One of the odder stories of the last week has been the disappearance of SC Gov. Mark Sanford, who reportedly went hiking on the Appalachian Trail, and was out of touch with his staff and family for at least five days. His lieutenant governor, Andre Bauer–a fellow Republican, BTW–publicly freaked over the disappearance. And all sorts of fun-loving amateur sleuths have been all over this (including, according to Josh Marshall, a SC television reporter who’s found a witness who saw Sanford boarding a plane in Atlanta several days ago). Admittedly, you can get in a pretty good hike in at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport, but it’s not exactly the best place for getting close to God or nature.
Sanford finally called his staff, and will reportedly return to his office on Wednesday. But Southern Political Report‘s Tom Baxter has been the first to allude to the real mystery:

How, it was asked, could a governor be absent from his four sons on Father’s Day and think he could run for president? How could his wife not be certain of his whereabouts? Under what circumstances could Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer take charge if there were an emergency? And why was the last ping on the governor’s cell phone from a location near Atlanta, when there are easier ways to access the trail?
Perhaps the most puzzling question went unasked, however: How did anyone notice he was gone?
Sanford, who has feuded with Republicans and Democrats alike, and who inquired after he was elected whether he could live in his beach house on Sullivan’s Island rather than the governor’s mansion in Columbia, can lay claim to being – the first word to come to mind is “disengaged,” but it would be more accurate to say, “distant” governor in the country.

I can relate. I won’t name any names, but I once worked for an elected official who sometimes seemed to disappear for months at a time, right there in his office.
Which leads to a philosophical question: If a governor walks in the woods, and nobody’s there to see it, is he invisible?
UPDATE: As you may have heard by now, turns out Sanford was in Argentina, not Appalachia, because he wanted some place “exotic” to recover from the rigors of the SC legislative session, which ended with an assortment of veto overrides by the Republican-controlled legislature. Whatever else this “story” represents, it’s got to be one of the most inept public relations jobs by a major politician since Larry Craig’s explanation of why he got arrested in an airport restroom.
UPDATE II: Southern Political Report says that there’s now talk among SC legislators about impeaching Sanford. This really isn’t working out well for the would-be 2012 presidential candidate.

You may have heard that the U.S. Supreme Court issued its long-awaited decision on a challenge to the constitutionality of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that requires nine states and a scattering of other jurisdictions to secure “preclearances” from the Justice Department for changes in election procedures or legislative districts (congressional, state or local).
To the surprise of many, the Supremes chose on a 8-1 vote to decide the case on the very narrow grounds of enabling the petitioning local government unit a chance to “opt out” of Section 5 coverage. But the opinion penned by Chief Justice Roberts makes it abundantly clear that the next challenge will lead to invalidation of Section 5 unless Congress acts quickly to update the evidence of discrimination underlying Article 5 coverage, and tailor coverage accordingly. The data for Section 5 coverage currently only goes up to 1972, though the historic data, of course, of jurisdictions that used to keep minorities from voting at all isn’t going to change.
There’s a pretty strong feeling among legal beagles that Congress won’t be able to meet this condition because of the intense wrangling that comparisons of this or that jurisdiction’s voting rights behavior will engender. So it’s probably tiime to begin thinking about what the next round of decennial redistricting will look like without Section 5 as a factor (though Section 2 lawsuits after the fact will still be available). I’ve got a post up at fivethirtyeight.com that briefly gets into the potential impact.

To hear a lot of Republicans right now, Barack Obama is all but on the ropes, his approval ratings slipping, the credibility of his economic stimulus package in tatters, his health plan under seige, his foreign policy stature diminished each day by events in Iran, and above all, his entire agenda threatened by a surge of public worry about government spending and federal deficits.
You don’t have to scoff at any and every danger sign for the administration to understand that when push comes to shove, Republicans just aren’t providing any credible alternative. And via Greg Sargent, the latest evidence is in a series of questions asked in the new ABC/Washington Post survey about the comparative trustworthiness of Barack Obama and Republicans in Congress on some basic issues.
On health care, it’s Obama 55%, GOPers 27%; on the economy, it’s Obama 55%, GOPers 31%. And check out these two categories: on the federal budget deficit, it’s Obama 56%, GOPers 30%, and on the threat of terrorism, it’s Obama 55%, GOPers 34%.
As I pointed out the other day, all the expressed unhappiness in the world with Obama’s policies won’t ultimately matter (at least in terms of 2010 and 2012) unless they translate into support for the opposition party, and Obama’s problems continue to look pretty small compared to those of the Republican Party.
I’m sure most of you remember the moment earlier this year when the President, responding to demands that he let Republicans rewrite his stimulus legislation to fit their own views, reminded them: “I won.” When it comes to the two-party competition, he’s still winning.

You may not have seen this storyline yet, but I promise you, you will. Basically it argues that the Iranian protesters have been primarily inspired by the American creation of democracy in Iraq. Seeing the Iraqis vote, in this narrative, is what stimulated the Iranians to challenge their own clerical regime. The Fox News PR guys will call it a “tide of freedom unleashed by the United States” and the Iranian protesters will be described – as were the Iraqis — as yearning for American-style freedoms and hoping to make their country more like the U.S.
Regional experts who actually speak the major languages, read the speeches of the Iranian leaders and listen to the commentary in the Iranian street will tear out their hair and sputter that this is a profound cultural misunderstanding of how most Iranians actually think about reform. Consider the following analogy — imagine that in 1963 the then-Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru – noting on TV the clearly Gandhi-inspired, nonviolent tactics of the civil rights movement – assumed that the movement was actually generally inspired by the Indian example and led the Indian congress to unanimously pass a “Fraternal Resolution of Support and International Solidarity with American Blacks in their Heroic Struggle to create a Hindu Republic in the American deep South.”
Go ahead and laugh. But the notion that the Iranian protesters basic source of inspiration is the U.S. presence and activities in Iraq represents a level of American cultural misunderstanding of their motives that is equally misguided. Unfortunately in the absence of high-quality objective opinion polls, this cannot be empirically demonstrated. Moreover, because this notion serves the profound needs of two groups, it will inevitably become a permanent part of the American political debate.
First, the neo-conservatives. For them, this “made in America tide of freedom” narrative is vital because it justifies the invasion of Iraq. Even in their own eyes, the worst failure of their policy was the absolutely undeniable strengthening of Iran that it produced (“collateral damage” to Iraqi civilians and the sacrifices demanded of US troops were always considered an acceptable “price”) Embarrassingly for them, the replacement of Saddam Hussein with a pro-Iranian Shia government and the immobilizing and overtaxing of virtually every available combat soldier in America in “Blackhawk Down” style urban warfare for 5 years exposed the fact that their feverish fantasy of intimidating the Iranian regime into total submission with implicit or explicit threats of a massive George Patton-style armor/infantry thrust on Teheran (launched from bases in a compliant US-allied Iraq, of course) made them look like pathetically bumbling military incompetents. Today, rather than being seen as the modern-day George Pattons they fancied themselves, the neo-conservatives have become widely viewed as modern-day General Custers.
Thus, for them, the story that the sight of elections in Iraq was the central inspiration for the demonstrators in Iran is vitally important. It makes everything fit together again and makes them once again “right”. They will, therefore, cling to this notion against any and all empirical evidence to the contrary with the fervor of religious pilgrims in Lourdes seeking miracle cures for their ills.
The second and far more heartrending group is America’s military families. It is impossible to overstate the tremendous comfort this narrative promises to provide. They desperately need to feel that the difficult and painful sacrifices they have made have had meaning and have been worth the cost. For the families and friends of the injured and dead, this sentiment is unimaginably profound. They will therefore embrace the notion that the invasion of Iraq has been validated by the protests in Iran utterly and without reservation. It is impossible not to deeply feel and profoundly identify with their feelings.
Thus, for these two groups, the new conservative narrative will stick. For other Americans as well it also has a very strong appeal – one rooted in the psychological mechanism called the “theory of mind” – the mental model people have of how other people think.

Read more…

Data point one: virtually all congressional Republicans violently oppose a “public option” in a competitive system for health plans.
Data point two: half of rank-and-file Republicans support a “public option” in the most credible recent surveys.
So, if Barack Obama wants to break the decades-long gridlock on health reform, exhibit “bipartisanship,” and expose weaknesses in the opposition, which Republicans should he focus on?
My answer is in a post over at fivethirtyeight.com. Positive comments by Jonathan Cohn are here, and by Digby here. Suffice it to say that if I’ve been right about Obama’s strategy of “grassroots bipartisanship,” this is an excellent opportunity for him to pursue it.

Veterans of the political wars of the 1990s will recall that some conservatives perpetually alternated between describing Bill Clinton as “liberal! liberal! liberal!” and attacking him for “stealing our ideas” (this last thought motivating my colleague Will Marshall to note that “it’s hard to steal from an empty wallet”). We’re already seeing the same dynamic at work in their takes on Barack Obama.
Check out this characterization of the President (via Jason Zingerle) by The Corner’s Andy McCarthy:

The key to understanding Obama, on Iran as on other matters, is that he is a power-politician of the hard Left : He is steeped in Leftist ideology, fueled in anger and resentment over what he chooses to see in America’s history, but a “pragmatist” in the sense that where ideology and power collide (as they are apt to do when your ideology becomes less popular the more people understand it), Obama will always give ground on ideology (as little as circumstances allow) in order to maintain his grip on power.

So he’s a hardened ideologue except when he’s not.
In a follow-up post at TNR, Christopher Orr offered this hilarous comment:

I just wish that, as long as McCarthy was offering such a pointless analysis, he’d been a little more creative with his opposing categories. Something on the order of, “The key to understanding Obama is that he is a hybrid of delicate, magic unicorn and ravenous zombie. He will frolic in the woodlands, spreading pixie dust and joy, until his hunger for human brains begins to rise…”

Orr offers a parody which is funny because it’s not far from what people like McCarthy are actually saying.

Note: This is a guest post by Chris Bowers, co-founder of OpenLeft, that we feature as part of our continuing discussion on intraparty and intraprogressive debates. It was first published at OpenLeft on Friday, June 19, and was discussed by Ed Kilgore here that same day.
When Democrats were in the minority in the Senate, they argued to progressive activists that, in order to pass the type of legislation we wanted, we needed to take back the majority in the Senate. So, in 2006, progressive activists worked their butts off and helped deliver Democrats a Senate majority.
After Senate Democrats had the majority, they argued to progressive activists that, in order to pass the type of legislation we wanted, they told they needed not just the majority, but also 60 votes in the Senate and control of the White House. So, in 2008, progressive activists worked their butts off and helped deliver not only the White House, but also sixty votes in the Senate (once al Franken is seated, of course).
Now that Democrats have wide majorities in both branches of Congress, not to mention control of the White House, we are still being told that our agenda is not politically possible. However, what is really happening is that a block of conservative Democrats are regularly joining with Republicans to weaken, or block entirely, many of the pillars of the progressive legislative agenda:
1. Stimulus: A group of nearly twenty Senators, most of them Democrats, successfully watered down an already too small stimulus was watered down by $96 billion.
2. Health Care: After the budget passed, and allowed for the 50-vote process on reconciliation, we are now being told by Kent Conrad that there are not enough votes in the Senate to pass a public option. Since that time, bad news for the public option has rained down, including former Democratic Senator Majority Leader and one-time nominee for HHS Secretary Tom Dsachle telling Democrats to drop the public option.
3. Climate Change. The already weakened Waxman-Markey climate change bill is currently being help up and further weakened by a block of 50 House Democrats led by Collin Peterson. The bill already has lower renewable targets than China and most of the 50 states, not to mention removes the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon. However, that isn’t good enough for Peterson, so expect much of the same to happen once this bill finally passes the House and reaches the Senate.
4. Employee Free Choice Act: Six Senators, all of whom are now Democrats, flipped their position on the Employee Free Choice Act. Originally, at the start of Congress, and once Al Franken was seated, there were enough votes to pass EFCA. No more–not even in a 60-vote Senate.
5. Cramdown: Twelve Democratic Senators, and all Republicans, voted against the foreclosure bankruptcy reform known as cramdown. This measure would have allowed bankruptcy judges to reduce the price of mortgages for people in bankruptcy, thus allowing hundreds of thousands to keep their home. It was ostensibly supported by the Obama administration.
Time and time again, conservative Democrats representing between 10% and 25% of their chamber’s Democratic caucus have formed a block, joined with Republicans, and successfully weakened, severely threatened, or entirely blocked key elements of the progressive legislative agenda. They were successful in every case despite the ostensible, public support for that agenda by the Obama administration.
All of this is enough to make one think that it simply wasn’t true that Democrats needed 60-votes in the Senate and control of the White House in order to pass progressive legislation. It turns out that Matt Stoller’s arguments on the 60-vote myth were correct.
Instead of 60 votes in the Senate, what progressives need is Democratic control of both branches of Congress, control of the White House, and a progressive block of at least 13 Senators and 45 House members that will vote against Democratic legislation unless their demands are met. What we need is our own version of the Blue Dogs and Evan Bayh’s “conservodem” Senate group that is large enough, and staunch enough, to be able to block Democratic legislation by joining with Republicans.
We need this group to draw hard lines in the sand for the two biggest legislative priorities of 2009: health care and climate change. The group needs to make it clear that, if their demands are not met, then no climate change or health care legislation of any sort will be passed. Demands like:
1. Health care: A public health insurance option that is immediately available to all Americans.
2. Climate change: Restoring the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon and renewable energy targets that surpass those put in place by China..
The models for the progressive block are the Blue Dogs, the Senate “conservodems,” and also the Afghanistan-IMF supplemental fight. In that fight, a progressive block of 32 House Democrats help up the White House and the Democratic congressional leadership for two weeks, forcing them to whip votes hard and make some concessions. With 13 more votes, there was a good chance they could have succeeded in severely denting the neoliberal “Washington consensus,” and forcing real reform at the IMF. While the fight was not ultimately successful, it forced the White House to deal with the Progressive Caucus more than any other legislative fight in 2009.
Such a progressive block is already in place in the House for health care. In that chamber and on that issue, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has stated there are not enough votes to pass health care reform without a public option. We need to form a corresponding health care block in the Senate, and corresponding blocks in both chambers on climate change legislation.
Once these blocks are in place, the White House and Democratic leadership will be forced to either whip conservative Democrats to fall in line with the demands of the Progressive Block, or to convince an equal number of Republicans to support compromise legislation. Either way, we will put an end to the dynamic of the White House and Democratic leadership offering muted public support for progressive legislation, while conservative Democrats threaten, weaken and block that legislation. They will either have to come out in public for more moderate legislation, or start working hard for progressive legislation.
We need a Progressive Block, not 60 votes in the Senate. For the next few months, progressive legislative efforts should be directed at putting that Block into place.

It hasn’t gotten much attention in self-absorbed Washington, but the continuing budget struggles of state governments in much of the country aren’t getting any better. Abby Goodnough of The New York Times has the sad details:

With state revenues in a free fall and the economy choked by the worst recession in 60 years, governors and legislatures are approving program cuts, layoffs and, to a smaller degree, tax increases that were previously unthinkable.
All but four states must have new budgets in place less than two weeks from now — by July 1, the start of their fiscal year. But most are already predicting shortfalls as tax collections shrink, unemployment rises and the stock market remains in turmoil.
“These are some of the worst numbers we have ever seen,” said Scott D. Pattison, executive director of the National Association of State Budget Officers, adding that the federal stimulus money that began flowing this spring was the only thing preventing widespread paralysis, particularly in the areas of education and health care. “If we didn’t have those funds, I think we’d have an incredible number of states just really unsure of how they were going to get a new budget out.”

Voters ought to be asking the congressional Republicans who almost unanimously voted against the stimulus legislation about that.
But in the meantime, the worst may lie ahead, as Pamela Prah of Stateliine.org explains:

While 2009 is bad, states worry 2010 and beyond will be even worse. Even if the national recession ends this year as many predict, the outlook for states is bleak. State fiscal conditions historically lag behind national economic recovery. The year after a recession ends is typically when state budgets are hit hardest, because by then, Medicaid rolls have swelled with the higher numbers of the unemployed who have lost their health insurance.

In April the National Conference of State Legislatures estimated that aggregate state budget shortfalls for fiscal year 2010 would reach $121 billion.
You should read the New York Times piece for examples of where the states are cutting or threatening to cut services, from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s suggestion that California’s entire public assistance program be shut down, to the poignant decision in Illinois to stop paying for about 10,000 funerals for poor people. We’re going to be hearing a lot more of these type of stories in the immediate future, and at some point, they should get some serious attention in Washington.