On the first formal day of the Democratic Convention, any pre-game jitters seem to be gone, and the show will soon begin.
Here in the Red Rehearsal Room (the other two, appropriately, are called White and Blue), we’ve just rehearsed AFL-CIO chief John Sweeney, and the who speech prep system seems to be functioning well. The total number of speakers is down noticably from past conventions (a good idea, IMO), and the number of what everyone calls “real people”–some who have personal stories to tell about Barack Obama, and other who exemplify one or another of the major convention themes–is up. Nobody seems to have been told they can’t criticize George W. Bush or John McCain, which is a nice change from the message straightjacket in Boston four years ago.

They’re at it again. The National Black Republican Association is bragging that they have put up 50 billboards in Denver claiming that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. No doubt they hope to cast a pall over Obama’s acceptance speech, which will be delivered on the 45th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It’s total B.S., of course, and anyone who can read can see why by paying a visit to Chapter 23 of the Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., in which America’s greatest ciivil rights leader has some disparaging things to say about the GOP and its candidate of the day, among them:

The Republican Party geared its appeal and program to racism, reaction, and extremism. All people of goodwill viewed with alarm and concern the frenzied wedding at the Cow Palace of the KKK with the radical right. The “best man” at this ceremony was a senator whose voting record, philosophy, and program were anathema to all the hard-won achievements of the past decade.
It was both unfortunate and disastrous that the Republican Party nominated Barry Goldwater as its candidate for President of the United States. In foreign policy Mr. Goldwater advocated a narrow nationalism, a crippling isolationism, and a trigger-happy attitude that could plunge the whole world into the dark abyss of annihilation. On social and economic issues, Mr. Goldwater represented an unrealistic conservatism that was totally out of touch with the realities of the twentieth century. The issue of poverty compelled the attention of all citizens of our country. Senator Goldwater had neither the concern nor the comprehension necessary to grapple with this problem of poverty in the fashion that the historical moment dictated. On the urgent issue of civil rights, Senator Goldwater represented a philosophy that was morally indefensible and socially suicidal. While not himself a racist, Mr. Goldwater articulated a philosophy which gave aid and comfort to the racist. His candidacy and philosophy would serve as an umbrella under which extremists of all stripes would stand. In the light of these facts and because of my love for America, I had no alternative but to urge every Negro and white person of goodwill to vote against Mr. Goldwater and to withdraw support from any Republican candidate that did not publicly disassociate himself from Senator Goldwater and his philosophy.
While I had followed a policy of not endorsing political candidates, I felt that the prospect of Senator Goldwater being President of the United States so threatened the health, morality, and survival of our nation, that I could not in good conscience fail to take a stand against what he represented.

And just to clarify, Dr. King’s son and namesake, Martin Luther King III, had this to say about the same billboards put up by the same group in FL and SC:

It is disingenuous to imply that my father was a Republican. He never endorsed any presidential candidate, and there is certainly no evidence that he ever even voted for a Republican. It is even more outrageous to suggest that he would support the Republican Party of today, which has spent so much time and effort trying to suppress African American votes in Florida and many other states.

Given the record of Dr. King’s stated views, you would think Republicans would have enough sense to know that this type of disinformation and distortion will come back to bite them where it hurts. Hopefully some enterprising Denver reporter will figure out who is paying for the billboards.

I’m in Denver from now through the week, working in one of the convention rehearsal rooms, and will try to regularly do some posts giving a flavor of the backstage scene.
As always on the eve of the convention, there’s a fair amount of confusion, with thousands of volunteers trying to find out where they are supposed to be and how to get the credentials to get there. Security is pretty heavy; there was a two-hour line yesterday morning for access to the Pepsi Center (the main convention venue). Downtown Denver is saturated with police officers, many in riot gear (today is apparently the big day for demonstrations). Best line I’ve heard so far was from a coffee shop waitperson who said: “The SWAT teams all have scuba gear; guess that’s in case there’s trouble at the Aquarium.”

Ed Kilgore’s post (see below) about the inclusion of a timetable for withdrawal in the new U.S. Iraq status of forces agreement is right on target. In the real world of foreign policy, the agreement marks a fundamental shift to the policy outlook and world-view of Barack Obama.
The Neo-conservative fantasy was to make Iraq a stable, pro-western state economically oriented toward the U.S. and favorable to U.S. interests. To accomplish this inescapably implied a very substantial long-term U.S. military presence – possibly for decades – and any timetable for withdrawal or other explicit agreement that U.S. forces had to leave the country had no part in the Neo-con plan.
As political issue, however, the negative consequences for John McCain’s presidential campaign can to a significant degree be controlled. The administration and the McCain campaign are already redoubling their efforts to make convoluted semantic distinctions between “aspirational goals” and “inflexible deadlines” in order to maintain the fiction that there is some difference between what Bush and McCain have been forced to accept and what Obama has advocated throughout his campaign. They are also energetically promoting the notion that the demand for a timetable is actually a piece of superficial political theater the Iraqi leadership is employing to pose as nationalists in upcoming elections and not really a serious diplomatic demand.
These semantic games – unconvincing as they are to serious observers – will be sufficient to satisfy many ordinary voters because for a large number the specific issue of timetables is ultimately a small subordinate part of two larger political narratives.

Read more…

As our staff post reported yesterday, the latest New York Times/CBS poll indicates the selection of the vice presidential running mate is an important factor in the ballot decision of 25 percent of voters.
Any choice Obama made would disappoint some important constituency. And it may well be that the net number of votes gained and lost as a result of different choices wouldn’t vary all that much regardless.
The selection of Joe Biden as Obama’s running mate is nonetheless a solid choice that should help with some pivotal constituencies, including Catholics, the white working class, seniors and those concerned about Obama’s foreign policy experience. Biden’s home state, DE, doesn’t add any electoral votes. But his Scranton roots should help Obama shore up central PA and perhaps NJ, all of which Obama had a good chance of winning anyway.
Biden also gives Obama a savvy running mate, who can help Obama target McCain’s weak and strong spots more effectively. As the Senate’s top foreign policy expert, Biden will be in position to provide helpful counsel to Obama on a daily basis. Biden also has a gift for quotable sound bites and an ability to explain policy in simple terms without talking down to voters. I wouldn’t worry too much about gaffes, despite his “clean and articulate” blunder in the primary season. Biden is too smart not to have learned from it. The ’88 plagiarism controversy? I think most voters know that top politicians use speechwriters, and they sometimes screw up. Besides McCain’s “cross in the sand” story’s similarities to Solzhenitsyn’s account makes it unlikely McCain’s campaign will make too much of it.
The selection of Biden may hurt some with women, southerners and Virginians in particular. Kaine would have helped more with Virginia, and perhaps the south. As Ed noted yesterday, however, Obama has some strengths in VA that could provide a margin of victory, especially if Webb, Kaine and Warner campaign energetically for Obama. As for the south as a whole, Biden’s selection won’t help much, except possibly in FL, where Biden may help elevate seniors’ comfort level with Obama. It may be that Biden as veep may chill Obama’s southern strategy altogether. Obama can win without any southern states, but only if he wins just about all of the other swing states. As I noted in my 8/19 post, no Democrat has ever been elected without winning some southern states, and Obama has to win 72 percent of electoral votes outside the south if he is shut out in the region.
Perhaps the toughest problem posed by the Biden choice is winning the votes of women who are disappointed that a woman was not selected. As Ed pointed out yesterday, the NBC News/Wall St. Journal poll indicated that “among self-described Hillary Clinton supporters, 52% say they now support Obama, while 21% support McCain and 27% are undecided.” Worse, when that poll was taken, there was still hope that Obama would pick a woman running mate.
The Dem ticket’s strong pro-choice advocacy will help with women. Dems should miss no opportunity to point out that McCain supports criminalizing abortion. Few women, even some of those who have doubts about abortion, want women who have abortions to be subjected to criminal penalties.
The important question facing the Obama campaign now is, what can be done to win more support from women and southerners. Obama’s GA and NC campaigns may be crippled by the Biden selection. Perhaps the only hope in these states is that the African American and youth voter registration surges are big enough to justify continued investment of campaign resources. If Sam Nunn and Jimmy Carter campaign vigorously for Obama in GA, it might help with some white and conservative voters.
One thing that might help with both the south and women is to name his cabinet before the election, and make sure that women and southerners get a healthy share of the top posts. Paul Waldman suggested naming his cabinet at the same time as his veep pick. But Obama could still release cabinet nominees slowly between now and the election to good effect. It would give him a half-dozen or so days when he could dominate the news in a positive way, and it could make McCain look disorganized in comparison. Imagine the splash, for example, if Nunn and/or Clinton were Obama cabinet nominees going into November 4. The Democratic party is loaded with impressive women and southern office-holders. Obama can benefit by leveraging this resource before the election, and it would show a bold, innovative spirit that would inspire confidence in the electorate..

Amidst the heat and light of the presidential campaign over the last week, it was easy to miss a pretty big development in Objective Reality. The long-awaited Status of Forces Agreement between the U.S. and Iraq includes a timetable for withdrawal of American combat forces by 2011, preceded by the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraqi “cities and villages” by June of next year.
Forget, if you can, the Bush administration spin on the agreement they signed. The political figure most threatened by it is John McCain, who has violently and consistently opposed any sort of withdrawal timetable on grounds that it would fatally endanger an impending U.S. military “victory” in Iraq.
Barack Obama’s reaction to the new deal in Iraq is obviously a big deal in terms of framing his position vis-a-vis McCain’s. Here’s part of what he said about it:

I am glad that the Administration has finally shifted to accepting a timetable for the removal of our combat troops from Iraq. Success in Iraq depends on an Iraqi government that is reconciling its differences and taking responsibility for its future, and a timetable is the best way to press the Iraqis to do just that. I welcome the growing convergence around this pragmatic and responsible position….
Senator McCain has stubbornly focused on maintaining an indefinite U.S presence in Iraq, but events have made his bluster and record increasingly out of touch with reality. While Senator McCain continues to offer unconditional military and economic support for Iraq, I strongly believe that we need to use our leverage with the Iraqi government to ensure a political settlement. In addition to a timetable, we should only train Iraqi Security Forces if Iraq’s leaders reconcile their differences, and we must insist that Iraq invests its $79 billion surplus on rebuilding its own country. It’s time to succeed in Iraq and to honor the sacrifice of our servicemen and women by leaving Iraq to a sovereign Iraqi government.

This is a pitch-perfect reaction, according to the typically acute and highly credible account of Spencer Ackerman:

First, it makes the point that the administration came around to the wisdom of Obama’s position after exhausting the alternatives. Second, it portrays Obama’s position as the consensus view. Third, it puts McCain on the horns of a dilemma: Either endorse Obama’s consensus position — and thereby flip-flop and concede his opponent’s judgment is superior — or be out of the responsible mainstream. Third-and-a-half, if McCain stays consistent, the Obama line draws a wedge between Bush and McCain.
But there’s a fourth reason, and it’s the most crucial of all. Did you notice how Obama is talking about “success in Iraq”? He’s taking that concept and giving it a common-sense meaning: getting out responsibly — that is, leveraging withdrawal into a diplomatic strategy with the Iraqi government and the region — is what success means. That, by the way, isn’t just a good campaign strategy. It’ll be a good governing strategy, giving the military its due respect from a civilian leader while taking up the arduous and tripwire-laden task of actually withdrawing.

If Obama can indeed define “success in Iraq” as what he, the Iraqi government, and even the Bush administration are talking about, leaving John McCain with the options of either raving on the sidelines about military victory or admitting there’s no reason to keep troops in Iraq for four, much less 100 years–then that could help the tide turn decisively in the presidential election.

Jay Cost of RealClearPolitics has another of his battleground state analyses up today, this time on Virginia.
This history of the Commonwealth in presidential elections is well-known: no Democrat has carried it since LBJ in 1964. But Democrats have won the last three seriously contested non-presidential statewide elections, the 2001 and 2005 gubernatorial races, and the 2006 Senate race. Putting aside Mark Warner’s highly unconventional voter coalition in 2001, Kaine and Webb won with big margins in increasingly Democratic and voter-heavy NoVa, and smaller wins in Hampton Roads and the Richmond area.
Cost thinks Obama might have trouble duplicating Webb’s Hampton Roads performance (Webb, like McCain, had a strong natural pull among military personnel and veterans) and Kaine’s Richmond margins (Kaine was a former mayor of that city), but his potential equalizer could be increased African-American turnout. Obama would also need to do no worse than Kaine and Webb among white voters in Southside, Piedmont and Appalachian Virginia (Obama actually didn’t do that badly in the first two “downstate” regions during the primary). Cost suggests that raising the African-American share of total turnout from 20% to 25% would give Obama a good chance of victory.
I personally think that Obama might do better than Webb or Kaine in NoVa. And Cost doesn’t mention a second Obama ace-in-the-hole when it comes to black voters here and elsewhere: the likelihood that he will improve on John Kerry’s percentage of that vote. By my back-of-the-envelope calculation, if Obama can increase the Democratic percentage of the African-American vote in VA from Kerry’s 87% to 92%–a pretty good bet–that could produce a swing of up to 100,000 votes in the state without a significant increase in relative turnout. Since Bush’s margin in VA in 2004 was 262,000, African-American swing voters, here as in other battleground states with sizable black voting populations, are an X-factor that nobody much has been talking about.
More obviously, if Obama text-messages Tim Kaine’s (or far less likely, Mark Warner’s) name out today or tomorrow as his running-mate, that would almost certainly be worth a percentage point or two in VA, making it less of a reach for Democrats than Cost’s analysis suggests.

If you want to know why the Obama campaign has spent so much time and energy dealing with the convention appearances of Bill and Hillary Clinton, or why, months after the entire hep political world decided it was a terrible idea, there’s renewed speculation that the Unity Ticket could actually happen later today, look no further than the latest NBC/Wall Street Journal general election poll. It showed that among self-described Hillary Clinton supporters, 52% say they now support Obama, while 21% support McCain and 27% are undecided.
What makes this finding especially interesting is how “Clinton supporters” are identified in the poll: those who said they’d “like to see Hillary Clinton become president someday.” This definition probably excludes a significant number of voters who pulled the lever for HRC in the primaries more because of concerns about Obama than affection for Clinton–i.e., nominal Democrats likely to wind up in the GOP column in November. That Obama’s only pulling half of this narrower, more-likely-to-vote-Democratic category of HRC supporters is troubling.
It remains true that as Election Day approaches, most partisan voters and partisan-leaners will feel a lot of pressure to return to the party fold; one of the most obvious factors underlying McCain’s recent mini-surge in the national polls is that GOPers are solidifying support for him more thoroughly and rapidly than Democrats are uniting behind Obama. And overt support for Obama from HRC and her husband won’t automatically convert her admirers. But it’s a big, important target for Obama going into convention week, and well worth whatever effort he gives it, despite the continuing disdain his campaign and many of his supporters feel towards the Clintons.

The new Greenberg Quinlan Rosner/ Public Opinion Strategies/National Public Radio poll of battleground states, conducted 8/12-14, has Obama ahead by one percent. 65 percent of lv’s say they are seeing negative ads about Obama, with 48 percent saying they are seeing negative ads about McCain.
The latest New York Times/CBS News poll of adults (about 86 percent rv’s), conducted 8/15-19, has Obama ahead 45-42. 25 percent said the candidates’ veep choices “would have influence” on their vote.
A new Wall Street Journal/NBC poll, conducted 8/18-18 with (with oversample of Hispanic voters), has Obama ahead 45-42 percent. “a statistical dead heat.” The poll also found “Only half of those who voted for Sen. Clinton in the primaries say they are now supporting Sen. Obama. One in five is supporting Sen. McCain.”
Fivethirtyeight.com has an impressive, comprehensive multi-poll analysis of Senate races that has some good news for Dems, especially Mary Landrieu, who is now well-ahead. “Our model is now characterizing Louisiana as “safe” Democrat.”
Zogby’s 8/15-19, 2008 battleground poll of 10 states sees Obama with 260 electoral votes, with 163 for McCain and 105 electoral votes “too close to call.” Zogby moves FL into the McCain column, and has CO and NH now undecided.
A Fox News/Opinion Dynamics poll of lv’s, conducted 8/19-20, has Obama leading by a margin of 42-39. 45 percent would vote/lean toward the Dem candidate in their congressional district, compared to 38 for the GOP candidate.
The Princeton Election Consortium latest meta-analysis has Obama up 1.38 percent in recent polls, with an electoral vote edge of 291-247.

With, praise Jehovah, the veep speculation on the Democratic side finally about to end, thought I should give a shout-out to at least one blogger who has been evaluating the field not in terms of electoral heft, “theories of change,” or any of the other political factors, but in terms of an often-ignored policy optic. The Progressive Policy Institute’s Katie Campbell, whose new blog, movingupusa.org, focuses on “upward mobility” agendas for low-income Americans, has done profiles of Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Tim Kaine, Kathleen Sebelius and Bill Richardson, based on what they’ve done and proposed for low-income families.
Campbell’s analysis is particularly valuable in terms of Kaine and Sebelius, whose state-based records aren’t as familiar as those of their Washington counterparts. Check it out.