The online forum “Progressive Politics and the Meaning of American Freedom” that Demos and TDS recently cosponsored (see a pdf version of the forum’s nine essays here, and a summary here) illustrated a variety of views on the political salience of “freedom” rhetoric by conservatives, the proper definition of “freedom” from a progressive perspective, and the relationship between freedom and government as an instrument for promoting it.
A broad area of consensus among our essayists was the observation that progressive politics are persistently–and right now, urgently–undermined by popular mistrust of government, regardless of the motive: the fear that government inherently constricts freedom, the conviction that government is corrupt or incompetent, or the suspicion that government is aligned with forces inimical to freedom.
As a result, those who believe freedom is the quintessential American value that progressives must embrace, those who believe freedom is properly defined as a publicly-guaranteed right to a decent living and the opportunity to succeed, and those who believe freedom should be consistent with collective responsibilities for common needs and aspirations–all have a vital stake in rehabilitating the public sector as an effective vehicle for vindicating democracy and those individual rights.
How to do that–by reforming the public sector, explaining it, defending it, aiming it more sharply at corporate abuses, or fundamentally changing it–will be the next subject that Demos and TDS will tackle with an online forum. It is obviously an overriding issue in the 2010 elections, but more importantly, it represents an enduring challenge to progressives who seek to make government work for broadly- shared freedom and other common goals.

Earlier this week I did a brief post on the madness that’s consumed the South Carolina Republican gubernatorial contest.
Long story short, a conservative blogger and former staffer to both Gov. Mark Sanford and state Rep. Nikki Haley “admitted” he had once had an “inappropriate physical relationship” with Haley, a former Sanford protege (and the beneficiary of an endorsement from Sanford’s ex-wife) who has recently rocketed into first place in polls for the primary that will take place on June 8. Haley’s denied everything, and the blogger, name of Will Folks (a somewhat shady dude whose departure from Sanford’s staff was immediately caused by his conviction on domestic violence charges) has been trickling out highly circumstantial bits of data about his relationship with Haley and her campaign, but nothing that really proves an illicit affair, all the while hinting the real goods were still to come.
Haley’s legion of very conservative supporters in and beyond South Carolina, including Sarah Palin and RedState blogger Erick Erickson, have treated the whole thing as a certain smear, with lots of innuendo that someone more powerful than Folks–perhaps one of her GOP gubernatorial rivals, perhaps satanic socialists fearful of Haley’s wrathful righteousness–was behind it. And yesterday the saga seemed to take a new turn when Erickson put up a red-siren post saying that he had evidence Folks had accepted six-figure money to make the allegations, and that RedState would “name names” today.
Turns out that was sort some of joke by Erickson, meant to parody Folks’ own media manipulation tactics, but that didn’t keep ol’ Erick from retailing some vague conjectures about the possible involvement of Lt. Gov. Andre “Stray Animals” Bauer in Folks’ conspiracy (maybe that was part of the joke, too, though if I were Erick I’d have a libel lawyer close at hand).
Meanwhile, Haley says she’ll deal with the allegations after the election’s over, and everything’s back to square one, with South Carolinians waiting to see if Folks has any real dirt. His last gambit was to release cell phone records showing that he and Haley seemed to spend a lot more time talking late at night than you’d normally expect from a politician and a part-time speechwriter, but it still proves nothing. Assuming Haley’s innocent, you have to feel sympathy for her for having to endure suspicion for so long, but at least she’s leading in the polls (and in fact, her campaign may benefit a great deal if Folks doesn’t produce anything decisive). How about her primary rivals, whose campaigns have been totally robbed of oxygen by the furor? And then there are the citizens of the state, who aren’t exactly witnessing a calm exchange of the candidates’ pithy views on public policy (though the whole primary campaign has basically been a more-conservative-than-thou competition).
Certainly the entire episode is a reminder of the Palmetto State GOP’s rich traditon of sex scandals and skullduggery. I will agree with Erickson on one thing: in his front-page teaser for his “joke” post pointing fingers at Andre Bauer, he said: “Let’s go below the fold and down the rabbit hole.” That’s exactly where this campaign has taken us all.

A lot of the political chatter of late has sort of assumed that this is the Year of the Elephant, and that the many fractious GOP primaries around the country may well represent a Struggle for the Soul of the Republican Party, but shouldn’t have too much general election impact, particularly if the correct (e.g., less rabid) candidates wind up winning.
But I dunno. Evidence is beginning to accumulate that voters aren’t real crazy about vicious primaries.
Exhibit A is in Calfornia, where the extremely visible (i.e., can’t possibly miss it if you watch television at all) hatefest between Meg Whitman and Steve Poizner has been accompanied by a quiet but steady rise in general election polls by Jerry Brown. A PPP survey released yesterday shows Brown ahead of Whitman 48-36, the first double-digit lead either candidate has held in a poll this year. The same survey shows Whitman’s favorable/unfavorable ratio at an unsavory 24-44, and Poizner’s at 19-43 (Brown’s is 37-39), which makes sense in view of what the two GOP candidates have been saying about each other in the 70-80 million dollars in ads they’ve run.
Exhibit B is in Nevada, where the CW until recently was that Harry Reid had become un-reelectable, and the next Senator would be be longtime GOP frontrunner Sue Lowden. Instead, the GOP primary has turned into an increasingly intense three-way fight involving Lowden, the recently surging Tea Party favorite Sharron Angle, and Danny Tarkanian. Meanwhile, the left-for-dead Reid has crept back into general-election contention, and actually leads Angle in the latest poll.
In other states, internal GOP fighting could redound to the benefit of Democrats if the “wrong” candidate wins Republican primaries. In the Georgia governor’s race, for example, state insurance commissioner John Oxendine has led every single poll of the GOP race, and seems almost certain to win a runoff spot. But none other than RedState proprietor Erick Erickson, who is a local elected official in Georgia, has said he’d vote for Democrat Roy Barnes if Oxendine is the Republican nominee.
And there’s no telling what sort of general election fallout could be produced by the current saga in the South Carolina governor’s race. If, as has been rumored, a rival Republican campaign is implicated in the allegations of marital infidelity against right-wing favorite Nikki Haley, all hell could break lose.
UPDATE: Marc Ambinder of The Atlantic has had similar thoughts, but with a wrinkle: he argues that the Tea Party movement hasn’t really done much positive for the GOP, and could be helping make previously pro-GOP elections competitive for Democrats.

This item is by Alan Abramowitz, who is Alben W. Barkley Professor of Political Science at Emory University and a member of the TDS advisory board.
In a recent article posted at The Democratic Strategist I presented evidence that conservatism had a negative influence on the performance of Republican incumbents in recent U.S. Senate elections. In this article I examine whether liberalism had a similar effect on the performance of Democratic incumbents. I collected data on all contested Senate races involving incumbents in five elections between 2000 and 2008. A total of 69 races involving Republican incumbents and 61 races involving Democratic incumbents were included in the analysis.
Overall, Democratic incumbents were much more successful than Republican incumbents in these five elections. Only 6% of Democratic incumbents (4 of 61) were defeated compared with 25% of Republican incumbents (17 of 69). This occurred despite the fact that Republican incumbents generally represented states that more strongly supported their party’s presidential candidates than did Democratic incumbents. On average, Republican presidential candidates received 54% of the vote in Republican incumbents’ states while Democratic presidential candidates received an average of only 50% of the vote in Democratic incumbents’ states.
The difference between the success rates of Democratic and Republican incumbents was especially striking in states in which the incumbent’s party was at a disadvantage or enjoyed only a marginal advantage based on the presidential vote. In strongly Democratic and Republican states, those in which the vote for a party’s presidential candidate was at least five points above the party’s national vote share, almost no incumbents lost: 94% of Republican incumbents (33 of 35) and 100% of Democratic incumbents (23 of 23) were reelected. However, in high risk or marginal states, those in which the vote for a party’s presidential candidate was below or less than five points above the party’s national vote share, 44% of Republican incumbents (15 of 34) were defeated compared with only 11% of Democratic incumbents (4 of 38).
In order to explain the difference in the performance of Republican and Democratic incumbents, I performed separate multiple regression analyses of the results of elections involving each party’s incumbents. The dependent variable in each regression analysis is the incumbent’s share of the major party vote. The independent variables are the vote share for the presidential candidate of the incumbent’s party in the state and the ideology of the incumbent, as measured on the DW-NOMINATE scale, as conservatism for Republicans and liberalism for Democrats. (Dummy variables for each election year were also included to control for the national political climate at the time of each election but the coefficients for these variables are not included in the table). The results of the regression analyses are displayed in Table 1.
The findings in Table 1 once again show that among Republican incumbents, conservatism had a substantial and statistically significant negative influence on vote share after controlling for the strength of the Republican Party in each incumbent’s state and the national political climate at the time of each election. In contrast, among Democratic incumbents, liberalism had only a small and statistically insignificant influence on vote share.

These results suggest that one of the reasons why Republican incumbents from marginal and Democratic leaning states suffered an exceptionally high rate of defeat is that some of them were too conservative for the states that they represented. In these five elections, 58% (7 of 12) of strongly conservative Republican incumbents (those with above average conservatism scores) from marginal or Democratic leaning states were defeated compared with only 36% (8 of 22) of less conservative Republican incumbents from these states.

E.J. Dionne’s column today is a valuable meditation on the irony of the “socialist” Obama administration being stuck with BP as a partner in trying to mitigate the Gulf oil spill disaster, while the staunchly conservative Republican governor of Louisiana, Bobby Jindal, is begging for more intervention from Washington. As he also notes, the problem of sorting out government and private-sector roles is vastly complicated by contradictions in public sentiments:

“Do something!” citizens shout to a government charged with protecting the environment in and around a Gulf of Mexico that is nobody’s private property. Yet the government, it seems, can’t do much of anything because the means of containing this unprecedented anomalous event are entirely in the hands of a private company. It was trusted to know what it was doing with complicated equipment that, it turns out, BP either didn’t understand very well or was willing to use recklessly.
Belatedly, the Obama Administration has realized that citizens can never accept the idea that their government is powerless. It’s making moves to show that it’s in charge, even when it’s not.

“Deregulation” is wonderful until we discover what happens when regulations aren’t issued or enforced. Everyone is a capitalist until a private company blunders. Then everyone starts talking like a socialist, presuming that the government can put things right because they see it as being just as big and powerful as its tea party critics claim.
But the truth is that we have disempowered government and handed vast responsibilities over to a private sector that will never see protecting the public interest as its primary task. The sludge in the Gulf is, finally, the product of our own contradictions.

It’s been pretty obvious for a while that there’s a major split between Hispanics and non-Hispanics on the immigration policy furor sparked by Arizona’s new law authorizing state and local law enforcement agencies to enforce federal immigration laws.
A new MSNBC/NBC/Telemundo poll helps outline the political choices this situation poses for both parties.
To put it simply, white Americans tend to support the Arizona law while Hispanics tend to oppose it, by roughly even two-to-one margins. But the internals of the poll tell a more interesting story. The short-term advantage to Republicans of loudly backing the Arizona law is reinforced by the fact that many Democratic-leaning voters–notably suburban women and women over 50–say they’d look favorably on candidates raising Arizona. And the long-term problem for Republicans is reinforced by the finding that hostility to the Arizona law–and to the GOP–is especially strong among younger Hispanics.
Complicating the picture further is the fact that a sizeable majority of all Americans (60-29) continue to support some sort of comprehensive immigration reform with provisions that include stronger border security and sanctions against both employers of undocumented workers and the workers themselves–short, however, of deportation. (This is what TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira has been pointing out). And big majorities want Congress to do something about the problem.
This last finding may tempt Democrats to move ahead with comprehensive reform in Congress, heightening Hispanic hostility to alternative approaches while convincing non-Hispanic voters that it’s possible to increase enforcement without deportation schemes or potential harrassment of citizens and legal immigrants. But as Jon Chait notes today, certain GOP obstruction of comprehensive immigration reform legislation might simply increase the frustration of both Hispanic and non-Hispanic voters about the status quo, while shifting attention away from Republican extremism on the subject. And as TDS Co-Editor William Galston recently argued, highlighting this issue is a perilous strategy for Democrats, given the likely composition of the 2010 electorate.
There are big risks and big tradeoffs for both parties in making immigration a big issue in 2010. I doubt Republicans in most parts of the country are going to be able to keep themselves from expressing solidarity with Arizona and trying to make this a wedge issue. Democrats need to be more consciously strategic than that, which probably means a principled position that avoids the extremes of “amnesty” as well as deportation or ethnic profiling by law enforcement agencies–but that also makes Republicans play offense on immigration, and lets them become truly offensive.

Sarah Palin, political kingmaker (or queenmaker, as the case may be) has been on quite a roll lately. She was one of the very first national Republicans to endorse Rand Paul before he went on to trounce Trey Grayson and become the new face of the Tea Party Triumphant. And more recently, candidates for highly competitive June 8 primaries in CA (Carly Fiorina) and SC (Nikki Haley) have surged in the polls shortly after a Palin endorsement.
But Palin’s rep as someone with the political Midas Touch took a hit yesterday in, of all places, her native state of Idaho. In the Republican primary to face vulnerable Democratic congressman Walt Minnick, the candidate that Palin (like other national Republicans) endorsed and personally campaigned for, Vaughan Ward, lost yesterday to state rep. Raul Labrador.
Vaughan had a very large financial advantage in the race, but succumbed in no small part because of high-profile stumbles, including a speech in which he (or his speechwriter) lifted whole lines from Barack Obama’s famous 2004 convention keynote address (!), and a debate where he insisted that Puerto Rico is a foreign country (which didn’t get past Labrador, who was born there).
You can rightly say none of that was Palin’s fault, but she did do her personal appearance with Ward after, not before, his most famous gaffes. Labrador had some Tea Party backing (though Minnick, who has voted against most of the top Obama administration initiatives, has actually been endorsed by Tea Party Express, which apparently wanted to boost its nonpartisan bona fides), and was also supported by the local conservative hero, former congressman Bill Sali. In any event, St. Joan of the Tundra couldn’t pull her guy across the finish line.
In other news of Palin-backed candidates, the bizarre saga in SC involving allegations by a political blogger (and longtime conservative activist) that he had an “inappropriate physical relationship” with Nikki Haley continues to hang fire. The site which originally published the allegations is now trickling out purported text message records involving conversations between the blogger and Haley’s campaign manager that indicate the two were collaborating very recently on efforts to supress rumors of an affair, but don’t really corroborate the affair itself. And the Palmetto State zeitgeist seems to be turning in Haley’s favor, in the absence, so far at least, of real evidence to back the allegations.

It’s been quite an election cycle so far for the South Carolina Republican Party.
First you had the Mark Sanford psycodrama, resulting in a failed impeachment effort and lots of material for late-night comics and Democrats.
Then there was the speech by Lt. Gov. (and gubernatorial candidate) Andre Bauer comparing beneficiaries of the school lunch program to “stray animals.”
And throughout it all, you had Sen. Jim DeMint ranging around the country intervening in Republican primaries to promote a rightward lurch in the GOP, while his Senate colleague, Lindsay Graham, appears to have been intimidated into curtailing cooperation with Democrats on climate change and immigration legislation.
And now with the gubernatorial primary just two weeks away, the front-runner, arch-conservative state Rep. Nikki Haley, has been hit with allegations of an illicit affair by a former Sanford (and Haley) staffer who is now a self-styled “bad boy” political blogger.
The blogger in question, Will Folks, has a rather sketchy reputation, in part because he left the governor’s staff in 2005 after being convicted of domestic violence. Haley, who is married (as she was at the time of the alleged “inappropriate physical relationship”) is angrily denying the whole thing, while her friend Sarah Palin has joined other supporters in attacking the allegations as a dirty trick engineered by her political enemies.
Now the web site that published Folks’ statement on the affair is rather broadly hinting that it has years of emails and text messages between the two that it will make available if Haley has the guts to sue for libel.
All this is occurring just as a new PPP poll (conducted before this story broke) shows Haley opening up a big lead over the GOP gubernatorial field, though likely heading for a runoff.
Haley had started the race at the back of the pack, with the unwelcome reputation as Mark Sanford’s protege. But early backing from out-of-state conservatives (e.g., Erick Erickson of RedState) and then endorsements from Jenny Sanford and Palin had helped earn her the prized Most Conservative mantle in the race.
And now all this.
There’s no telling how the latest Palmetto State saga will turn out, but it could be good news for one of the two Democrats (Vincent Sheehan and Jim Rex) in the gubernatorial race. I mean, really, how much craziness from one political party in one state can voters accept?