Perhaps this is a dog-bites-man story these days, but remarks by putative 2012 presidential candidate Mike Huckabee in Iowa yesterday really do illustrate the delusional belief of Republican conservatives that they are struggling against high odds to keep their party from completely endorsing Barack Obama’s agenda:

“I hear people who give advice that the Republicans need to moderate. They need to be a little more to the left,” Huckabee said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It sounds like advice that Democrats would give to us so that we’d never win another election ever.”
Some argue that Republicans have lost Congress and the White House because they’ve turned the party over to social and religious conservatives, driving away moderates and independents. Huckabee made precisely the opposite argument.
“It’s when they move to the mushy middle and get squishy that they get beat,” he said….
“Historically, the way we’ve found our way back to winning, having clear convictions that are conservative and then when elected, act like it,” he said. “In every election, when Republicans have had clarity of convictions and those convictions were conservative, they win.”
He warned that many Republicans have gone astray by buying into President Barack Obama’s big-spending effort to stimulate the economy, a move he called “a big, colossal, utterly disastrous mistake.”

It’s hard to know where to begin in mocking this nonsense. Let’s start with Huckabee’s understanding of what’s true “historically.” As I recall, Republicans had a “clarity of convictions and those convictions were conservative” in 1964, and they lost in a very big landslide. Four years later, Richard Nixon ran as a sort of center-right “unity” figure, and won in a narrow plurality. In 1972, Nixon got his landslide after instituting wage and price controls, recognizing China, pumping up the economy with his own version of “stimulus,” cutting a major arms deal with the Soviet Union that led conservatives to “suspend” their support for him, and supporting clean air and clean water legislation (he also lied about the war, demonized “liberal elites” and bugged and harrassed his “enemies,” but he was nothing if not inconsistent on every ideological issue). Yes, Reagan won a bare majority in 1980, and then won his own landslide after approving two taxes increases and “caving” to “liberals” on major cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Bush gained office in 2000 with the help of the Supreme Court after promising to be a “uniter, not a divider,” who would make conservatism “compassionate,” and then was narrowly re-elected after promoting all those things (No Child Left Behind, the Medicare Rx Drug Benefit, immigration reform) that are now being denounced by conservatives as a “betrayal” of principle.
Huckabee’s peddling revisionist history of the rankest kind.
But even more ridiculous is the claim that lots of Republicans are clamoring to move to the “mushy middle.” Since the last presidential campaign got underway, Republicans have abandoned their long-time support for the earned income tax credit (now called “redistribution” or “socialism”) and their reluctant acceptance of global climate change as real (now denounced once again as a hoax), and have thoroughly exterminated any GOP interest in comprehensive immigration reform. They have adopted a partisan rhetoric that makes Karl Rove look temperate, punctuated by an actual debate by their national committee of the idea of demanding that Democrats start calling themselves the “Democrat Socialist Party.” As for the stimulus package, no House Republicans voted for it; one of the three Senate Republicans who voted for it after securing major concessions has since left the GOP. Two GOP governors, routinely denounced as RINOs, endorsed it (Ah-nold and Charlie Crist). For Huckabee, these tiny signs of dissent are a terrible threat. To use an old southern expression, he and other conservatives are goosing a ghost.
I don’t know why conservatives persist in this delusion, and just acknowlege that they are totally calling the shots in the Republican Party today. But the fiction of a major ideological battle is getting pretty old.

The murder yesterday at the Holocaust Museum, following so soon after the murder of Kansas abortion provider George Tiller, is rightly making people wonder what’s going on in our country. Are two politically motivated homicides in so short a period a coincidence? And if not, how do we avoid falling into paranoid states of mind that lead us to unfairly associate non-violence Americans with violent acts?
As it happens, James Vega did a prescient and useful piece on this subject for TDS back in April, entitled: “What is ‘right-wing extremism,'” motivated by the now-famous Department of Homeland Security study that had conservatives howling in outrage. Here was his most fundamental point about the distinction between “extremist” and “non-extremist” politics.

Underlying all extremist political ideologies is one central idea – the vision of “politics as warfare”. While this phrase is widely used as a metaphor, political extremists mean it in an entirely concrete and operational way. It is a view that is codified in the belief that political opponents are literally “enemies” who must be crushed rather than fellow Americans with different opinions with whom negotiated political compromises must be sought.

In terms of right-wing extremism, says Vega, there are separate but mutually reinforcing military and religious world-views that can lead to this treatment of opponents as “enemies” who merit annihilation, the first adopting the rules of engagement of warfare, and the second involving a literal demonization of opponents. And this process of legitimizing violence can begin with the sort of violent rhetoric heard so often on the airwaves and across the internet.
It’s important, as Vega reminds us, to separate the sheep from the goats and not blame conservatives for right-wing violence. But no matter how respectable the voices involved, when people adopt the language of warfare, they need to be called out:

Many conservative groups object to being lumped together with violent extremists, and argue that even their most intense and radical opposition to Obama does not make them violent political extremists.
In fact, they are entirely correct. What distinguishes “political extremism” from other concepts like “the radical right” or “hard-right conservatism” is the following:
1. The two ideological pillars on which genuine political extremism rests are the notions of “politics as warfare” and of political opponents as “enemies”. Groups which reject these notions are not political extremists,
2. Political extremism becomes dangerous and violent whenever and wherever these two notions are taken literally.
What should Democrats do? Basically, there needs to be clear and resolute pushback against these two notions. When politicians or others use the notions of “politics as war,” and “liberals and Democrats as enemies”, Democrats have to clearly and forcefully object. They have to stop the discussion dead in its tracks and say.
“No, you are profoundly wrong. Politics is not warfare and Americans with whom we disagree are not “enemies”. We totally reject these ideas. In fact, that’s one of the most fundamental differences between you and us and we think it is a major reason why most Americans now support Obama. You actually believe that you are literally at war with every single American who does not agree with you. We don’t think that way, and most Americans don’t either.

Let’s hope this way of stopping the incitement of violence in politics catches on before tragedies and outrages become all too common-place.

So what really happened in yesterday’s Virginia Democratic gubernatorial primary? In a sentence, Creigh Deeds trounced the two early front-runners in nearly every part of the state, despite notable disadvantages in organization and (versus Terry McAuliffe, at least) money. His campaign saved the money it had, spent it on well-placed TV ads, and peaked at exactly the right time, winning the bulk of undecided voters down the stretch and battening on growing voter dissatisfaction with his rivals.
As Ari Berman points out today at The Nation, there was almost certainly an element of the old murder-suicide scenario at play: Brian Moran spent a lot of time attacking Terry McAuliffe, driving up T-Mac’s already high negatives and souring voters on himself as Deeds quietly went about campaigning.
But it’s not enough to intone “murder-suicide” and forget about the whole thing. The remarkable aspect of the contest was that Deeds defied the heavily-subscribed-to belief that the “ground game” is what matters most in low turnout primaries. Yes, turnout was a bit higher than expected (320,000 votes instead of 250,000), but was still low by almost any standard other than VA’s weak history of competitive primaries. Moran was all about “mobilization” and McAuliffe threw lots of his money into the “ground game,” even as Deeds was laying off field staff. Yet Deeds won ten of eleven congressional districts (losing narrowly to the Macker in the majority-black 3d district that runs from Richmond to Hampton Roads), winning NoVa against two rivals from that region. Some pundits attribute Deeds’ success in NoVa to his endorsement by the Washington Post, but while that endorsement was well-timed and helped provide a psychological boost to the Deeds campaign, everything we know about elections suggests that newspaper endorsements don’t matter a great deal.
In other words, what the candidates actually had to say in their ads, their mailers, their debates, and their personal appearances actually had a lot to do with the results–an once-popular idea that deserves a second look now and then. (See Amy Walters’ breakdown on the percentage of candidate expenditures on direct voter contact via ads and mail, where Deeds excelled).
Was there an ideological twist to this primary? That’s hard to say, without exit polls. Moran definitely tried to position himself as the “true progressive” in the race, opposing a big coal plant in southeast VA, stressing his eagerness to overturn the state’s gay marriage ban, and hiring some high-profile netroots figures like Joe Trippi and Jerome Armstrong. Moran also tried to identify himself with those who supported Barack Obama against McAuliffe’s candidate, Hillary Clinton, in last year’s presidential primaries (not very successfully, given T-Mac’s relatively strong showing among African-Americans yesterday). And both Moran and McAuliffe went after Deeds very hard during the last week or so on Deeds’ record of opposition to gun control measures.
In a state like Virginia, though, even self-conscious progressives tend to cut statewide candidates a lot of slack, so the ideological issues with Deeds may have helped him marginally.
The silliest conclusion I’ve heard since last night, though, is that McAuliffe’s defeat somehow represents the “end of Clintonism” in the Democratic Party. Sure, the Big Dog himself campaigned for McAuliffe to no apparent avail, and if “Clintonism” means no more than the personalities connected with the Clintons in the past, then maybe the results were a blow to “Clintonism.” But if, as I suspect is the case, those who are celebrating the “end of Clintonism” are talking about “centrism” or efforts to appeal beyond the progressive Democratic base, it’s kinda hard not to notice that the winning candidate yesterday seems to most resemble that profile. And there’s no question at all that the areas of Virginia actually won by HRC in 2008 went heavily for Deeds.
If you missed all the very brief excitement over VA last night, you can check out the liveblogging that Nate Silver and I did over at 538.com. And I also did some analysis of turnout patterns in VA today. Now it’s on to November, and no matter what you think of Creigh Deeds, he does enter the general election contest with some momentum and a demonstrated ability to pull votes from pretty much everywhere.
UPDATE: John Judis povides a more thoroughgoing analysis of the “end of Clintonism” interpretation of yesterday’s results than I did, but reaches a similar conclusion. In the meantime, given the prominent roles played in Brian Moran’s campaign by netroots gurus Trippi and Armstrong, and his adoption of many elements of netroots CW on how to win a low-turnout primary, you have to wonder why nobody’s asking if Moran’s third-place finish signals the “end of the netroots.” Maybe that’s because this whole “death by association” theme is ridiculous, whether we are talking about Moran or McAuliffe.

Let’s say you’re running a gubernatorial campaign in Virginia, and you want turnout in Northern Virginia to be relatively high. This is probably not the early-morning headline you want to see in the Washington Post: “Severe Thunderstorms Hit As Polls Open in VA.” The story beneath that headline says that in some areas experiencing hail, radio stations are telling residents to stay indoors, presumably even if that van shows up to take you to the polls.
For whatever reason, it looks like God had some definite ideas about turnout patterns in Virginia today.

Virginia’s Democrats are holding a primary today, and the headliner event is the contest to see who will face Republican Bob McDonnell in November in an effort to secure a third straight Democratic governorship. As Jonathan Martin of Politico explains this morning, there are scenarios under which each of the three candidates–Creigh Deeds, Terry McAuliffe and Brian Moran–could win, with turnout being a crucial variable. But Deeds has been the surprise leader in all four of the polls released during the last week.
I have a post up at fivethirtyeight.com that explores some of the issues we may be discussing when the returns are in, including the ancient debate between mobilization and persuasion strategies; the role of timely media endorsements; and Virginia’s relatively restrictive early voting rules, which Gov. Kaine unsuccessfully tried to change this year.
The polls in VA close at 7:00 p.m.; the whole state’s in the eastern time zone; and given the expected low turnout, we may have a result pretty early unless it’s very close.

Every martyr needs her hagiography, and according to David Weigel at the Washington Independent, the Governor of Alaska is getting her own, tentatively entitled The Persecution of Sarah Palin. Penned by The Weekly Standard‘s Matthew Continetti, it’s due out in 2010, just in time for the launch of a Palin presidential run.
I don’t know how smart it is to make your first big political biography an extended whine, but then again, there is definitely a persecution-complex faction in the GOP that loves St. Joan of the Tundra not so much for the enemies she has made, but for the mockery she has inspired. The Torquemada of the Palin Passion, Tina Fey, ought to demand a cut of the book’s proceeds. Or if Continetti has a taste for historical puns, he could entitle the chapter on Palin’s Saturday Night Live ordeal: “Auto da Fey.”
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Normally American conservatives don’t much care what happens in Europe. But there are already signs that they will interpret this weekend’s European Parliamentary elections, which produced poor results for social democratic parties and an outcropping of far-right victories. The leading indicator was a Drudge Report banner that read: “USA Moves Left, EU Moves Right.”
You know how this will go, of course: Obama is “driving” the US towards “European-style socialism” just as Europe is abandoning it.
There’s only one big problem with this story-line: Europe ain’t abandoning what passes for “socialism” among American conservatives. Indeed, the kind of social policies that largely dwarf anything proposed by Obama in this country are so much a part of the landscape that parties of the Left can’t find traction in hard times, as the Financial Times‘ Tony Barber explains:

[I]n France, Germany and Italy, voters preferred to stick with ruling centre-right parties, even though economic conditions are as severe as anything in living memory.
One reason is that centre-right leaders, alert to the risk of being portrayed as defenders of a heartless or irresponsible capitalist system, have sought to protect citizens against the worst effects of the recession by preserving jobs where possible and letting the welfare state take care of those in need.
Unemployment benefits, access to medical care and other forms of social expenditure, which come into effect automatically during a recession, form a large part of the €400bn fiscal stimulus that EU policymakers claim to have been implementing over the past six months.
This Franco-German model, criticised in the US and UK in the boom years as an unaffordable, bloated welfare system, has turned out to be exactly what most voters want during the recession.

You can understand why conservatives here would want to seize on any evidence from any source to create optimism for their embattled cause and their shrinking party vehicle, the GOP. But unless they want to associate themselves with the relative success of anti-immigrant or neo-fascist parties in the EU elections, they should probably look somewhere else.