In times like these, it’s important to acknowlege good news when it happens. And for me personally, along with countless other long-time advocates of voluntary national service, President Obama’s signing of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act today was good news that we’ve awaited for a long, long time.
When national service was first emerging as a serious issue in Congress back in the late 1980s (I was involved in drafting a bill introduced by Sen. Sam Nunn at the time), its support in both parties was limited, with many Republicans scoffing at the idea of compensated service and some Democrats worrying that participants might undercut public employees. Ted Kennedy successfully shepherded through Congress a small national and community service demonstration program in 1990, and I was lucky enough to help set up a pilot program in Georgia. Bill Clinton embraced the idea in 1992–against the advice of some of his political advisors–and in 1993 secured authorization of AmeriCorps, the first service program since the Great Society’s VISTA primarily focused on full-time service.
Though Democrats by then had largely come to support voluntary national service, AmeriCorps struggled for survival throughout the balance of the Clinton administration, as congressional Republicans repeatedly sought to kill it, mainly because it was a signature Clinton initiative. It didn’t get much better after 2000, even though George W. Bush devoted much of his 2002 State of the Union Address to a call for expanded national service (and then did little or nothing to implement it).
The 2008 presidential campaign witnessed a revival of interest in national service, as most of the Democratic candidates–most notably Barack Obama and Chris Dodd–made specific national service commitments, while Republican nominee John McCain had long supported a major AmericCorps expansion, once cosponsoring a bill with Evan Bayh that proposed much of what the legislation today accomplished.
But it’s still somewhat astonishing to see this expansion enacted after so many years of frustration. Yes, many conservatives still attack the very idea, and some told preposterous lies about the latest legislation, suggesting it would create re-education camps or lead immediately to compulsory service. But the Kennedy Service Act won 79 votes in the Senate and 275 votes in the hyper-polarized House, and the President didn’t have to look too far, for once, to find Republicans to share some credit with for a signature accomplishment of his own.
Another long-time national service warrior, Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall, had these pertinent words to say when the bill cleared Congress:

Although it didn’t get the attention it deserved, passage of the Serve America bill is a major breakthrough. It enables us to build a uniquely American approach to public problem solving that has proven its worth over the past 15 years in communities across the country. It multiplies opportunities for people to give back to their communities while earning money to pay for their education. It establishes a growth trajectory that eventually could move national service from the margins to the center of our national life, where it belongs.

I think this is an Obama achievement that’s going to be remembered positively for a long time.

At The New Republic yesterday, Franklin Foer and Noam Scheiber undertook the latest effort to define “Obamaism,” and concluded that the president represents a sort of hybrid liberalism that reflects the market-friendly attitude of Bill Clinton’s New Democrats tempered by a more traditional commitment to equality:

Like the New Democrats who ultimately shaped the Clinton administration’s agenda, Obama has a deep respect for the market and wants to minimize the state’s footprint on it. He has little interest in fixing prices or rationing goods or reversing free-trade agreements. But, while he basically shares the New Democrats’ instincts, he rejects their conclusions. Reacting against the overweening statism of their liberal ancestors, many New Democrats came to believe that if government largely got out of the way and let markets work properly, the natural result would be widely shared prosperity. You only need to view the extent of Obama’s domestic agenda to know he doesn’t agree.

They go on to talk about the Obamaite tendency to “nudge” or “harness” market forces to accomplish progressive means, instead of relying on direct government action, as reflected in both their banking and health care policies.
While I generally agree with their take on “Obamaism,” I do question, as a veteran of the whole New Democratic thing, Foer and Scheiber’s retroactive take on that ideology, which they describe as based on the belief that “if government largely got out of the way and let markets work properly, the natural result would be widely shared prosperity.” I don’t think New Democrats were ever as laissez-faire oriented as they describe it.
The closest anyone ever came to an ideological definition for the New Democratic “Third Way” was probably the 1996 Progressive Policy Institute document called “The New Progressive Declaration,” a self-conscious manifesto for the reform movement that was then sweeping through center-left parties all over the world. Here’s that document’s key principle when it comes to the fundamental relationship of markets to government and society:

The first cornerstone–the promise of equal opportunity for all and special privilege for none–has animated generations of American leaders and has attracted millions of immigrants to our shores. It is the ideal of a society in which individuals earn their rewards through their own talents and effort within a system of fair and open rules. It recognizes that there is no invisible hand that creates equal opportunity; it is a conscious social achievement that requires affirmative acts: removing discriminatory barriers, providing meaningful arenas for self-improvement, a commitment to public investment, and a rejection of special-interest subsidies that give the influential a leg up.

Equal opportunity as a “conscious social achievement that requires affirmative acts” doesn’t quite sound like getting government out of the way to let markets work their magic. And for all the talk about Obama’s agenda transcending that of his Clintonian predecessors, some of his signature progressive agenda items, like a market-based approach to universal health coverage and a cap-and-trade system for reducing carbon emissions, have been advocated by serious New Democrat types for years, along with a strong commitment to progressive tax rates.
That’s not to say that Obama is today merely echoing what the Clintonians were saying a decade or so ago. The real difference, I would argue, was not any New Democratic lack of interest in equality or public-sector activism, but rather a hostility to regulation based on a sense of triumphalism about technology and globalization as wholly positive developments, and a conviction that “information age” progressivism needed to rethink the social bargains associated with “industrial age” progressivism. It’s safe to say that New Democrats were irrationally exuberent about the economic trends of the 1990s, though not entirely wrong, either.
In general, I’d say the more we learn about Barack Obama’s domestic ideology, the more it looks like a “third way” progressivism chastened by the economic experiences of the last decade and yoked to a much firmer commitment to the necesssity of maintaining some of the “old” social bargains and regulatory practices of the New Deal and Great Society eras. And in international relations, it’s even more obvious that Obama represents a liberalism chastened by an Iraq War that so many Clintonians embraced, however tentatively or fleetingly.
As Foer and Scheiber conclude, Obama may find the elusive “third way” that Clinton “grasped for a decade ago,” whether or not his political thinking acquires a distinctive label or is articulated in books and manifestos. Right now most progressives would settle for success in sheparding America throught the present crisis, and in giving progressive governance a fresh chance.

Of all the questionable anti-administration agitprop being churned out by conservative media in recent weeks, one of the weirdest bits is the ongoing assault on Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano over a routine DHS study suggesting that violent right-wing groups might target returing war veterans for recruitment. It reported that the FBI had begun investigating domestic terrorist efforts to recruit “disgruntled vets” in December–i.e., back when George W. Bush was still in charge.
The report has been blown up into a big “controversy” by Fox and its blogosperic and elected official echo chamber, and distorted beyond recognition into a claim that the Obama administration is ignoring Islamic extremists in order to spy on conservatives and veterans.
It’s hard to know where to begin pushing back on this hysteria. Yes, there are domestic right-wing terrorist groups that represent threats; that’s all te report was about, and DHS is required by statute to make such assessments periodically. No, the report didn’t represent some sort of major prioritization by DHS. Yes, the FBI watches terrorist groups and shares its information with DHS; if you have a problem with that, conservatives, you should have raised the issue with the Bush administration.
And of course veterans returing from combat are, as they have been throughout human history, ripe targets for terrorist recruitment, because they have recent military training, and because combat tends to be rather stressful. It also doesn’t help that vets are returing to a country in the midst of a deep recession. Anyone professing shock at this simple fact, or who thinks mentioning it represents an attack on veterans, flunks both history and logic.
Even if you concede some legitimate concern over this report, the abuse being dealt out to Napolitano over it is just a classic smear.

The dramatic upsurge during the last year or so of conservative use of the term “socialist” to describe Barack Obama, progressives generally, and such progressive goals as universal health care and carbon emissions limits, is usually attributed to a hyperbolic free-market mania that treats any public-sector activism as a way station to government direction of all economic activity.
That clearly is the predominant causal factor in latter-day red-baiting on the Right. But there’s another one as well: the determination of the pre-millenial faction of what’s left of the Christian Right to identify progressives with a one-world secularism that’s a sign of the rise of the Antichrist and the End Times.
You may recall the many hints dropped during last year’s presidential campaign by some Christian Right agitators that Barack Obama might be, well, if not the Antichrist himself, then maybe one of his agents.
Such “thinking” didn’t end with Election Day, and now some premillenialists are weaving together the global economic crisis, the interventionist policies of many Western governments, and the replacement of Bush-style unilateralism in Washington with Obama’s oft-repeated efforts to restore diplomacy and alliances as foreign policy tools, into Marks of a Red Beast.
Via that intrepid chronicler of the Christian Right, Sarah Posner, we are alerted to a special Easter Issue of the conservative tabloidy magazine Newsmax, which takes the temperature of conservative Christian activists on the question of whether the Second Coming is imminent.
While some Christian Right leaders (particularly those associated with postmillenialst theological traditions, like the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land) quoted in this feature are quick to warn about the dangers of too much End Times speculation, others are not so reticent, and the prevailing theme is that global “socialism” of the mildly center-left nature could be, literally, the work of the devil. Check out this quote from Tim LaHaye, co-author of the bestelling “Left Behind” series of apocalytpic novels:

In an exclusive interview, LaHaye tells Newsmax: “What we see going on in the world is just like Jesus said — in the last days, perilous times will come. Well, they are perilous, not only in the political field. And socialism is sweeping the world. Even Newsweek magazine recently announced on its cover that ‘We Are All Socialists Now.’
“It’s a new thought, for the American people anyway. World socialism is the forerunner to the Antichrist kind of government that he is going to run during the Tribulation period.”

More ominous is Newsmax’s quotes from Fox’s Glenn Beck, who is now rivalling Rush Limbaugh as the most popular right-wing gabber in the country. Beck connects all the dots linking Obama, socialism, and the one-world agenda of the Antichrist:

America’s blatant move towards socialism has caught the eye of the world, especially those who love the idea of a one-world government. They think this could be their opportunity to achieve their goal, and they are attempting to cash in on socialism’s current favorable public view. The sad part is they are succeeding. The world views the European Union as a wild success and other leaders want to emulate the EU. Why do you think that Obama had such huge crowds in Germany? Because he thinks like they do….
The fact that, for the first time, Russia and Iran have alliances — something that has to happen for end-times prophecy to be fulfilled; America’s weakened standing in the world. America is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible, implying that it would be crippled or taken out of the picture in some way.

For people like LaHaye and Beck, Obama’s foreign policy, and particularly his diplomatic initiatives towards Russia and Iran, are as significant as any of his domestic policies in signalling his alignment with Satan’s agenda. This is worth watching as the campaign of calumny, and in some cases demonization, against the 44th president continues.

The fun just never ends when it comes to following the career of the front-runner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. As you may have heard by now, her nominee to become Alaska’s Attorney General, a very sketchy right-wing dude named Wayne Ross, was rejected by the Republican-controlled state legislature while Palin was off in Indiana at an anti-abortion fundraiser.
The backstory is one of many chickens coming home to roost. The AG opening was created when Palin ally Talis Colberg resigned in the wake of fallout over the Troopergate saga. Appointing Ross, a notorious caricature of wingnuttery in a state where everybody knows everybody, was a grossly provocative act by Palin. Then the governor went out of her way to offend legislators by refusing to appoint an acceptable Democrat to an open Democratic-controlled state senate seat (defying bipartisan Alaska custom), and Ross went out of his way to defend her action. Then Palin decided to go to Indiana in the decisive, final week of the legislative session, in what was obviously a special-interest-group command performance associated with her presidential aspirations.
There once was a time not long ago when Palin would retreat back to the warm embrace of Alaskans after being mocked and rebuffed in the national political arena. Not so much any more. I wonder if she’s rethinking her decision against challenging Sen. Lisa Murkowski next year. It’s a lot easier to get to all those right-to-life events from Washington rather than Juneau, and senators don’t have all those messy executive decisions to make.

I guess extraordinary times lead to extraordinary talk, but Texas Governor Rick Perry seems to have an extraordinarily limited knowledge of American history, looking at some of his remarks this week about states’ rights.
Perry got the most attention for hinting at a revival of Texas secessionist sentiment. Via Steve Benen, we hear him respond to calls of “Secede!” from a “tea party” event yesterday:

“There’s a lot of different scenarios,” Perry said. “We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that.

Now there’s always been a lot of semi-facetious Texas Independence talk in the Lone Star State, so I take this flirtation with secession by Perry with a shaker of salt. But less noticed was his more forthright effort to raise the banner of “states’ rights” in a different statement:

I believe the federal government has become oppressive. It’s become oppressive in its size, its intrusion in the lives of its citizens, and its interference with the affaris of our state.
Texans need to ask themselves a question. Do they side with those in Washington who are pursuing this unprecendented expansion of power, or do they believe in individual rights and responsibilities laid down in our foundational documents.
Where’re you gonna’ stand? With an ever-growing Washington bureaucracy, or are you going to stand with the people of this state who understand the importance of state’s rights.
Texans need to stand up. They need to be heard, because the state of affairs that we find ourselves in cannot continue indefinitely…
…We think it’s time to draw the line in the sand and tell Washington that no longer are we going to accept their oppressive hand in the state of Texas.

It’s been quite some time since it’s been respectable in major-party politics, even in the South, to prattle about “states’ rights.” You can promote “federalism,” yeah, and bash Washington all day long, sure. But issuing the old rebel yell of “states’ rights” is a bit edgy, even for Rick Perry. Looks like W.’s handpicked successor as governor of Texas is determined to nail down that hard-core conservative vote early in his anticipated primary battle next year with Kay Bailey Hutchison.

This week has brought the long-delayed resolution of the 2008 U.S. Senate contest in Minnesota to a near-end, with a special three-judge panel appointed by the state Supreme Court rejecting Norm Coleman’s petition to include additional absentee ballots and paving the way for Al Franken to finally assume the seat.
Coleman will immediately appeal the decision to the state Supremes, but nobody much seems to think they are likely to overrule the special panel they created to resolve the dispute. And there’s also been talk that Coleman might follow up an exhaustion of his state remedies by going into federal court and asking for a Bush v. Gore-style intervention on federal constitutional grounds. But aside from the unique this-isn’t-precedent principle embedded in Bush v. Gore, the real obstacle to use of this avenue is the vast difference between the rational recount and dispute-resolution process used by Minnesota, and the crazy-quilt chaos of Florida in 2000.
And so, as Norm Coleman’s Senate career almost certainly expires, with it, too, should expire one of the “lessons of 2000” so often drawn from that horrific experience: that the side exhibiting the most aggressive tactics always wins election-result disputes.
It’s an article of faith among many progressives that Gore and Lieberman lost the election in 2000 well before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, by exhibiting a naive respect for the rule of law while the Bushies laughed at them contemptuously and blew their doors off in manipulating the process by any means necessary. That’s certainly the impression left by the much-watched HBO movie Recount, where an effete and pompous Warren Christopher, who worried about New York Times editorials and the judgment of history, was decisively outflanked from the beginning by the charmingly vicious Jim Baker. Indeed, the idea that Democrats handed Bush the presidency through a weak and supercilious concern for fair play provided a lot of the impetus (according to some accounts) for the whole “netroots” phenomenon of the ensuing years.
As Josh Marshall notes today via a reader email, Al Franken has been the quieter, more rules-observing contestant in the Minnesota dispute. And that seems to have paid off politically: according to a new poll, 63% of Minnesotans now want Coleman to concede. This is important because it places pressure on MN Gov. Tim Pawlenty to certify Frankel as a senator if Coleman loses his state appeal, without waiting to see what happens in a possible federal suit.
My point here is not to relitigate the argument over Al Gore’s tactics in 2000, though my personal opinion is that the key mistake was the failure to push for a statewide recount from the get-go: it’s that going forward the best way to prevent the recurrence of the 2000 nightmare was and remains a push for election reforms at the state and national levels that create more Minnesotas and fewer Floridas. Something that often got lost in the recriminations over Florida in 2000 is that Gore would have won without any recount whatsoever had the Florida election machinery under Katherine Harris not been allowed to play havoc with voter rolls and election sites before any vote was cast. Barack Obama’s decisive victory last year has probably reduced the already-low interest level of many Democratic elected officials in election reform. They should compare Florida 2000 with Minnesota 2008, and rethink their indifference about how we hold elections in this country.

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Editor’s Note: this TDS Strategy Memo, written by Andrew Levison, provides a unique historical perspective on President Obama’s much-debated strategy for promoting a progressive agenda in Washington, drawing on the lessons of the civil rights movement.
Obama’s ambitious budget has profoundly reassured many Democrats that he is indeed the progressive he appeared to be during the 2008 campaign. But there is still widespread concern about his continued desire to achieve some degree of “bipartisanship.”
For many progressives, Barack Obama’s notion of “bipartisanship” reflects a political strategy rooted in a timid, overly weak and compliant variety of 1990’s centrism — a political strategy that the Democratic Party finally rejected after the 2004 election, leading to the gains in the elections of 2006 and 2008. In this view, Obama’s attempts to negotiate with congressional Republicans over his stimulus and budget programs and his continuing expressions of a desire to win the support of moderate Republican legislators for his health and energy plans represent a serious threat to compromise and dilute the progressive vision reflected in his budget.
The progressive alternative to Obama’s strategy that this critical view suggests seems obvious: a much more consistently combative, fiercely partisan and unyieldingly progressive approach, one that seeks to maximize Democratic victories and reject any unnecessary compromise. As Digby, for example argued: “Only in the beltway bubble is there some expectation that everyone is going to agree. The rest of us would prefer that our politicians stand up for what they believe in and try to do what they promised”.
This approach was developed and championed by the Democratic grassroots and netroots during the Bush years and it is also often suggested that it is also the modern version of the political strategy that underlay the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960’s.
The Civil Rights Movement was indeed militant and confrontational in many of its tactics such as sit-ins, freedom rides and street demonstrations. But, in the particular approach developed and employed by Martin Luther King and SCLC, the broader, long-term strategy the movement followed was actually a good deal more complex. In fact, Obama’s seemingly unique political strategy did not appear out of thin air in 2008. Its roots actually lie in one particular perspective that emerged out of the civil rights movement and that drew heavily upon the lessons the movement learned during the Birmingham and Chicago campaigns.
Before proceeding, it is necessary to emphasize one key fact. Recognizing that Obama’s political strategy has its roots in strategies developed by King and SCLC does not imply that progressives and the progressive movement today are obliged to support and employ the same approach Obama chooses for his Presidential political strategy. Quite the contrary, Martin Luther King’s strategy in relation to both John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson suggests precisely the opposite – – that King felt he and the movement had to always maintain a separate and explicitly progressive political role and identity, in contrast to even a relatively liberal President who King understood would often have to make compromises and respond to other political imperatives. But what this interpretation of Obama’s strategy does require is a substantial revision of the notion that Obama’s approach can be dismissed as simply a warmed-over version of 1990’s centrism.

Read more…

The publication of a long, interesting, if somewhat meandering Newsweek cover piece by John Meachem entitled “The End of Christian America” has spurred a brief resurgence of blogospheric debate on the whole church-state separation issue.
Much of the debate has been stimulated by Damon Linker at The New Republic, who has simultaneously argued against the “Christian Nation” concept, while also suggesting that a watered-down version of Christianity known as “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism” (MTD) might serve quite well as a “civic religion.”
Much of the blowback Linker has generated comes from this second assertion, which offers a pretty easy target insofar as Damon himself describes MTD as a theological abomination. Rod Dreher waxes indignant about the patent emptiness of MTD as a source for prophetic political action such as the civil rights movement. Ross Douthat more broadly asserts that the kind of thinking behind MTD is more dangerous than anything promoted by the Christian Right:

[Y]ou don’t have to look terribly hard to see a connection between the kind of self-centered, sentimental, and panglossian religion described above and the spirit of unwarranted optimism and metaphysical self-regard that animated some of Bush’s worst hours as President (his second inaugural address could have been subtitled: “Moral Therapeutic Deism Goes to War”) and some of his fellow Americans’ worst hours as homeowners and investors. In the wake of two consecutive bubble economies, it takes an inordinate fear of culture war, I think, to immerse yourself in the literature of Oprahfied religion – from nominal Christians like Joel Osteen to New Age gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Rhonda Byrne – and come away convinced that this theological turn has been “salutary” for the country overall.

I’m mentioning this discussion here because church-state separation issues tend to divide not only progressives from conservatives, and believers from seculars, but even progressive believers from each other. Damon notes my own “Augustinian dualist” position in the post above, which can be roughly described as staunch support for strict church-state separation on both civic and religious grounds. So count me as someone who agrees with Damon Linker on the threat to American liberties and traditions posed by the Christian Right (and for that matter, the Christian Left if it ever became really popular), but who also doesn’t like the religious or political implications of some Christian Lite “civic religion” like Moralistic Therapeutic Deism. I don’t think America really needs a “civic religion;” we should be able to get by as a secular republic characterized by religious (and irreligious) diversity, thank you very much.
So that puts me in the camp, for once, of the polymath Michael Lind, whose own essay for Salon on the latest Christian Nation debate flatly denies that religion, rigorous or Lite, is necessary for democracy, even though some (if not all) of the Founders felt that it was:

In [George] Washington’s day, it may have been reasonable for the elite to worry that only fear of hellfire kept the masses from running amok, but in the 21st century it is clear that democracy as a form of government does not require citizens who believe in supernatural religion. Most of the world’s stable democracies are in Europe, where the population is largely post-Christian and secular, and in East Asian countries like Japan where the “Judeo-Christian tradition” has never been part of the majority culture.

But as Lind points out, strict church-state separation not only protects secular society from religious abuses, but also protects religion from manipulation for political reasons:

The idea that religion is important because it educates democratic citizens in morality is actually quite demeaning to religion. It imposes a political test on religion, as it were — religions are not true or false, but merely useful or dangerous, when it comes to encouraging the civic virtues that are desirable in citizens of a constitutional, democratic republic.

So gimme that old-time “wall” between church and state, beloved of the Southern Baptists of my childhood. America’s religious and civic cultures are truly in crisis if they can’t do without it.

Seems it’s a good day for some of the odder variety of conservative activists; here are a couple of examples:
In Iowa, it seems (via Steve Benen) that conservatives need a good refresher course in constitutional law, as reflected in the themes of a major rally held In reaction to the recent Iowa Supreme Court ruling striking down the state’s same-sex marriage ban. Republican gubernatorial candidate Bob Vander Plaats sez he’ll issue an executive order overriding the court’s opinion until such time as Iowans get to vote on the issue. Informed that the governor has no such power, Vander Plaats said he’d exercise it anyway, since after all: “Who says the courts get the final say?” Er, well, maybe the Iowa constitution? Maybe Marbury v. Madison?
At the same rally, a bird named Bill Salier, the founder of a right-wing group called Everyday America, and former Iowa chairman for Tom Tancredo’s presidential campaign, suggested that the state’s gay marriage ban remained in effect because it was physically still in the statute books. “Unless some magic eraser came down from the sky, it’s still in the code.” Interesting.
Meanwhile, over in the nation’s capital, anti-abortion activists are having catalyptic fits over Georgetown University’s entirely routine decision to let the President of the United States speak on its campus today. Veteran abortion extremist Randall Terry is leading a protest against Obama’s appearance, and is making unusually explicit reference to the US-Nazi Germany parallels that most Christian Right leaders only hint at:

Georgetown’s attitude seems to be: Germany’s leaders built great roads in the 1930s, they helped save the banks, and they rebuilt the economy. Let’s focus on their economy – not that whole genocide thing.

Here’s guessing that Terry and the other protesters will go particularly wild when (as Tim Fernholz tips us off) Obama talks about the Sermon on the Mount as a model for economic policy in his Georgetown address.