking-point against Hillary Clinton.
What about the one Clintonian episode that obviously did have an impact on post-1994 dynamics, the Lewinsky scandal? Aside from the fact that the scandal had no obvious ideological underpinnings, other than to bond Republicans to a hard-right cultural message, it’s hard to escape the conclusion that in the end, the scandal didn’t hurt Democrats, unless you believe that’s what kept Al Gore from being inaugurated as president. In that connection, Schaller’s post suggests that the political case against the Clintons includes the “legacy election” of 2000, wherein their failure to “fight” for Al Gore made a crucial difference. Well, it’s hard to “fight” for a candidate who is doing everything possible to distance himself from you, and one of the most commonly heard complaints about the Gore-Lieberman campaign at the time is that it largely refused to deploy Clinton or his record.
Schaller makes one additional argument in his post that bears some discussion: The Clintons failed to build the sort of ideological institutions (e.g., CAP, Media Matters) necessary to combat the right-wing uprising of the 1990s. For one thing, the White House itself was a stronger pro-Democratic message-purveyor than any private-sector institution could have ever managed; indeed, it was the loss of the White House that made the construction of an alternative infrastructure so important. And for another, Clintonians have played a pretty conspicuous role in the Bush Era progressive “noise machine” scene. It’s a bit hard to cite John Podesta’s work as evidence of a general Clintonian lack of interest in institution-building.
All in all, I think Dr. Schaller’s barking up the wrong tree, but he is certainly fostering an important discussion of a set of beliefs about the recent political past that lurks just under the surface of most intra-party disputes.

John Bresnahan has a Politico piece on a new funding strategy for Democratic congressional campaigns that should arch a few brows: Here’s the nut graph:

With a huge cash advantage over the National Republican Congressional Committee, Van Hollen and Emanuel are cautioning their colleagues that the DCCC wants to have money to put into 40 challenger races next year — and if these vulnerable Democrats are not facing serious races or any effort by the National Republican Congressional Committee to unseat them, the DCCC will spend its resources elsewhere.

It’s a bold move, and one which appears to be based on the confident assumption that a mega-victory in ’08 is in the making for Donkeys. May it prove to be so.

Williams College proffs James MacGregor Burns and Susan Dunn have a provocatively-titled op-ed in the L.A. Times, “How to win elections, FDR style.” Burns and Dunn argue that front-runner Hillary Clinton is on the right track in emulating FDR’s strategy — “he purposefully sought to be elusive, vague and to appear to be all things to all people.” The authors say her critics complaint that she should be “more candid and genuine” is “a sensible and astute formula — for losing elections.” Although demographics have changed somewhat since FDR’s day, say Dunn and Burns, the Dems’ winning formula still requires a ‘big tent’ perspective. An interesting article, and one sure to generate a healthy measure of disagreement.

I wrote yesterday about the significance of Paul Weyrich’s endorsement of Mitt Romney as an indication of Cultural Right determination to stop Rudy Giuliani. But ol’ Rudy certainly offered his own rebuttal today, with the announcement that his candidacy was being endorsed by the Rev. Pat Robertson.
In an interview with Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post after the endorsement, Robertson seemed to embrace the idea that cultural issues just aren’t that important right now:

Robertson said although he and Giuliani disagree on social issues, those disagreements “pale into insignificance” when measured against the import of the fight against global terrorism and radical Islam. “We need a man who sees clearly how to deal with that issue,” said Robertson.

Since the other Republican candidates (other than Ron Paul) ain’t exactly doves, this sure looks likes a repudiation of almost everything Robertson’s ever said about the importance of abortion, gay rights, and other cultural issues. I mean, it’s one thing to say you’ll be loyal to the ticket if Giuliani is the nominee. It’s another to endorse him as your own candidate.
I’ve tried to think of a Democratic analog for the unlikeliness of this particular endorsement, and the best I can come up with is Cindy Sheehan joining Hillary Clnton’s campaign out of admiration for her energy proposals.
To be sure, Robertson’s pretty long in the tooth, and doesn’t have anything like the political clout he used to enjoy before the Christian Coalition imploded. But as a symbol of social conservative surrender to Rudyism, he’s pretty important, and it will be a bit tougher now for his colleagues to publicly contemplate a third-party campaign against Pat’s candidate.

While the Kentucky governor’s race and the Democratic takover of the Virginia Senate were the top-line news from yesterday’s offyear elections, other results were of interest as well.
As expected, Mississippi governor Haley Barbour was re-elected over Democrat John Arthur Eaves, but Democrats did take back numerical control of the state Senate (not the same as organizational control, since some Democrats have caucused with Republicans in the past).
In New Jersey, there were no major changes in the composition of the Democratic-controlled legislature. But the big surprise is that a stem cell research funding ballot initiative strongly backed by Gov. Jon Corzine was narrowly defeated, with fiscal rather than moral concerns apparently driving the results.
In Utah, the big news was the overwhelming defeat by voters of a school voucher plan enacted earlier by the Republican-controlled state legislature. And Democrat Ralph Becker was elected mayor of Salt Lake City by a landslide.
And in the least surprising news, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom was easily re-elected.

Down in Atlanta yesterday, I was watching a local yak show, in which Pulitzer Prize-winners Hank Klibanoff and Cynthia Tucker were being interviewed about the comparative strengths of the print rags vs. the blogs. The two Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporters gave a pretty good account of the merits of print media, giving some cred to the blogosphere as a source for good reporting, but stretching a little painfully, I thought, to paint a bright picture of the future of print at a time when daily newspapers across the country are laying off staff in droves.
You can find a revealing example of why print is often an inferior medium, at least for political reporting, by comparing the recent coverage of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul at one of the better political websites Orcinus and alternatively at the Boston Globe, which has won more Pulitzers than any daily other than the Grey Lady and WaPo. Here’s a teaser from Sara, writing on Paul at Orcinus back in June:

What I can tell you — what all of us need to know before we run out and sign on for a summer of Ron Paul Love Feasts — is that Paul has some long-standing ties to early-90s Patriot groups — and some ugly attitudes on race and equality — that should give us all long and serious pause….

She then cites some disturbing quotes attributed to Paul or his newsletter, including:

* A 1992 screed on African-American”racial terrorism” in Los Angeles, in which Paul insists that “our country is being destroyed by a group of actual and potential terrorists — and they can be identified by the color of their skin.”
* Another 1992 article, this one asserting that “complex embezzling” is “100% white and Asian;” and noting that young black male muggers are “unbelievably fleet-footed.”
* A Houston Chronicle citation from 1996, in which he asserts that Barbara Jordan was a “fraud.” Paul wrote: “Everything from her imitation British accent, to her supposed expertise in law, to her distinguished career in public service, is made up. If there were ever a modern case of the empress without clothes, this is it. She is the archetypical half-educated victimologist, yet her race and sex protect her from criticism.”

There’s more in a similar vein in Sara’s article, and Orcinus has many other disturbing reports about Paul. Contrast this hard-hitting reportage with the Boston Globe’s limp pages on Paul, which you can access here. To be fair, it’s not just the Globe. Major dailies in general have given him an easy ride of it. When it comes to comparing dead tree media political reporting to political blogs, it’s often like patty-cake vs. hardball.
The exception that proves the rule is the late great Molly Ivins, who hipped her readers to his extremist views many years ago. No doubt they miss her a lot these days.

Democrat Steve Beshear’s easy win in the Kentucky gubernatorial race tonight is very important, but the more dramatic news is that Democrats appear to have won control of the Virginia Senate. Given the Commonwealth’s well-earned red-state reputation, this is a good sign for Democrats nationally going into 2008. Yes, Virginia, you are a purple state now.